IN CONVERSATION: HUNTED + GATHERED

Courtesy Hunted + Gathered

WORDS BY SOFIA CONNELLY

Hunted + Gathered is a local Melbourne collective making artisanal chocolate out of their Cremorne headquarters. From bean to bar, Forkful chats with co-owner Harry Nissen to delve into the process and ethics behind their award-winning chocolate.

How long did it take to develop a process for making Hunted + Gathered chocolate? How has your product evolved from its initial establishment to now?

It took around two years to work out the method for how we make chocolate now. The technique continued to be refined and changed as we progressed and scaled up to using commercial-sized machinery. The product has become more refined since we first established it, as there are more people involved now. We find that the chocolate is continually evolving, from season to season and harvest to harvest, based on the conditions at each origin.

Where did you find inspiration to create the signature Hunted + Gathered flavour profile?

I seek out inspiration mainly from chefs and restaurants, and this informs the way Hunted + Gathered chocolate is made. This has helped to refine the product by showing me how much time and effort can go into the development of the flavour. Having a well-thought-out process forms the basis of Hunted + Gathered. There have been many wins in the development process to get our chocolate to taste the way we want it to, but for as many of our successes, we’ve had the same number of disappointments. Because we taught ourselves how to make chocolate, there’s been a lot of trial and error in learning to make something that we’re proud of. Each stage of the chocolate-making process has been thought out to make sure that we’re getting the flavour profile that we want from the beans. For example, in the beginning stages, hand sorting each bean has a large impact on the final flavour. The whole process is labour-intensive, which makes it difficult on this scale. I am unsure if the public are aware of how much time and effort goes into making a single bar.

Do you draw from traditional or contemporary practices to create your product?

The way we make chocolate is pretty traditional, but I think the way we source beans has more of a contemporary skew. The processes we use to make the chocolate involve a lot of time and labour, rooted in traditional techniques. The cacao beans are all hand sorted, roasted, and winnowed and then put into a stone grinder which slowly refines/conches the chocolate over three days. The way we source the beans focuses on contemporary practices—we work with a producer in Ecuador, a microbiologist who ferments cacao beans using specific inoculants and yeasts to create a specific flavour profile. Not many producers out there are using these types of modern fermentation techniques.

What ethical values and moral responsibilities are most important to Hunted + Gathered?

We think that if you work in the chocolate industry, the cacao you source needs to be purchased responsibly. The success and wellbeing of the cacao producer is important to us, so we pay a premium well above the international market price of cacao. We try to work directly with producers where we can because we believe in the importance of trade transparency.

What is your favourite Hunted + Gathered memory?

One of my most cherished memories is from when we first released the chocolate, but we still didn’t know what we were doing. The night before we were selling our chocolate for the first time at the Good Food & Wine Show, we called in all of our friends to help package. I remember being at the factory until two in the morning a few nights in a row, trying to work out how to package it all.

Hunted + Gathered

68 Gwynne Street, Cremorne

Monday to Friday, 8 am to 3.30 pm