Easter is a busy time for Steven ter Horst, Chocolatier. Steven, who has been at the Market since 2008, has just opened a new self-titled shop on Unley Road and is busy making hand-made chocolates to prepare for a time of indulgence for many people. However for Steven, Easter is not about eating as much chocolate as your stomach can hold but savouring the flavour with a couple of mouthfuls.
“Chocolate is for every day of the year, it’s not for eating a whole box at once. A couple tend to satisfy people when they eat our chocolates,” said Steven.
Steven’s business partner, Chantelle, added,
“We’re trying to celebrate food and seasons, it’s not about the novelty of it. When we celebrate Easter, we celebrate the ingredients we are using, the spices and the flavours.”
And flavour is something you will definitely find at Steven’s stall, Steven ter Horst Chocolatier.
Steven explained his philosophy.
“We’re really trying to show people how good chocolate can be. It’s like a fine wine, it’s like really good coffee…plus for me it’s about the eating and the taste sensation which is why we don’t enrobe in anything but 70% dark chocolate….A lot of our chocolates are a large percentage milk chocolate but we put that dark chocolate shell around it just to get that flavour line perfectly balanced.”
However, Steven said he does understand that people have their own Easter traditions, which is why he still has a variety of chocolate eggs as well as his own version of a chocolate hot-cross-bun. He explained further,
“We’ve got sundried muscats, again from the Farmers Market, and we’ve soaked these in Howard’s Semillon Botrytis. Once they’ve plumped up, they’ll be pureed down with cinnamon and that will go into a chocolate ganache and we’ll do our little hot cross bun again. We do that every year, that’s now a tradition for us.” he said.
This Easter, Steven will also have for sale his chocolate eggs, either filled, plain or latticed. He has beautifully presented chocolate eggs brushed with an edible metallic powder and also chocolate lattice eggs presented on a chocolate base with a truffle inside. Steven also makes a traditional egg with a pattern on the front-facing side of the egg.
For Steven, chocolate needs to be fresh and good quality. He said many people compare hand-made chocolate to a factory-made chocolate and they have a little trouble understanding the price difference.
“All my chocolates come from a little tank,” he said, “there’s no big equipment, there’s no machinery. We have to import the chocolate, the high quality produce that we use, like the raspberries that we use, they’re not cheap either. Our chocolates have only five to eight ingredients and you pick up some of the other big manufactured bars and you’re reading 14 different ingredients off the label. So I think that’s an ethos that follows through to everyone at the Farmer’s Market, they like to keep that intense quality about what they make.”
Steven is just as passionate about South Australia as he is about his chocolate. Describing South Australia as a “mini Europe”, Steven sources local ingredients wherever possible and credits the demand and customer base of the Farmers Market for facilitating his dream to open up a European-style chocolate shop of his own. Born to Dutch-born farmers, Steven did not immediately fall into the kitchen.
Steven told us how he always loved food and understood how flavours worked together but “hated” his experience working in big commercial kitchens.
“I didn’t enjoy the heat, I didn’t enjoy the pressure, the yelling….so I just gave it away and never really did anything with it for quite a long time”
Lucky for us all, Steven didn’t completely give up on his dream.
“About six years ago, I found a shop in the Adelaide Arcade called Chocolate World and I started buying couverture from there, Belgian quality chocolate ….using it for flavours, making ice-creams, cakes, mousses, anything with chocolate in it. And every time I’d go into Chocolate World, I’d buy a little French handmade chocolate and I thought to myself one day “Someone’s got to be able to teach me how to do this, I want to learn how to do it”. So after 6 months of searching I found someone in Melbourne, trundled over there, did all of their courses and basically I’ve been developing it ever since.”
Having grown up in the Adelaide Hills, Steven used his love and knowledge of South Australia to gain an advantage in chocolate-making.
“The fundamentals they taught me in Melbourne were how to work best with chocolate, how to work with quality ingredients,” he said. “Their quality ingredients were always focussed on Europe and I’ve always thought to myself, ‘Well South Australia, it’s like our own little Europe anyway. We’ve got some of the best ingredients in Australia so let’s focus on South Australia, let’s focus a little bit more on the Adelaide Hills and try to put that in the chocolates.’”
Steven uses wines from new stallholder Howard Vineyards. He also works with Gumeracha-based Protero Wines and Maximus Wines from McLaren Vale. He also uses cream from the Adelaide Hills which he describes as, “just cream, there’s nothing else going on in it”.
Steven currently has 25 chocolates in his range but he is constantly experimenting with the “alchemy of chocolate.”
“All of my chocolates are named after women. So far there won’t be, to the best of my feeling right now, a man’s name in a chocolate. ..A David chocolate just isn’t right. When we first started, we tried to put a little bit of the personality of the person into the chocolate. Chantelle – perfect example – she’s fiery, she’s the chilli. My Mum is Anneke, she’s half Dutch and half German, so we’ve got a layer of German marzipan and a layer of Dutch spice ganache.”
For Steven, the Farmers Market gave him the funds to open up his new shop on Unley Road. He said it also opened up business networks and raised his profile.
“What a lot of people don’t realise is that some of the best chefs do cruise through the Farmers Market and find different bits and pieces,” he said, “but for most of my business dealings, I’ve never had to source a wholesale customer. They’ve all found me through the Farmers Market or through someone who found me at the Farmers Market.”
Finally we asked Steven whether it was true what they say about chocolate being an aphrodisiac? Steven said it is not too far off being the truth, saying
“Chocolate actually affects your serotonin and your endorphins which are your happy centre so it does actually make you feel better about yourself.”
You can find Steven at stall 43 inside the Market Pavilion or at his shop, opposite the Metro shopping centre, at 221D Unley Road, Malvern.
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