Make some space for these special peppermint chocolates
If you like the combination of mint and chocolate as much as I do, you may want to drive over to the southside of town, or log onto zingermans.com, to try out these terrific English imports ASAP. I have long had a thing for mint and chocolate, but Summerdown’s good work has taken that affection to a whole new level. Over the last few years, these have become a staple item on our kitchen shelves. I have ended many a long day by enjoying one or two of them before heading to bed.
Made with, best I can tell, the only single-estate mint oil in Europe, most everything about these great mints is pretty special. The man who’s been driving it to high-quality success is Sir Michael Colman, heir to the Colman mustard firm. Sir Michael ran the family business for decades before selling it in 1995, but his passion, business drive, commitment to high quality, and doing meaningful work continued on. Retirement, he reflected, was ridiculous. Instead, he started this incredible mint project. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” he said. “But occasionally in life you have to take a step and say to people, maybe there is more to this than you thought.” I would agree. His passion for the mint and for making world-class products with it has paid off. The results are excellent, much more, I will say, than I would ever have imagined the pairing of mint and chocolate could be.
While chocolate is what normally gets the attention in this combination, the Summerdown project makes mint the star of the culinary show. England, it turns out, was once one of the largest mint producers on the planet. With WWII and the stress of war economics, commercial mint farming came to a quick end. Michael Colman’s mission became to restore the glory, not of the Empire, but rather, of British mint. He returned to the old variety, Black Mitchem, which dates to the middle of the 18th century. Particularly aromatic, it was once the pride of English peppermint growers. Colman and crew planted about 70 acres of Black Mitcham on the family’s farm in Hampshire, about an hour to the southwest of London. “Peppermint is our passion,” he said. “We want to make people aware of what real peppermint is like!” The descriptions of the aromas in the fields are fantastic—beautifully quiet fields filled with purple flowers and lovely green peppermint leaves. When the oil content is at its highest, the leaves are picked and pressed. In his drive for excellence, Sir Michael put together all the equipment needed to make the oil from the fresh leaves right on site. Because they use only their own mint, Summerdown is the mint equivalent of a good estate olive oil. Unlike olive oil, mint oil needs to mellow and mature—Summerdown sets it aside for a full year to “soften” after it’s pressed.
There are now four marvelous mint offerings that we have on hand from the folks at Summerdown—they keep adding a new one each year! One is the Chocolate Peppermint Creams—a thick layer of minty white peppermint “cream” with a thin layer of dark chocolate. The other are “crisps”—flat sheets of chocolate spiked with slivers of sugar and crystallized mint. Basically, it’s a bark. Then there are thin mint “discs,” or wafers. Awesome. Last but not least, there are some really cool and compellingly tasty, thinnish Dominoes—they really do look like little dominoes! All four are terrific.
The high quality of the mint oil is the feature in all four—it won’t hit you over the head the way cheaper alternatives will. The result is a cooler, mellow, but highly memorable, very marvelous chocolate mint that, for all I know, is being enjoyed this week at Buckingham Palace.
Not surprisingly, then, Summerdown has won a whole series of Great Taste Awards in Britain. As I said, they’re pretty steadily stocked on our kitchen cabinet at home (while the box lasts—we’ve been eating them rather rapidly). When the Summerdown creams first came to the ZCoB, they were a small asterisk in a wide, wide array of wonderful artisan foods! Today, they have a solid presence, a very loyal and ever-expanding following, and a very bright future. All of that is built, as I believe it should be, not on flashy ad campaigns, but on the quality of the product, the history of the Black Mitcham mint, the commitment of Sir Michael, his son Jo, and the whole crew on the farm. . Bottom line is that the Summerdown Peppermint Creams are all terrific!
