Regal plantations is located in the scenic Anamalai’s foothills. Nestled close to the Indira Gandhi wildlife sanctuary also know as Top-Slip, our plantations are located in a pristine environment! The location of the plantation ensures that it receives showers from both the North-East & South-West monsoons, coinciding with our harvest seasons.
Our cacao is grown as an intercrop along with coconut, nutmeg, pepper and banana creating a melange of interdependent fauna - the corner stone of permaculture - adding to the flavor nuances of our cacao beans. The plantation is pesticide free and managed using principles of aquaculture & permaculture ensuring that the trees get the best nutrition so that they produce great tasting cacao! Every year we select the best trees for our breeding program to cater to our increasing acreage and demand for our cacao beans.
Chocolate is one of the few foods that undergo both fermentation and roasting... Both having been used by man for ages to develop complex flavors and aromas. Inside the cacao pod the cacao seeds - “bean” is covered by a fleshy pulp often called “baba”. The pulp is quite tasty and eaten in a lot of cacao growing regions, but is of no use to the chocolate maker who is after the inner bean. Fermentation is used to eliminate or drastically reduce astringency and to develop the full flavor of the cacao.
The cacao undergo complex chemical and physical changes during fermentation, where the beans puff up and change colour. The inside of fresh cacao bean changes from purple to the familiar dark brown. About 35 cacao pods are needed to produce a kilo of cacao beans...We also work with other cacao farmers in the neighborhood, where we ferment and process their cacao pods to feed a growing demand.
Once harvested the cacao pods are broken to extract the pulp covered seeds. The cacao is then put into wooden boxes and undergo fermentation according to our secret recipe to develop an amazing flavor. Our closely guarded fermentation process helps us to consistently produce batch after batch of fine flavor cacao beans.The fermented cacao beans are then slow dried in the sun. This ensures that our beans are free of molds other unwanted critters. The dried beans are then hand sorted to remove any defective beans because we care about our chocolate, and want to ensure that only the best beans go into making our chocolate...
The sorted beans get packed and wait patiently for their time to come to get transformed to fine chocolate. Being a seasonal crop, we hold on to our precious cacao until the next season so that you can enjoy the same great flavors time and again...
The flavor of cacao is influenced by the terroir of the region, the micro climate and the flora / fauna in the region. One can taste the region in a well made single origin chocolate! As a special- ist chocolate maker we work hard to bring out the special flavors of the cacao bean that we work with. At Soklet, we make chocolate the old way - As it should be! Real chocolate needs nothing more than cacao beans and sugar... Good chocolate is not complex or difficult, but requires time and patience. A skilled chocolate maker can get a simple bar of chocolate to taste as complex as a fine wine.
