Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  Names were one way to do this. But candy makers also resorted to publicity stunts. Most famously, in 1923 Otto Schnering, president of the Curtiss Candy Company, chartered a plane to drop thousands of Baby Ruths onto the city of Pittsburgh. (There were no injuries reported.) Long before McDonald’s and Burger King affixed game cards to their fries, candy companies were linking bars such as Put & Take and You Bet to the punchboard craze, a game of chance in which folks paid a few pennies to punch a prize board. No major aspect of the culture went unexploited. During Prohibition, the Marvel Company of Chicago made an 18th Amendment Bar, which boasted THE PRE-WAR FLAVOR and pictured a bottle of rum on the label. World War II spurred a battalion of militaristic bars: Flying Fortress, Jeep, Chevron, Buck Private, Big Yank, Commando.

  What the best minds of the industry intuited was that establishing a solid brand name was the only way to survive over the long haul. This required aggressive advertising, a national distribution system, a fierce sales force, and the means to produce huge numbers of bars. While their competitors floundered about, guys like Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars were automating their factories, buying out competitors, and stockpiling raw ingredients. As a result, the industry sped ahead on a kind of hyperglycemic metabolism. Whereas the leaders of the auto companies, for instance, have consolidated only in the past decade or so, the candy giants have been there, done that.

  Toward the end of my visit, I told Broekel about my plan to visit a bunch of smaller candy companies so I could document these operations before they disappeared. I assumed Broekel would share my distress over the current state of the industry. But his logic was actually a lot subtler than mine. “My grandkids have more candy bars to choose from than I did,” he pointed out. “When I was a kid, you see, I only knew about the candy bars available in my area.”

  This was the crowning irony of candy’s golden age: very few people actually experienced it in real time. Unless you were a traveling salesman with a sweet tooth, you probably never tasted even a fraction of the candy bars produced in this country. And now that our country consists largely of upwardly mobile nomads, most of the exotic brands are gone anyway. What people want these days is a dependable oral experience, the comfort, as they hurl through airports and across state lines, of a few, familiar brands.

  5

  THERE ARE MEN UPON THIS EARTH WHO TREAD LIKE GODS

  Shortly after the Broekel colloquy, a friend of mine brought me two candy bars that I had never seen before. They were called Five Star Bars and the reason I had never seen them before is because they are sold primarily at Bread & Circus, an upscale grocery chain (that is, one I do not frequent). The bars were slightly larger than snack size, but they had a queer and pleasing heft. Indeed, they weighed nearly as much as a full-size Snickers. I tend to steer away from gourmet candy—at least from the purchase of gourmet candy—but here they were, gifts, and didn’t they look pretty? Yes, they looked so pretty in their embossed wrappers that I was actually a little frightened to open them.

  My friend had no such compunction. She unwrapped the Caramel Bar and took a bite. It was clear, simply from the way her mouth addressed the bar, that we were dealing with a different grade of freak. Her bite was smooth and concerted—there was an obvious density at play here—though interrupted by two muted snaps, both of which caused her a quartermoment of anguish, followed by a twinge of delight, registered as a flushing upon her cheeks. She moaned. It was a lovely thing to hear.

  This reaction was, in my view, restrained. I had never tasted anything like the Five Star. Fancy chocolates, truffles and so forth, are one thing. But this was a fancy candy bar, a complex and nuanced marriage of ingredients. There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate. You almost never see milk and dark chocolate commingled, but the effect in this bar was striking: The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the buttery dissolution of caramel. What I mean here: there was a temporal aspect to the bar, a sense of evanescence and persistence. Because of the random placement of the almonds and dark chocolate, each bite offered a distinct combination. It was like eating several different bars at once.

  The Hazelnut Bar was so: milk chocolate around a hazelnut paste (by which I really mean a rich hazelnut mousse) interspersed with crushed hazelnuts. If the bar had stopped here, well, as we Jews say: Dianu. It would have been enough. But there was something else going on with the bar, an ineluctable grittiness that conveyed a tang of vanilla.

  “What is that?” I said. “It’s like, what, a cookie?”

  “More granular,” my friend said. “Like tiny planes of sugar.”

  Yes, that was it. Planes. The geometric sort. Little vanillainfused planes.

  It will go without saying that I broke my long-standing boycott of gourmet groceries in order to seek out additional Five Star Bars. The ingredient list for the Five Star Peanut Bar was simple enough: peanuts, peanut butter, and crisped rice, enrobed in milk chocolate. But the taste was richer, more chocolaty, than 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 t
o 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 chocolate makes the most sense?” He reached for the Santo Domingo and popped a few pieces into his mouth. “This has such an intense, smoky flavor. It would be best for a pastry. And it would be wonderful with figs or a fruit like that. A brown fruit.”

