Ambrosia Crafts Confections
Aura Hertzog and Tim Simpson are on a highly enviable mission: “Chocolate is our main focus, and we’ll continue to expand on that.”
The duo behind Ambrosia Pastry Co.’s bean-to-bar wholesale and retail operation are quite serious, too. They’ve been experimenting with pralines and truffles, making everything from scratch (as they’re bent on doing), and getting ready to roll out their own brand of cocoa powder. These are great compliments to their already stellar Saturday morning menu of pastries, tartes, cookies and other treats, available at their small shop and kitchen next to the Spur Line bike trail. For a fix during the rest of the week, their single-origin bars are made with organic, fair trade, ethically sourced beans from all over the planet, and can be found at similarly-minded local businesses – including, as of recently, Settlement Co. and EcoCoffee.
Last summer Ambrosia launched another plank in its ever-evolving hand-crafting arsenal, a weekly event series called Truck Eats Cool Treats, which has spilled into a second season (running until Thursday, August 4th, 2016). These family-geared gatherings are simple: a curated roster of food trucks, occasional activities sprinkled in by other community businesses (such as free classes by Amma Yoga), and a range of fresh ice creams and cookies with which to build delicious sandwiches for dessert. Talk about a sweet recipe…
Tell us about one of your favourite tools.
TIM: My favourite are my hand tools that I use to temper chocolate. We just got a tempering machine, which has helped me to produce a lot more chocolate, but up until then I’ve been doing everything on top of a marble tabletop with two handtools – the old fashioned way. I never want to lose the skill set that it takes to temper chocolate like that. It’s just great to see the process of taking chocolate that’s melted and out of temper, and being able to work that chocolate quickly and efficiently, and understanding how to get it to a very specific temperature with your hands and then quickly take it back off that table again and into the bowl to come up to the correct working temperature. It takes a lot of skill and practice, and I’m proud of the time I’ve spent to learn how to do that properly.
AURA: And I’d say the melanger, because that allows us to make the chocolate. Without those, we wouldn’t be able to refine the nibs to the consistency that we need in order to make the chocolate.
TIM: It’s pretty simple technology – two big granite stones rolling over a granite base, basically. The melanger we have was made in India for grinding nut pastes or chickpeas and lentils into powder. So it wasn’t initially designed for chocolate, but it just works perfectly.
Tell us about one of your first products you were satisfied with?
AURA: Probably when we first started making chocolate, which was about two and half year ago. I was a bit reluctant when we started the bakery business because in addition to wholesale, Tim wanted to start making chocolate, and also make it from scratch. And other than Soma in Toronto, at the time I had never met anyone else who was doing that around here. I didn’t know if we could do it. But then we did it. It was amazing to see that it was possible to make chocolate…
TIM: …and good chocolate. I figured we could probably make a batch of chocolate, but I didn’t know if it would actually taste very good. I still remember that day, tasting that chocolate and being really excited that it was more than just edible. The fluidity was great, it had a really nice smoothness and creamy texture to it — same as you’d find in a high-end chocolate — and the flavour was really nicely balanced. It confirmed that we could run with that idea and make a better product.
There are so many variables to getting chocolate to work properly – from sourcing the beans to roasting them properly – and there’s lots of potential for error along the way, and the process takes a long time to fine tune. That first batch obviously wasn’t my best chocolate by far, but it was pretty decent as a starting point.
AURA: We also learned from that first batch that not all cocoa beans are going to produce the same quality of chocolate. It’s like coffee — just because you’re roasting it yourself doesn’t mean you’re going to end up with great coffee. So we began to see that depending on the type of bean you choose, where it comes from in the world, and how it was produced, those factors will result in different grades of chocolate and completely different ranges of flavour. As we started making chocolate, we really began to notice the world of differences between various products.
What makes you make the things you make?
TIM: I want to do everything from scratch. I’ve been that way in my life for every single thing, be it at home doing renovations myself, and I grew up with a dad and mom doing everything for themselves. I always want to see how I can take things back to their purest form, and that’s my motivation behind everything that we do here.
AURA: We have a strong passion for food. We knew that no matter what we did, we wanted to be making food, and so it became a question of what do we want to be making within that industry. We love making chocolate, but Tim and I also really love making pastries, and having the ability to open to the public on Saturdays and do fresh pastries is like having two businesses in one. Our chocolate-making business kind of takes over during the week and it’s our wholesale business that allows us to do what we do and focus on it, and then on Saturdays we get to open the doors to more people and do something different. Having a space to do that was hard to find, but we’re really happy that we did.
Who (or what) made you into makers?
AURA: If you’re passionate about food and the industry around it, you’re also passionate about making food — you want to know more about it, research it, work with different people and generally just understand more layers of how to do it. And in our case, as Tim said, we’re passionate about taking it back to first steps. We could be buying all sorts of components and tools to do the things we do, but we didn’t want to do it that way. We thought: if somebody else can make it from scratch, why can’t we do that?
I also grew up in Toronto in a bed and breakfast, so there was a strong emphasis on food and customer service that was part of my upbringing. And so I sort of gravitated towards the food business from there. We met at George Brown while we were both pursuing our education to become part of this industry.
What attracts you to the materials that you work with?
TIM: I’ve been obsessed with chocolate since I was child. So this is my dream, to make chocolate for a living.
AURA: He’s also been able to build many of the tools we use here — Tim built the cacao winnower, the customized molds for our pastries, the specialized tables we use here…
TIM: …woodworking, welding and metalwork, these are things I’ve learned from my dad and they’re things I’ve always loved to do. We built most of what you see in our shop.
How does practicing your craft in Kitchener contribute to your success?
TIM: Kitchener is a great place with lots of like-minded people taking the same sort of approach to making things. So we feel like we fit in with the folks who are roasting coffee, brewing beer, the great restaurants in the food scene that are opening up and working with local produce and products.
AURA: We’re so close to farmland, and we can make use of a lot of really fine local ingredients on pretty much the day they were picked or harvested. I also think the roots to the Mennonite community here is part of it. Because there is a strong Mennonite presence, or people have relationships within that community, or they’re part of it, there is this throwback to more traditional methods and a really genuine appreciation for craftsmanship that you might not find in a larger city.