Sweet Dreams of Gourmet Chocolate

Chris Sherman | 2/1/2008

A sampling from Norman Love Confections in Fort Myers

There are chocolate lovers, chocoholics and lovers of great chocolate. Count me among the last group. We prefer dark to milk, pop $2 for a mere truffle and like our chocolate plain and pure so we can taste the fruitiness, earth, smoke and nuttiness of it. You can tell us by the way we eat chocolate: Very slowly. We eschew chewing and like to let the heat of the mouth melt the goodness until it slides over the tongue and down the throat, letting the aroma fill our head.

Gourmet chocolate, I’m happy to say, is at high tide in Florida these days.

EXTRA List of Florida chocolatiers.

Norman Love, a former top Ritz-Carlton pastry chef, has become one of America’s foremost chocolatiers. “When I started six years ago, my friends thought I was crazy to start a chocolate business in Florida,’’ the owner of Norman Love Confections in Fort Myers says, referring to the steamy climate that works against chocolatiers. He stands in a pure white packing room with a rubber apron over his chef’s jacket, watching as a lab-coated crew assembles the latest order, 15,000 pieces for a resort in the Netherlands Antilles. They are surrounded by big red posters for G, his artisan line for Godiva, and racks of boxes and bags waiting for the FedEx pickup. In a secure cold room next door, pastry chefs work edible magic with old-fashioned funnels and gloved hands and visual artistry with an airbrush chamber.

In the salon in front, customers watch the work — and eat it. A Euro glass case is a jewel box of delights. Raspberry and strawberry truffles gleam like rubies; cookies and cream candy, like a ball of polished terrazzo. A confection of Granny Smiths has candy apple shine and the taste of fresh apple pie. Love has converted s’mores into candies of iridescent golds and tans and replicated Christmas cookies too.

Pierre Vivier

My favorite is an ebony square of Venezuelan bittersweet, earthy and woodsy. Most customers like the white chocolates, and Love’s white chocolate
is the best this dark-chocolate snob has tasted, luscious and not too sweet.
As for his own favorite, Love picks the simple caramel — exquisite milk
chocolate with a filling of Plugra butter and bourbon vanilla beans from
Tahiti.

Besides a visual flair, fine chocolate requires just-so precision. To convert solid chocolate to moldable form, chefs must understand crystallization and “temper’’ chocolate, heating, cooling and reheating in minute steps to destroy all but the desired Category V crystals. Historically, that process required marble counters and perfect spring weather. Air conditioning, better packaging and air freight deliveries changed all that. “I can ship to Vegas in August,’’ Love brags.

Chocolate is now hot throughout Florida, despite the heat. Pierre Vivier, Tallahassee’s beloved French chef, gave up restauranting for the life of a chocolatier 10 years ago. Outfits like Godiva and Jacksonville’s Peterbrooke have locations throughout the state. So does Schakolad, where franchisees make their own. Chuao, an artisan firm in California named for a prized region in Venezuela, has opened its first out-of-state store on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables.

Chocolate from Romanico’s in Miami

Most impressive are brave chocolatiers like Romanico’s in Miami, started by a graphic artist from Venezuela, Alejandra Bigai, with her grandmother’s recipe
for hand-rolled truffles and her own packaging and criollo pride. “The
name is from the old (Romanesque) temples in Spain. They are plain on
the outside but inside very beautiful,’’ says Bigai.

Tampa is also awash in chocolate. Viktoria Richards in Trinity makes dozens of truffles and chocolate Russian matryoshka dolls to order for internet customers. Chicago restaurant veterans Jeanine and Duane Lipinski moved to New Tampa to open Soleil Chocolates; they deck truffles with rose petals and gold leaf, mix a perfect martini truffle (hold the olive) and make fresh torrone.

And as connoisseurs look beyond percentages of cocoa solids to the global origins of cacao, a new store called Choxotica in Tampa offers edible geography lessons. It stocks 210 bars from different regions and estates ($3 to $15) in an elegant chilled salon lined with maps, leather chairs and flat-screen chocumentaries of harvesters and plantations. The store brews cups of spiced liquid chocolate from customer’s choices in regional chocolates and is having heady Starbucks dreams.

If the Aztec royals loved their chocolate hot, shouldn’t we?

Norman Love’s customers can watch chocolatiers make the goods.

Tags: Dining & Travel