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Remarkable chocolate grown locally
The Star-Ledger | NJ.com
By Teresa Politano/For The Star-Ledger
02.13.08
We grow up with S'mores, M&Ms and Nestle Quick. Valentine's Day alone is practically an homage to chocolate. Add brownies, Toll House cookies, Forest Gump and Hershey Park. What could Americans not know about chocolate? Multitudes, says Hoboken historian and chef Maricel E. Presilla. We would be stunned at the complexities of the cacao bean, its nuances, its character.
"Chocolate is one of the remarkable creations of civilization," says Presilla. But it went generic when it became a confection for the masses.
Thankfully for chocolate lovers, Presilla sees the germs of a revolution, as more artisans recognize the significance of those nuances, as more companies respect the origin of the cacao bean, and more chefs return to some of the exotic recipes made when chocolate was first discovered. Americans are beginning to become more sophisticated about chocolate.
"Where there is cacoa, there is life." Presilla quotes a Venezuelan plantation worker in her book, "The New Taste of Chocolate."
Here then, are three local stories.
Diane Pinder talks poetically about chocolates, much as a sommelier talks about wines. Try the sea salt and olive oil truffle, she urges.
Sea salt opens your taste buds, she says, to the flavor of the chocolate. You won't taste the olive oil, but it gives the truffle a velvety texture (compared to the pudding-like texture of chocolate emulsified with butter).
Try it and you're stunned. This is chocolate as you've never had it; chocolate with so much spirit that it seems also to have soul. And it will instantaneously render all your other chocolate experiences -- from Hershey to Ghirardelli, Godiva, even Valrhona -- as flat and mundane.
And, snap, Pinder has seduced another groupie.
Pinder opened Donna & Company, an artisan chocolate shop in Cranford in 2005. It's a quaint, old-fashioned shop filled with modern, sophisticated and sometimes shocking flavors of chocolate -- cinnamon chipolte, drunken plum, balsamic, blood orange, even a Thai chocolate, with peanut butter and red peppers. Eating these chocolates is an event -- the layers of flavor, the texture, the undercurrents. She's been noticed by "The Today Show" and "Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?" Business is so good -- keep your fingers crossed, she says -- that she's negotiating with some retail specialty stores to sell her chocolates.
Meet Pinder and you're not surprised -- she is passionate and uncompromising. And she didn't just open the shop on a whim. "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to be really credible about it."
So, Pinder, a former intensive care nurse who had also done pharmaceutical marketing for Saatchi & Saatchi, first did trend research, developed a business plan, took a course in New York. But she was really inspired by Ecole Chocolat, a professional school of chocolate arts in Tuscany, where she learned from master chocolatiers.
Donna & Company sells two separate lines of treats, a fun line -- hand-dipped Oreos and pretzels made with imported CocoaBee chocolate, and Donna Tuscana -- artisan chocolates developed in the spirit of Pinder's Tuscan experience. Pinder is fussy about chocolate's origin, how it's grown and processed. She makes each chocolate by hand. Artisan, to her, means clean, with noteworthy ingredients.
And she uses her chocolates to promote her other passion -- taking care of the soldiers who take care of us. Pinder is a '70s Vietnam War protester who somehow ended up with a military family -- her son served in Afghanistan, her daughter is at Fort Dix and her son-in-law is in Iraq. When her son was away, she slept in his bed just to stay close.
She sells chocolate bars for Fisher House, a temporary residence near military bases for family members of those wounded in the war. For every bar she sells for $1.50, she donates $1 to Fisher House, to cover the cost of housing while a soldier is receiving medical care. She invites Girl Scouts to make hand-dipped Belgium chocolates to send to Walter Reed. Pinder's still a caregiver. But in the ICU, she wasn't always able to make people happy. At Donna & Company, she can.
If you're looking to cross over to the dark side, Susan Fine offers some tricks.Try first a dark chocolate bar with fruit -- it offers the sugar you crave. As you get more adventurous, eliminate the fruit and choose a more dense dark chocolate. You don't miss the sugar and you start appreciating the nuances.
Fine has swooned over dark chocolate for 15 years, but couldn't find it in the suburbs. So when she opened The Chocolate Path in Montclair two years ago, she decided to sell just dark chocolates.
"It's truly a niche," she says. Indeed, many customers are thrilled to walk into her chocolate shop, but are then disappointed by the selection. "Oh, you don't have any milk chocolate." But Fine converts them, one dark chocolate at a time.
Fine is a former corporate television consultant, but credits the Junior League with giving her the confidence to start her own business. entrepreneurial dreams.
As a shop owner, Fine does have one big selling point -- the antioxidants in dark chocolate. But dark chocolate also has a subtlety and sophistication that milk chocolate lacks. "You taste the chocolate, but you get a feel for where the cocoa's been." For example, the shop sells three chocolate bars from Ecuador, similar in size and content, but from different plantations. Thus each chocolate has a separate flavor profile, one fruity, one flowery, one with citrus notes, reflecting the crops grown elsewhere on the plantation.
Shop best-sellers include the burnt caramel and sea salt chocolate by Knipschildt, the line of award-winning Italian chocolates by Amedei, the Spicy Maya chocolate by Chuao, with cayenne and pasilla. For Valentine's Day, try the rose truffles -- dark chocolate with a rose-water flavored ganache, sprinkled with edible rose petals. Or take home some cocoa pulp, a fruit spread great on croissants and banana bread.
Everyday dark chocolate from the world's best sources -- that's the shop motto. But Fine isn't defining everyday as commonplace. Her chocolates are some of the best dark chocolates in the world, many organic and artisan. What Fine is saying is that you should make dark chocolate a habit. Every day. Fine has hers for lunch.
Laura Waitze Zuckerman is a hat-loving mom who makes whimsical chocolate-covered treats out of her home in Bridgewater.
Her chocolates are the kind you wish you would make yourself --chocolate-covered pretzels, marshmallows and graham crackers, topped in sprinkles, in mini-M&Ms, puffed rice.
Nothing outrageous or unusual here -- except the ingredients. Zuckerman uses Belgium chocolate, organic pretzels, award-winning graham crackers. These are your childhood favorites, elevated by top-notch ingredients.
And people gush -- Al Roker, Rachel Ray, Modern Bride have exclaimed over her sweets.
The philosophy behind her business is an extension of the philosophy of her life -- she lives organic -- no processed food for her family, no chemicals in her cleaning agents. She's also lively and unpretentious.
Which means her chocolates are fun. And they evoke precious memories -- for a moment you can go back to the innocence and optimism of your childhood. And they're a special indulgence. "I don't think good things are ever made in mass production," she says. "If I'm going to have my calories, I want my chocolate to be amazing."
How Zuckerman ended up in chocolate is a circuitous story. She is a Farleigh Dickinson film major who interned at MTV, worked for Guess jeans and started her own line of fitness clothing. Then her children were born -- Iliana is 5, Ruben is 3. Zuckerman closed her fitness business, but remained an entrepreneur at heart. She began selling cookies with a friend, flubbed one of the recipes with too much chocolate and, presto, Yummie Chocolates was created.
For an entrepreneur with her level of charisma and energy it's an ideal situation. "I've never met a person who doesn't like chocolate."
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