Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond Page B
Authors: Steve Almond
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the perfect ratio of feuilletine to chocolate. This was simple enough for a small batch. But somehow, moving to a large batch, there’d be too much chocolate, not enough crunch, or the other way around, and he’d have to start from scratch again. By the end, he was up to 50 percent feuilletine by volume, about 15 to 18 percent by weight. “This process is literally what we’ve built the company on,” Dave said, “finding the proper proportion of flavors and textures.”
He, too, had a healthy fascination with feuilletine. The Europeans, he informed me, call it a cereal, though it’s really just the scrap from a patisserie cookie. It had become so popular as an ingredient that it was now mass produced. I imagined a whole army of men in puffy white hats and sterilized sneakers stomping on a sea of helpless patisseries and yelling curses in French, a sort of anger management thing for pastry chefs. Dave pulled a box from the shelf and pulled back the flap. I was alarmed to discover that feuilletine looked a lot like fish food. (In the interests of fairness, I should mention that Lindt makes a spectacular dark chocolate bar filled with feuilletine and hazelnut cream, which, thank God, is virtually impossible to find in this country, and which I know about only because my father/enabler recently sent me a bar from Switzerland.)
“Let me tell you a story,” Dave said. “I was on a plane flying back from Baltimore and the guy next to me pulled out a Five Star Peanut Bar and put it down on the tray table thing and cut it in half and said: ‘Would you like to try the best piece of candy you’ve ever eaten?’ I just looked at the guy and said: ‘I invented that bar.’ ”
This was the glory of his job. But Dave assured me there was a fair bit of grunt work, as well. A good example: the raspberry truffle debacle. A few years ago, he used a raspberry filling that consisted of canned raspberries cooked in vodka and strained through cheesecloth. Then Lake Champlain decided to get certified as kosher and the rabbi wouldn’t accept that process because of the alcohol. Dave had to invent a filling similar enough that the public wouldn’t know he’d modified the recipe. This took well over a year of trial and error. Lampman would walk by his lab and snarl, “Where’s that raspberry truffle?” He finally came up with a combination of all-natural raspberry concentrate and raspberry jam.
The rabbis weren’t the only ones Dave had to please. Lake Champlain also had a group of tasters who gathered twice a year to sample new products. Dave had created a whole series of creams recently. Only one made it to market. “It can be pretty unnerving,” he said. “I’ll present a piece I think is marvelous and they’ll say, ‘This is crap!’ I had a lemon-ginger cream I was pretty excited about, but they said it was too overthe-top. I have to keep my ego out of it.”
Naturally, I asked Dave what cream got approved.
Mango, he told me. He suggested we go try one. This meant heading out to the production floor, which was just fine with me. Every candy bar factory smells like chocolate. But the scent at Lake Champlain was intoxicating. This was because they used a chocolate made for them by a Belgian company, one that I would grade as—to use the technical term— totally ass-kicking . The factory was impeccably clean. It was not only the cleanest factory I’d ever visited, it may have been the cleanest room I’d ever visited. A few of the twisting, overhead pipes had been painted in bright primary colors, which lent the operation a Yellow Submarineish feel.
We arrived just as the chilled hazelnut bars were being popped from their molds and lined up on a conveyor belt to be run through the enrober. A few feet away, a machine shaped like a pommel horse was spinning a series of specially designed molds to create hollowed-out Santas. Nor were these your average Santas: they had detailed beards and white chocolate trim on their
He, too, had a healthy fascination with feuilletine. The Europeans, he informed me, call it a cereal, though it’s really just the scrap from a patisserie cookie. It had become so popular as an ingredient that it was now mass produced. I imagined a whole army of men in puffy white hats and sterilized sneakers stomping on a sea of helpless patisseries and yelling curses in French, a sort of anger management thing for pastry chefs. Dave pulled a box from the shelf and pulled back the flap. I was alarmed to discover that feuilletine looked a lot like fish food. (In the interests of fairness, I should mention that Lindt makes a spectacular dark chocolate bar filled with feuilletine and hazelnut cream, which, thank God, is virtually impossible to find in this country, and which I know about only because my father/enabler recently sent me a bar from Switzerland.)
“Let me tell you a story,” Dave said. “I was on a plane flying back from Baltimore and the guy next to me pulled out a Five Star Peanut Bar and put it down on the tray table thing and cut it in half and said: ‘Would you like to try the best piece of candy you’ve ever eaten?’ I just looked at the guy and said: ‘I invented that bar.’ ”
This was the glory of his job. But Dave assured me there was a fair bit of grunt work, as well. A good example: the raspberry truffle debacle. A few years ago, he used a raspberry filling that consisted of canned raspberries cooked in vodka and strained through cheesecloth. Then Lake Champlain decided to get certified as kosher and the rabbi wouldn’t accept that process because of the alcohol. Dave had to invent a filling similar enough that the public wouldn’t know he’d modified the recipe. This took well over a year of trial and error. Lampman would walk by his lab and snarl, “Where’s that raspberry truffle?” He finally came up with a combination of all-natural raspberry concentrate and raspberry jam.
The rabbis weren’t the only ones Dave had to please. Lake Champlain also had a group of tasters who gathered twice a year to sample new products. Dave had created a whole series of creams recently. Only one made it to market. “It can be pretty unnerving,” he said. “I’ll present a piece I think is marvelous and they’ll say, ‘This is crap!’ I had a lemon-ginger cream I was pretty excited about, but they said it was too overthe-top. I have to keep my ego out of it.”
Naturally, I asked Dave what cream got approved.
Mango, he told me. He suggested we go try one. This meant heading out to the production floor, which was just fine with me. Every candy bar factory smells like chocolate. But the scent at Lake Champlain was intoxicating. This was because they used a chocolate made for them by a Belgian company, one that I would grade as—to use the technical term— totally ass-kicking . The factory was impeccably clean. It was not only the cleanest factory I’d ever visited, it may have been the cleanest room I’d ever visited. A few of the twisting, overhead pipes had been painted in bright primary colors, which lent the operation a Yellow Submarineish feel.
We arrived just as the chilled hazelnut bars were being popped from their molds and lined up on a conveyor belt to be run through the enrober. A few feet away, a machine shaped like a pommel horse was spinning a series of specially designed molds to create hollowed-out Santas. Nor were these your average Santas: they had detailed beards and white chocolate trim on their
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