Look out for us in Oxford on March 24th and 25th and Bristol on April 7th and 8th

Lawrence Vaughan of Lava Lens has made a short video of the chocolate making process
at Red Star. The bad news is that Duffy features; the good news is that the soundtrack is by Rico
Rodriguez. One of these people is a legend, and it isn’t Duffy.

Unfortunately as a micro-producer of chocolate working with the very finest cocoa beans I
cannot achieve the economies of scale that I had hoped for when I started the business 2 years ago.
In order to keep the quality at the highest level by buying the best ingredients, granite grinding and
conching for at least 48 hours I need to increase the cost of the bars. I try and deal direct with the
growers and I always pay a premium for beans and that cannot change so the prices are going up.
Existing customers can contact us for a 20% discount on all orders.

Duffy’s Panama Tierra Oscura 72% has recently been launched and is already garnering good reviews. We managed to buy – direct from the farmers – the whole crop of cocoa from the small Bocas del Toro island. This sounds impressive – but the crop was only 350kg.

Whatever the size, these guys certainly know how to grow beans and ferment and dry them properly. The resulting chocolate is excellent – cherries and raisins, liquorice and leather.

We will make a small donation to the Bocas Educational Service Organisation for every kilo of beans that we buy – they are doing good work over there, helping to educate local people.

Whenever we attend food and chocolate fairs we see people peering at the back of the label to ask whether it contains various things. Usually this is gluten (none in it) or dairy (only in the milk) but occasionally we are asked about soya. Some people are allergic to it and others have been recommended to avoid it. A few folks asked if it was GM-free and organic.

We use lecithin so that the chocolate is thin enough to pour into moulds. We did use soya lecithin but are changing over to sunflower lecithin. It is still only 0.5% and still doesn’t affect the taste in any way that we can detect.

Duffy collecting the “Golden Bean” trophy for his Honduras Indio Rojo – voted the best bean-to-bar entry in the 2011 Academy of Chocolate Awards, jointly with Amadei #9.

Apart from the top overall award Duffy also received a Bronze Award for the Corazon del Ecuador 72% chocolate bar and the Best Newcomer award.

Reviews of Red Star Chocolate can be found on “Chocolate Reviews”.
Corazon Del Ecuador Milk Chocolate Review can be found here
72% Ecuador Dark Chocolate Review can be found here

Duffy’s Heart of Panama 70% Review on “chocablog” can be found here

Real Food Festival, Earls Court – May 7th to 10th 2010. Launch of Duffy’s chocolate in London.

www.seventypercent.com reviewed the factory