Metricup to Margaret River The chocolate trail, from bean to bar to fudge

Start where chocolate does, with the bean. Gabriel Chocolate brings raw cacao to its own factory in Metricup, sorts it by hand, roasts it, winnows it down to nibs, then grinds and refines it into chocolate. That's what bean to bar means, and Gabriel says it was the first maker in WA to work this way.

The beans come from Peru, Ghana, Uganda, Madagascar and more, and each origin gets its own bar instead of going into a blend. Same factory, same method, so the difference you taste is the bean. The Peru 65% won gold and Crowd Favourite at the 2024 Perth Royal Food Awards, so start there.

The factory moved here from Yallingup and now shares its site with a cafe: hot chocolate, a chocolate chunk cookie, gelato and coffee. Nobody will judge you for having the gelato first.

Over at Yallingup Siding, Yallingup Chocolate makes handmade chocolates and runs a cafe on the same site where Commonage Coffee Co roasts its beans. When we checked, it had no online shop for its chocolate, so that one is strictly in person.

Temper Temper is two chocolatiers, Roz and Georgia, who met when Georgia catered Roz's wedding in 2015. Roz had run a chocolate business in McLaren Vale before she moved to Margaret River. Georgia had six years behind her as a professional chef. The pair went to Melbourne together to study chocolate-making further.

A chef's hand shows in the flavours: grapefruit and fennel, coffee and almond, and a Fairy Bread bar for anyone who grew up on Australian birthday parties. The plain 50 g bars are tempered by hand, and the dark one is 70% cacao from Sao Tome, an island off West Africa. The coated figs start as dried figs grown at Rosa Brook.

Then Bettenays, on Tom Cullity Drive, where the nougat is made on site behind a window and you can stand and watch the kitchen at work. There are dozens of flavours, from honey and toasted almond to rosewater and pistachio, and free samples of the nougat. That makes choosing one bar much harder than it should be.

Temper Temper has a second shop in town on Bussell Highway, next door to Two Cracks Coffee. Handy if you drove through Cowaramup too fast, or already regret leaving the coated figs behind.

Also on the main street, the Margaret River Fudge Factory has been making fudge by hand since 1999. It's family-owned, and a window onto the kitchen shows each batch being mixed, poured and cut. Chocolate fudge is the obvious pick on a chocolate trail, and there's a Chocolate Rocky Road for anyone who wants it in a different shape.

For the pantry at home, Providore sells a drinking chocolate range that runs from Classic through to Aztec Chilli, and makes the Classic on its Margaret River property.