  It was now clear I was in the presence of freak genius. But Dave’s approach to chocolate was actually pretty low-key, in the context of the new foodie movement which has sprung up around fine chocolate. This movement has, alas, spawned its own insufferable rhetoric, such that, in reading over various high-end chocolate catalogs, you are likely to encounter descriptions of this ilk: A saucy single-bean, grown exclusively in the shady lowlands of Ghana and harvested on alternating Tuesdays, at dusk. Notes of cardamom and oak predominate, with an insouciant creosote finish. (Those familiar with other luxury foods—wine and coffee, for instance—are no doubt familiar with this process: the curdling of expertise into hauteur.) The new chocolate specialty products are equally pretentious. I ask you, does the world truly need a bar infused with hot masala? The latest rage, as of this writing, is superconcentrated chocolate, with a cocoa content in the 90 percent range, a trend that will, in due time, allow us to eat Baker’s Chocolate at ten bucks a square.

  In some sense, though, this decadence is a return to the pre-Columbian days of cocoa, when the bean was viewed as a gift from the god Quetzalcoatl and considered the domain of royalty. Five hundred years later, Theobroma cacao (literally: food of the gods) remains the single most complex natural flavor in the world. Flavorists have been trying to reproduce the taste for decades—and they’re nowhere near doing so. This is because chocolate is made up of more than 1,200 chemical components, many of which give off distinct notes, of honey or roses or even spoiled fish. There’s even one chemical in chocolate that’s cyanide-based. This is to say nothing of chocolate’s oft-touted psychoactive ingredients, which include caffeine, theobromine (increases alertness), phenylalanine and phenylethylamine (both known to induce happiness), and anandamide, which is similar to THC (yes, stoners, that THC). In truth, most of the brouhaha over these chemicals is trumped up. They only occur in trace amounts. The main reason chocolate is the ultimate physiological freak is because it’s half sugar and half fat.

  FEUILLETINE, REVEALED

  Dave came to Lake Champlain fifteen years ago. At the time, he signed on as a part-time truffle maker to help out his friend, owner Jim Lampman, during the Christmas rush. But he fell in love with the manufacturing process. As the business grew, he agreed to become chief of new product development. This, of course, included the Five Star Bars, which have become the company’s signature product line.

  “Those are all recipes we created,” Dave said. “The Caramel Bar took us two years to figure out how to produce. Now, the Fruit and Nut Bar came much faster. I know it sounds silly, but I literally dreamed that candy bar. I dreamed of putting those precise ingredients together and came into the lab and made the bar in one or two tries. I’d read about Janduja chocolate, which is a very soft chocolate, the ‘chocolate of love’ according to the Italians. I figured it would go well with dried fruit and nuts.”

  When I told Dave that I’d never tried the Fruit and Nut Bar, he looked stricken and sent Chris to fetch one. With a delicacy any mohel would envy, he sliced the bar into thin slabs. The chocolate had a creaminess I associated with ganache, against which rose the chewier textures of raisins and pecans.

  “The bar has a great finish,” Dave noted, “because the nuts and fruit last a little longer than the chocolate. They clean the palate.”

  “What about the Hazelnut Bar?” I said.

  Hazelnut, it turned out, had been especially tricky to devise. Dave spent months attempting to find 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 hollowedout Santas. Nor were these your average Santas: they had detailed beards and white chocolate trim on their coats and hats, which had been painted into the molds. Round and round they spun, with slightly dazed expressions.

  Dave hurried past the enrober to a sleek, new machine. It featured a set of pistons, which shot various liquid fillings into molds of chocolate with a sharp pop. They were still figuring out what products could be made with the machine. They could do inclusions, anything that wouldn’t jam up in the pistons. But the viscosity had to be just right. Lake Champlain had gotten big enough, as a company, that Dave now had to worry about whether they could mass-produce a piece. “Years ago,” he said, “all I had to do was figure out the flavor. Now we’re into flavor and technology.” Dave gazed at the machine, a little morosely. The machine hissed and popped.

  “Mango cream,” I said.

  “Right,” said Dave.

  We spent the next few minutes trying to locate a mango cream. Dave kept opening all these hidden doors. There were scraps of chocolate everywhere, little mutant truffles and Five Star Bars that had failed to pass muster, which I wanted very badly to snatch and stick in one of my pockets, as I feared otherwise they would be thrown away. Chris assured me he was having a selection of seconds put together for me.

  The mango cream proved to be a milk chocolate piece, slightly larger than a gum ball, filled with a sweet, yellowish cream. “I would have liked a thicker center,” Dave muttered. “But there were viscosity issues.”

  He made his way over to a large plastic bucket, which was filled with a moist white substance. “Smell,” he said.