A Big Chunk O’ Love

There’s no sugarcoating the truth: chocolate is good for the soul.

A little over two years ago, writer and pop culture provocateur Aishwarya Subramanyam aka Otherwarya on her Instagram stories encouraged the “girls, gays, and theys” to create smaller offline groups and friendships amongst themselves in their cities to “meet or talk to one another.” Her simple enough suggestion saw many such groups mushrooming overnight across the country from Coimbatore to Rohtak; Kanpur to Hyderabad; and even in Bengaluru too. “That’s the funny story behind us meeting each other for the first time,” chorus Kimsuka Iyer and Ifrah Tahmid, the duo behind Naked & Holy, a city-based, bean-to-bar, micro-batch craft chocolate brand.

At first, the “Bengaluru Otherwarya group started out as a book club, which quite immediately turned into a club for unhinged conversations, and no books were ever read. That’s how I met a bunch of different, really cool women in the city,” says Kimsuka. “And from those initial hangouts, we started working out together, playing pickleball, and so on,” Ifrah adds, cementing the lore behind their friendship.

Put your money behind bars

Building on this foundation of friendship, the duo decided they wanted to start a business together bringing their professional skills into the mix. Ifrah has trained “in French pastry at Bellouet Conseil, a lovely little school with just 12 students in a batch in the heart of Paris, France,” and later ran Criollo Patisserie, her own French dessert cloud kitchen “out of Kalyan Nagar.” And Kimsuka has worked at the “intersection of travel and art” with VAWAA: Vacation With An Artist in New York & Mexico where she helped “curate mini-apprenticeships for people across the world with a bunch of master artists.” She admits to “having no background in food except for a deep love for chocolate.” Quickly, she confesses to secretly demolishing countless jars of Nutella that were squirrelled away in her cupboard “like a crazed person.” She admits to bringing these chops to their enterprise besides her marketing and sales proficiencies, of course.

Their powers united, and they had just one more obstacle to overcome. Over two years ago, “as part of our fitness journey,” the duo had decided to completely give up on eating refined sugar. Kimsuka has lasted so far and Ifrah admits “to caving a few months in” but this commitment shaped the foundational philosophy of Naked & Holy. Their micro-batch craft chocolate is entirely built on the base of just two ingredients: cacao and dates, which acts as the natural sweetener. As a true-blue chocolate evangelist Kimsuka declares “technically, one could think of chocolate as being made of fruit,” before taking us through the time-intensive process they’ve developed.

Over a year of research and development, they did “a lot of testing and trials of cacao from different farms, different approaches to fermentation and roasting of the beans, and different durations in each of these stages” before arriving at their own formulation “that marries the cacao and the date fruit” while seriously side-stepping the grittiness, often associated with blending dates. Think Sharjah Shake at a lassi bar. “I joke [that] the third ingredient in our chocolate is time; because ours is an intensive process,” says Kimsuka, only half-laughing, as it has ensured a velvety, buttery smoothness to their chocolate bars. This year-long R&D time was also spent on Ifrah relearning and going back to basics in the kitchen. "Even though I’d been to pastry school, I had to learn to make bean-to-bar chocolate from scratch because they don’t teach you this skill. Instead, we were always encouraged to use certain international brands,” Ifrah explains.

Can’t reese-it you

At the beginning of this year, after sharpening their skills, the duo “officially” launched Naked & Holy with surprise micro-batch drops over their Instagram account. And recently have been playing around with flavours outside of their two variations: 55 percent and 62 percent bars. “We’ve been experimenting with different nut butters, flowers and spices — everything from nature. That’s all you really need to make chocolate,” Kimsuka insists.

Naked & Holy’s recent runaway success has been their jasmine chocolate bar “where we literally take fresh jasmine buds and put them with the roasted cacao nibs overnight, and the scent blooms into the nibs by the next morning,” describes Ifrah. “Then, we got to painstakingly remove each and every jasmine petal and then put it in the melanger to turn jasmine-infused cacao nibs along with the dates into a silky, chocolate paste,” she adds. We can sign off on this rich, floral chocolate after scooping it fresh out of the melanger too impatient to experience “the complexity” that comes from their four-week aging stage.

Next on their production line is an ode to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “I used to be able to eat a giant bag of Reese’s in a single sitting,” Kimsuka divulges. And so, it seemed a natural direction to go in their exploration of flavours. “We make our nut butters in-house,” Ifrah pipes in, speaking to their avowal to do as much as possible among the two of them. And another melanger had their cinnamon coffee chocolate, another forthcoming flavour profile on Naked & Holy’s roster. And they’ve also been popping up as an ice-cream stand in the city by simply adding coconut or almond milk to their chocolate-date base. “We’ve presently got only the capacity to make 45 scoops, so far,” says Kimsuka. “And, it’s been a great way to introduce our chocolate to people.”

Look out for Naked & Holy’s next drop, pre-orders open this evening! Until then, sweet dreams.

The details: Naked & Holy is releasing weekly drops, with pre-orders opening today for the following Wednesday’s dispatch. Stock up on Jasmine Chocolate, Peanut Butter Filled Chocolate, 62% Dark Chocolate, and 55% Dark Chocolate bars. Rs 440 for a 70g bar.