Nanyang Kaya - Breakfast in a Chocolate Bar

Walk around Singapore’s kopitiam in the morning and you’d likely see people munching on kaya toasts and dipping them in soft-boiled eggs while sipping hot kopi. It’s the quintessential Singaporean breakfast. For those unfamiliar with kaya, it is a highly addictive coconut and egg jam that is slowly cooked with palm sugar and aromatic pandan leaves. Every store has their own secret recipe but it’s always delicious when smeared on a nicely toasted traditional white bread. The light crunch as you bite into it, followed by the toasty flavour mixed with the aromatic kaya will wake you up nicely every morning.

Our take on this well-loved dish is a milk chocolate made with Rehoboth Estate cacao, pandan leaves, coconut oil and toasted bread. We have a love-hate relationship with pandan leaf. It’s one of those ingredients which has to be used in moderation because of its strong unique perfume. Too much can kill your appetite, too little and the chocolate will struggle to feel like a kaya bar. It took us a while to find the perfect pandan for this bar, and then an even longer time to get the right balance.

We chose cacao from Rehoboth Estate for its nutty and savory character that reminds us of toasted bread and soy sauce - perfect in a breakfast bar. Finally, to complete the experience, we toasted up some lovely naturally leavened bread baked by our neighbour (there’s a bakery on the fourth floor of our building) and put them into the chocolate to recreate the crunch in the kaya toast.

Hope you enjoy this bar! We had lots of fun developing it.

Sea Salt Dark Chocolate

It's amazing how salt brings out lots of inherent flavours from food. Even in beer brewing, a touch of salt makes the beer taste sweeter and "rounder". Hence we're here today with our very own sea salt chocolate.

Salt musks certain flavours and highlights others. We went through some rigorous sessions, tasting through all our single origin dark chocolates with salt. Some didn't go so well, with the salt highlighting the astringence and bitterness - like in our PISA 68% chocolate, and the acidity in our Lachua 70% chocolate. But in other chocolates, the salt brought out sweetness and nutty flavours like in our Alto Beni 70% and Pak Eddy 70%. 

If you haven't tried chocolate with salt, do give them a try! 

Shrimp & Bonito

We had so much great sea food during our short (food) trip to Tokyo, Japan in March earlier this year that we had a slight withdrawal after we came back home. The terrible urge to eat seafood eventually manifested into this chocolate bar - the Shrimp & Bonito chocolate bar.

Full of the flavours of the sea, that shrimp aroma reminded us so much of the fishery port, and the bonito furikake usually sprinkled over rice brought forth a special umami that goes so well with one of our dark chocolate. This unique combination may seem weird at first but it grows on you. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Sake Kasu

Few months ago, Taichi from Sakemaru (a sake subscription service – check them out) asked whether I could make chocolate with sake kasu. I immediately said YES because this is one of my dream ingredients. I can smell it all day.

Sake kasu, also known as sake lees, are the leftover rice from brewing sake. It has recently gained popularity as an ingredient due to its abundance of nutrients and incredible flavor. Some hardcore sake fans simply bake them with salt to make a chewy side dish. If you manage to get your hands on some, definitely try this out. It’s delicious!

Sake kasu is soft and mushy. It smells like sake.

The sake kasu we got were produced in the process of brewing Daiginjo, which is the highest grade of sake brewed by Asahara Shuzo Brewery, a family brewery located in Saitama Prefecture. To make them into chocolate, we dehydrated the sake kasu for a few hours over low heat to remove moisture and alcohol. The result is a chewy “jerky” that has all the flavors of sake without the alcohol so it’s suitable for people on alcohol-free diet.  This kasu “jerky” is then combined with our house-made white chocolate and some sea salt flakes to round off the flavor. 

Dehydrated sake kasu is still sticky.

Talking about white chocolate, this bar would be the first and probably only batch of white chocolate we will make with natural undeodorised cacao butter sourced from Peru. We managed to get our hands on a few kg of these special cacao butter and it's all going into this batch. This is easily one of my favorite bar now. Only 250 bars were made so do grab them fast before they run out!

Chocolate Bonbons

First blog update in three months! Time really flies when you don’t notice it. Today I want to write about the chocolate bonbons we have been creating in our little workshop. These are bite-sized pieces of chocolate confectionary that come in a wide range of forms, appearances and flavors. We love them for a few reasons.

Firstly, they are tedious to make and that gives us something interesting to distract ourselves from our daily ritual of chocolate making. There are many subtle yet critical factors that contribute to the taste, texture and appearance of a bonbon and even the slightest error means we have to throw out the batch and start over. It is not for the faint-hearted but the satisfaction is great!

Chocolate bonbons also allow us to introduce flavor combinations that wouldn’t be possible in a chocolate bar. Usually these are ingredients that can’t be dried sufficiently without losing the flavors that made them great. We are also able to introduce different textures—soft, crunchy, chewy, flowy—within the same bonbon. A journey within a single bite!

We will try to introduce new flavours every month or two. Here are the bonbons we introduced in the last two months. 

May- Mother’s Day Collection

Earl Grey Haiti Dark Chocolate Ganache with Salted Caramel

Homemade Raspberry Jam with Coconut Ganache

June – Fathers’ Day Collection

Ardbeg Peated Whisky Caramel with Bolivia Dark Chocolate Ganache

Homemade Orange Jam, Shortbread, Rosemary Bolivia Dark Chocolate Ganache

Introducing Our Range

It is with great pleasure to announce that we’ve finally launched our Fossa Chocolate product range for sale. We chose to use this name because it really resonates with what we envision the company to be—working with and presenting wild flavors (Fossa, the animal’s scientific name is C. ferox which means wild).

During our one-year lull time doing back end R&D work, we visited cacao plantations, conducted countless experiments with various cacao and recipes, and slowly built and refined our chocolate making equipment to dial in the flavor profiles we wanted. Our current system has its limitations but the final piece of equipment (at least for this year) will be arriving this weekend so I’m really psyched to start making some even better chocolate with it.

We will be making generally three types of chocolates.

The single origin dark chocolate range will be our core product, showcasing the unique unadulterated flavors of the cacao we have sourced. Each of these cacaos will be selected for their wide spectrum of flavors. We try not to have cacaos with similar flavor profile in our portfolio at any one point in time so that we can manage our limited warehousing space better and keep our production schedule in check.

The inclusion range will see some interesting toppings that we feel complement the various single origin chocolates. For example, one of the ex-tenants of our shared factory space brings in some really amazing sun-dried mulberries. We have plans to use that with one of our fruitier chocolate.

Finally, to make things more interesting (for us as much as for you), we will also have a special limited edition range that pushes boundaries. So far we have a salted egg yolk cereal with caramelized white chocolate and an Uji Matcha chocolate available. More flavors are in the work. We will be releasing them in the coming months so please revisit our website or sign up to our mailing list!

These three types of chocolate should be enough to cover all grounds for now. If you haven’t already tried our current range, go ahead and order them on our webstore. Delivery to any location in Singapore is S$10. If you’d like to have them shipped overseas, just send us an email and we’ll fetch you a shipping quote from trusty DHL.