
Chocolate is the easiest gift there is, until you’re standing in front of a wall of identical gold boxes. This year, give something with a story: chocolate made from scratch, from the cacao bean, in our workshop on Granville Island in Vancouver, and shipped anywhere in Canada. Here are our picks for everyone on your…

Few foods split a room like durian. Some people smell it and go weak at the knees; others smell it and leave. So when people find out we make a durian chocolate bar on Granville Island, the next question is always the same: what does it actually taste like? Here’s our honest answer, plus a…

“Bean-to-bar” is printed on a lot of chocolate wrappers these days. Sometimes it means exactly what it says. Sometimes it’s just a nice-sounding phrase. We’ve been making chocolate from raw cacao beans on Granville Island since 2015, so here’s our plain-language take on what the term means, why it matters, and how to tell the…

Full disclosure right up front: we make chocolate. Kasama is a bean-to-bar chocolate maker on Granville Island, so we’re not a neutral guide — but we taste everything, we know this scene from the inside, and Vancouver’s chocolate community is genuinely collaborative. Here’s our honest map of it. Vancouver is quietly a great chocolate city…

Ask a Filipino grandmother about chocolate and she probably won’t mention bars at all. She’ll tell you about tableya — dark, rustic tablets of pure roasted cacao — and the thick, steaming cup of sikwate they melt into. This is the Philippines’ original chocolate tradition, and it’s the inspiration behind one of our favourite things…

If you’ve ever tasted a brown sugar so dark and complex it verged on caramel, toffee and smoke all at once, you may have already met muscovado. It’s one of our favourite ingredients — and one of the Philippines’ great culinary exports. Here’s what it is, how it’s made, and why we grind it into…