Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond

expected. And for good reason: the peanut butter contained chunks of white chocolate. (The author is at a loss to explain how the otherwise loathsome white chocolate works in this confection, but it does.) The net effect was a bar at once crunchy and dense, a Whatchamacallit squared or, perhaps, cubed.
    But it was the Hazelnut Bar that tweaked my heart. And specifically, that mysterious texture. So I tracked down the manufacturer, Lake Champlain Chocolates, and called their headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, and spoke to their PR guy, Chris Middings. He knew exactly what I was talking about. (“That very fine crunchiness, yes, absolutely.”) But he didn’t know what accounted for it. He was elaborately apologetic for this, explaining that he’d just taken the job, and promised to e-mail me an answer.
    A day later I received a brief note: “The ingredient in question is called feuilletine. It’s actually a crushed pastry, frequently used in European candies.” Feuilletine is best known to Americans in its uncrushed form, those thin, pie slice–shaped cookies that are placed in ice cream sundaes.
    Chris also invited me to visit the factory any time I was in the area. “You can talk to Dave Bolton,” he said. “Our chocolate engineer.”
    I suppose I was aware, in an abstract way, that there were men and women upon this earth who served in this capacity, as chocolate engineers . In the same way that I was aware that there are job titles out there such as bacon taster and sex surrogate, which is to say, job titles that made me want to weep over my own appointed lot in life. But I had never considered the prospect of visiting a chocolate engineer. I could think of nothing else for days.
    I arrived at the factory at nine in the morning, alongside a bus full of seniors from Mount Kisco, New York. Chris appeared and led me to a small room tucked away in the back of the factory. This was Dave Bolton’s lab. It looked very much like your basic junior high science lab, except that the counters were littered with bags of recent work product—chocolatecovered toffees and cocoa nibs—along with jugs of flavoring and a tiny panning machine that resembled a space helmet.
    Dave himself was hunched over a counter, scrutinizing what looked like an overgrown Junior Mint. He looked up when we came in and, almost reflexively, held the piece out to me. The dark chocolate shell gave way to an intense burst of sweet, chewy fruit. The texture was soft enough to yield to the teeth, yet firm enough to absorb the musky undertones of the chocolate.
    “What you’re eating,” Dave said, “is a dried cherry, infused with raspberry and covered in a Select Origin 75 percent dark chocolate.” He held out the bag. “Have another.”
    Here is what I wanted to say to Dave Bolton at that precise moment: Take me home and love me long time, GI .
    “This is what I do back here,” he explained. “Sales comes to me and says: ‘Dave: think cherries.’ I research what’s out there on the market already and what ingredients are available. The whole idea with this piece was to get away from canned cherries, but to retain an intense cherry flavor. Then, of course, I had to find a chocolate with high fruit overtones, because I wanted the marriage of a fruity chocolate to a piece of fruit.”
    Dave had a neatly trimmed beard and a beaked nose and powerful, low-hanging arms that swung as he trudged about his lab. He looked like a rabbi. Or a navy cook. I couldn’t decide. “People tend to think of chocolate in simplistic terms,” he said. “But there’s a tremendous variation based on where it’s grown.” He turned and grabbed a few boxes from the shelf behind him. These were his Select Origin chocolates, each from a different part of the world. They came in disks about the size of dimes. Dave’s favorite, at the moment, was Tanzania. He was also a big fan of Cuba. “My first question, when I come up with a new piece, is always: What sort of