How the Chocolate-Making Brothers Behind Melbourne’s Hunted & Gathered Have Been Keeping Busy During Lockdown

You only need three ingredients to make top-quality chocolate: cacao nibs, coconut sugar and coconut butter.

This simple formula is the basis of all Hunted & Gathered chocolate, which is made in Melbourne by brothers Harry and Charlie Nissen. It’s also one that allows the carefully chosen flavouring ingredients to shine – from coffee and hazelnut to unconventional additions such as fennel seed and Four Pillars gin.

The brothers’ interest in chocolate stems from school holidays spent scoffing chocolate-coated macadamias at their grandparents’ macadamia farm on the north coast of NSW. “Chocolate was in the family,” says Charlie.

When they couldn’t find chocolate that met their specifications as adults, they decided to make it themselves. “We were already making a bunch of different things from scratch like salami and jerky, wine and beer,” says Harry.

Their goal was clear: make a quality, boutique product with minimal ingredients and processing. “We wanted a really simple production process, transparency across all the ingredients, and it had to be delicious as well,” says Charlie.

“We wanted to get the best possible ingredients and showcase them in the best way possible,” Harry adds.

At their Cremorne headquarters, the Nissens now make a range of products including chocolate bars, drinking chocolate, cooking chocolate and spreads. Their products are stocked at Melbourne staples like Leaf, Ripe Organics, Morning Market and more, and they’ve previously collaborated with Pidapipo and Baker D Chirico.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, many of the restaurants they supply to – including Attica, Baker Bleu, Wild life Bakery and Brae - have been closed, as has their own cafe, which is attached to their factory.

The full impact of Victoria’s two lockdowns is not yet known, but it’s clear thousands of producers, retailers, restaurateurs, winemakers, artists and more have been hit hard. (One way to show support is to shop online, either directly via businesses’ websites or through platforms such as Visit Victoria’s Click for Vic.)

For the Nissens, the pandemic has meant running Hunted & Gathered with a heavily reduced workforce – no mean feat. “We’ve been able to take a few staff members back, but there was definitely a time there when it was just us trying to get as much as we could done,” says Charlie.

The brothers don’t take shortcuts in their production, sourcing cacao beans from the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Belize, Peru, Tanzania and Madagascar. “A lot of people will buy cacao liqueur, which is cacao beans that have been ground down already,” says Harry. “You miss the first half of the production process, but it doesn’t give you much control over the final flavour profile.

“Because we get the raw product, we try to buy the best beans possible with unique characteristics depending on where they’re grown. [Our] focus is on the bean rather than masking it – milk chocolate has a lot of vegetable fat, vanilla and sugar, which all mask the flavour of beans.”

In the factory, each bag of beans is sorted by hand (those that don’t make the grade go into a customer’s compost bin) before being roasted based on its place of origin. The beans are deshelled, then the nibs are slowly ground with coconut sugar and coconut butter for three days in a stone grinder, then tempered for a glossy finish and clean snap.

The chocolate is then hand-wrapped and packaged. Generally, Hunted & Gathered produces around 240 kilograms of chocolate a week, which is far less than large manufacturers, but impressive when you consider the amount of work that goes into the process.

One upside of the lockdown: the Nissens have been experimenting with new products, including those aforementioned spreads. There’s chocolate-hazelnut, chocolate-peanut, and one featuring biodynamic almonds grown here in Victoria. They’ve already become bestsellers – probably because it’s an eat-chocolate-spread-from-the-jar kind of year. So when restrictions ease, be sure to head into their chocolatey headquarters on Gwynne St in Cremorne and pick up a well-earned treat.

huntedandgathered.com.au

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