Chocolate chic

E-mail: sfeats@examiner.com Publication date: 02/12/2003 BY PATRICIA UNTERMAN Special to The Examiner      Like boutique olive oil, coffee and wine before it, chocolate has become the next culinary frontier -- and as usual, Northern California is in the vanguard.

    Great chocolate releases layers of flavor and an evocative aroma as it melts in your mouth. Semisweet or bittersweet chocolate with a high proportion of cocoa to sugar (say 65 to 80 percent) might taste bitter or astringent at first, but it opens up as it dissolves on your tongue, revealing fruit, smoke, spice and floral overtones.

    Some say the complexity of flavor in chocolate is akin to that in wine. Others liken it to varietal coffee. But in the past five years, a revolution has swept America's taste in chocolate. We now want more from, and are willing to pay more for our indulgences, especially affordable ones like chocolate.

    History in chocolate     My changing taste in chocolate is typical: Way back in the 1950s I used to bake a simple sour cream chocolate cake with my mother. We used Baker's unsweetened chocolate in the cake and Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder in the buttery frosting, which we also flavored with brewed coffee.

    Even as a child I loved the cake because it had a dark chocolate bite unlike the lighter, sweeter, chocolate cakes that seemed to be the common currency.

    In the '70s I made Toll House chocolate chip cookies straight from the recipe on the back of the package of chocolate chips, with my own baking variation: I pressed down each spoonful of dough on the cookie sheet with wet fingers so that the cookies baked up very thin and crisp.

    Then, sometime in the '80s, I tasted a bar of Bernachon chocolate. I'll never forget the moment I first bit into a bittersweet bar from this famous artisan chocolate maker in Lyons.

    Not only did many flavors dance around on my tongue, but the finish seemed to last forever. One bite led to another in this haunting blend. Who knew that chocolate could be so expressive, so thrilling?

    Bernachon's beans     About five years ago I made the pilgrimage to this Lyonnaise chocolate maker. Jean-Jacques Bernachon himself conducted the tour, available by appointment, which took place in a warren of rooms behind his chocolate shop at 42 Cours Franklin Roosevelt (tel. 78 24 37 98).

    We smelled the roasting beans from Venezuela, Ecuador, Trinidad and Madagascar, each bag checked for slow outdoor fermentation in the open air where the beans were harvested.

    The pinkish beans roast for 20-30 minutes, (checked every two minutes by the roaster) until they darken and shed their moisture. Then they are broken in a machine which winnows out the dark, shiny, brown nib.

    Bernachon carefully grinds the different varieties of cocoa nibs with sugar, vanilla and cocoa butter. This mixture passes slowly through steel rollers of different sizes until it forms, first, a moist sludge and then, a dry powder.

    The conching begins next: the smoothing out of the chocolate with added cocoa butter. For three days this mixture is warmed to the melting point and churned until it forms a thick, brown liquid. This silken liquid is formed into blocks which are aged in what looks like a huge walk-in refrigerator.

    Bernachon sells some of this chocolate in small pure bars with graduating ratios of pure chocolate to sugar. Most of it goes into in their exquisite filled chocolates (the best is the bittersweet chocolate-covered ganache called palets d'or), and flamboyant, achingly rich pastries.

    This is one of the few chocolatiers in the world that makes its chocolate from scratch. Most other candy makers buy blocks of chocolate from manufacturers and create their own confections with it.

    Going gourmet     About the same time that I was touring Bernachon, Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, a local company, was just starting.

    Founded by John Scharffenberger, who previously developed an excellent Mendocino county sparkling wine, and Michael Steinberg, a doctor turned chocolate-maker, their goal was to manufacture their own super-high quality chocolate to sell in blocks to pastry chefs and also to retail consumers, just as the Europeans do.

    Experimenting in a home kitchen, the two came up with a recipe for expressive dark chocolate. As they became more experienced, their small-batch artisan chocolate got better and better.

    Word of mouth spread like melted chocolate. Pastry chefs all over America started using it and consumers bought little individual bars of pure chocolate to eat out of hand, and larger slabs for the home kitchen.

    A year ago they set up a new factory in Berkeley (914 Heinz Ave.; 510-981-4050; www.scharffenberger.com). You can take a tour yourself and buy their products at the factory shop.

    Now, another local chocolate maker has jumped into the high-end chocolate sweepstakes: Burlingame's Guittard Chocolate Company, founded in 1868 (in San Francisco). Guittard supplies the inimitable See's (my favorite), among others, with chocolate for their confections, and is a major manufacturer of chocolate chips.

    But fourth-generation owner Gary Guittard told me that the success of Scharffen Berger was a wake-up call, that its European-style chocolate forced him to rethink the whole process in this highly competitive business.

    Though his operation is much larger than Bernachon and Scharffen Berger, Guittard now makes its own small-batch artisan chocolate.

    E. Guittard L'Harmonie is now sold in little orange boxes with five individually wrapped leaves of dark, fruity chocolate, a perfect two bites each. I like the thinness of the L'Harmonie packaging, but I prefer Guittard's Sur del Lago, a blend of cocoa bean varietals that grow south of Lake Maricaibo in Venezuela. Currently Sur del Lago only can be bought in big slabs.

    Gary Guittard, who grew up working in the chocolate factory, has an emotional attachment to chocolate making. As we tasted fingerfuls of warm chocolate sludge (just ground nibs, sugar and cocoa butter), he told me that this was his favorite stage in the manufacture of chocolate. He loved eating it as a child.

    He gave me a nugget of crumbly chocolate from a white jar made with the same blend of Sur del Lago beans but processed differently. It was delicious -- more vivacious, more accessible and with an addictive finish.

    I asked Guittard what made it taste like that; he wouldn't tell me. He said the process was proprietary and that the company was thinking about using those same techniques on its other premium chocolate. The chocolate tasted as if it were closer to that initial moment of mixing of nibs, sugar and cocoa butter. There was something brighter about it, more friendly.

    Taster's choice     If you want to sample the range of artisan chocolate, visit Fog City News (455 Market St.; 415-543-7400), a unique magazine store that carries the largest selection of magazines in the Bay Area as well as more than 150 premium chocolate bars from Europe and the United States.

    Owner Adam Smith has the soul of a collector. He goes well beyond just stocking the bars; he catalogues them and lovingly describes them.

    Here's his description of Guittard L'Harmonie (64 percent): "This chocolate has a smoky raisin and maple scent, with a smooth consistency and notes of mint, orange, lightly roasted peanut and toffee presented at the back of the palate."

    And Michel Cluizel 1er Cru d'Hacienda (66 percent): "Pleasant rose fragrance, the slightly brittle exterior leads to notes of cool orange, cinnamon, pear, and black cherry, with a smooth kiwi and apricot conclusion."

    Since he opened the store in 1999, Smith told me that his palate has become more sophisticated, and he has watched his regulars develop theirs, too, distinguishing between chocolates as they would wines. So it's no coincidence that the Bay Area now has two artisan chocolate makers and a growing appetite and appreciation for complex, layered, dark chocolate.

    With more and more people tasting the difference, chocolate will only get better.