Popcorn, kimchi, bee pollen, and mustard are just a few of the many one-of-a-kind ingredients you’ll find in the artisan chocolate made at Centre & Main Chocolate Co. in Warkworth.
What’s more, all these unique ingredients are sourced locally.
With the innovation and artistry that comes from designing flavours like “The Sushi Bar” and “Toffee & Potato Chip,” you might not expect that chocolatier and owner Angela Roest came upon her passion for chocolate, as she says, “by accident.”
After realizing being a professor was no longer what she wanted, despite working towards a career in academia, Roest first began making jewellery.
“I had always loved working with my hands, but it wasn’t something that I had really nurtured through the years because I was going to be an academic,” she says. “I always loved food, and I had always loved cooking and fashion.”
Since knitting wire for jewellery was hard on her hands, Roest began working at Naked Chocolate in Peterborough in the afternoons and, soon enough, the spare time she spent thinking about jewellery designs and patterns slowly morphed into time spent thinking about caramel recipes and chocolate designs.
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While taking intensive courses through the Chocolate Academy in Montréal, Roest studied under chocolatiers from France, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe. After opening Centre & Main Chocolate Co. in 2017, she discovered a disconnect between how she was sourcing ingredients for her business and how she was sourcing ingredients for her family.
“One of the things that I realized when I was shopping for the chocolate shop was that I’d be getting fruits — like passion fruit and guava and lychee — from all of these really wonderful faraway places and putting them in different caramels and ganaches,” she says. “But when I’d be shopping for my own family, I’d be going to farmers’ markets and getting things that are grown around here.”
“These two worlds just didn’t seem to mesh in any way. There wasn’t any crossover, and I couldn’t figure out why these two worlds were so far apart, flavour wise and ingredient wise.”
That’s when Roest began thinking about ways to incorporate local ingredients in her chocolate.
“I’ve done what the Europeans did 150 years ago, by looking around here and putting things in chocolate that grow around us,” she says. “Farm to table is really popular in many areas of culinary arts, but not really in chocolate.”
Roest explains one reason for this is that much of the food grown locally is largely water-based, which can’t be put into the cocoa butter required in a chocolate bar because “it’s like mixing water and oil.” It would be straightforward to put them into bonbons, which she does have at the store, but chocolate bars have always been her main passion.
“Bonbons are wonderful and they’re delightful and they are gorgeous and beautiful, but from a day-to-day basis, I wanted something that I could put in my bag,” she says. “I could have a bit now as I’m driving, have a little bit more while I’m walking around. It’s something that you could snack on rather than just enjoying as one moment of pleasure.”
The very first thing she purchased when beginning Centre & Main Chocolate Co. was a freeze dryer, a machine that takes a food product’s temperature down to minus 40 degrees to remove all the moisture through the process of sublimation.
“If you put in a strawberry, it looks exactly like it did before. It has the colour and it has 97 per cent of the nutritional value, but it’s light as air because the water is out,” Roest says.
“It’s not a chemical approximation of what a strawberry tastes like. It’s the real strawberry, and it’s a local strawberry. And it’s a strawberry with 97 per cent of all the nutrients that you would get from eating a strawberry. Freeze-drying is a better nutritional preservation method than canning or freezing.”
The strawberries come from Brambleberry Farm, located in Wooler in Quinte West, and paired with local saffron from the now-closed True Saffron in Warkworth and rhubarb from Art Farm Produce in Brighton to create the Saffron Strawberry Rhubarb Bar, which won a silver medal in the International Chocolate Awards, 2018 Canadian Competition.
While each chocolate bar is precisely crafted and artfully designed now, they haven’t all come out perfectly on the first try. Roest shares how she was determined to use the sourdough from My World Kitchen in Brighton, despite discovering that freeze drying didn’t work.
Eventually, Roest learned to slice it thinly, toast it deeply, and grind it into caramelized white chocolate. Paired with Darjeeling tea, it now makes up the Tea & Toast Bar, a silver medallist in the International Chocolate Awards, 2019 Canadian Competition, and a winner of the Innovation in Chocolate Award.
“I must have gone through six or seven different experiments of how to use her bread,” Roest says. “It’s one of our most popular bars. The texture is great, the flavour is amazing, and people are happy they have an excuse to have chocolate for breakfast.”
Roest is currently in the process of expanding her plant-based and vegan collections, which use rice milk, almond milk, oat milk, and hazelnut milk in place of dairy milk. This also took a lot of experimentation because the amount of fat differs in comparison to dairy milk.
“It’s a scientific and intuitive process to get the math right so that the proportions are in line with what you would expect for milk and white chocolate,” Roest says. “To have the flavours come through is another challenge, so it was really exciting to create that collection.”
Centre & Main Chocolate Co. now has more than 60 flavours across its “Great Wall of Chocolate,” but with special and seasonal collections, Roest guesses they have crafted more than 150 different chocolate bars.
Located in a renovated Masonic lodge, the shop has high ceilings and a “gravitas” that Roest wanted to feature, making Centre & Main Chocolate Co. resemble more of a gallery than a retail shop. The space also lends itself to education with panels about the history of chocolate and encouraging people to think about how they engage with the products.
“It invites people to think about chocolate in a different way — as something that can be savoured and enjoyed, rather than just to be eaten haphazardly without any care to the ingredients, how it was made, or where it came from,” Roest says.
“You eat first with your eyes. If something is beautiful and interesting to look at, it’s already intriguing and draws you in. I apply that thinking to the creation of my chocolate. I make it beautiful so that you can enjoy it visually before all the other senses.”
For more information about Centre & Main Chocolate Co. and to purchase products, visit centreandmainchocolate.com.
