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Elegance Bark
At Gray, Tennessee’s Chocolate Elegance, Jan Scibor’s 25-year hobby has grown into a business shipping sweets to as far away as Iraq.
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Chocolate Frogs
The fare in the Chocolate Spike display can can range all the way to accordion-playing rabbits.
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Elegance Bark
At Gray, Tennessee’s Chocolate Elegance, Jan Scibor’s 25-year hobby has grown into a business shipping sweets to as far away as Iraq.
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Pretzel Pieces
Chocolate Elegance combines savory and sweet in chocolate/pretzel creations.
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Chocolate Cake
A cake created by Chocolate Fetish.
And not the backroads kind, as we visit four chocolate makers in three states, for tastes of things like truffles, barks, bars and chocolate-covered Granny Smith apple.
What do you get when you mix lavender with chile with peach with Granny Smith apples with champagne with lime with pecans with ginger with bourbon with coffee with… chocolate?
Regional chocolatiers and their customers are finding out. Here are a few of their secrets.
Gearhart’s Chocolates, Charlottesville, Va.
No better place to start than this foodies’ city just below Afton Mountain, in a building on Main Street occupied by (among other things) a store called Feast and a chocolatier called Gearhart’s. Its founder, Tim Gearhart, started as a dishwasher at Duner’s in nearby Ivy. A few years later, he enlisted in the Marines. As a cook.
“We were making gravies and sauces from scratch – not gourmet, but real cooking.”
It was more than a hop and a step to pastry chef and chocolate maker, but after culinary school and eight more years of restaurant work, he opened Gearhart’s in 2000.
Today they turn out up to 7,000 truffles a day. They use peaches from Carter’s Mountain Orchard, strawberries from the farmer’s market, cream from Shenandoah’s Pride, local maple syrup. Their chocolates are handmade, hand-dipped; the more beautiful among them are overlaid with designs printed in edible gold.
“Probably my all-time favorite is the malted milk hazelnut,” Gearhart says. “It’s a childhood thing with me.” Also, “the toffee is completely addictive.”
Gearhart lives in Waynesboro with his wife Lauren and two-year-old son Owen. Did he think about anyplace else? “Not really. This is a food town.”
“In these Wal-Mart days, people don’t understand when you run out of something,” he says. “We get perplexed looks around Christmas – ‘what do you mean, you’re sold out? When does the next shipment come in?’
“They don’t understand. We make these things upstairs.”
Gearharts’ core line is 16 chocolates, and they try out new ones every six months to a year. Lately, “we’ve been playing with pepper and balsamic vinaigrette.” gearhartschocolates.com
The Chocolate Spike, Blacksburg, Va.
It’s a Friday afternoon, and college students wander in from nearby Virginia Tech. The conversations overlap and intertwine, but focus on one topic.
“It’s a champagne ganache,” explains owner Genie Ranck to a customer.
“I came in here with a guy – definitely a great place to go on a date.”
“…Soak ‘em in bourbon or brandy…”
“Soak ‘em in sherry, call ‘em sherry cherries!” another customer suggests…
“Oh, I like that!” Ranck says. “Gotta write that down.”
Ranck’s degrees in chemistry and chemical technology and her background in painting and fabric art prepared her well for developing a farmer’s market stall into a full-fledged chocolate shop. Early chocolate education from a German mother and a merchant marine father, and intensive training in chocolate and candy making along the way helped too. She started by making chocolates for her children, and now she’s making bourbon truffles for the Bull & Bones pub in Blacksburg and filling monthly orders for Chateau Morrisette on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
A glance through the glass case in her shop reveals a wide range of ingredients, from pomegranate to granola to marshmallows.
One of her most popular creations, the spicy Aztec Gold, was created for Blacksburg’s Lyric Theater.
“It was an immediate hit, and I’ve been tweaking it ever since,” says Ranck. The combination: bittersweet chocolate, cream, butter, cinnamon, orange and lemon peel and two kinds of chipotle chili.
Besides barks, bars, truffles and fudge, the Chocolate Spike makes molded chocolates, especially for holidays and special occasions – from accordion-playing rabbits at Easter to three-dimensional skulls at Halloween. chocolatespike.com
The Chocolate Fetish, Asheville, N.C.
Bill Foley and his daughter Elizabeth Foley talk about chocolate the way some people talk about wine.
“You get a burst of total mouthfeel,” says Bill. He’s talking about one of Chocolate Fetish’s concoctions, the Dragon’s Sigh. “Then you’ll start to taste sesame, and then you have about a five-second delay – the wasabi comes down and does a little dance on your tongue, and disappears,” and then the chocolate/sesame taste returns.
“Tasting fine chocolate is very much like tasting fine wine,” says Elizabeth. She is in training to take over the business, which her parents (Susan, her mother, is a former teacher and a trained cook) bought in 2002. The business was founded in 1986, and celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2011 with a newly expanded space.
Elizabeth studied art at the University of Oregon before she took up the reins as general manager of The Chocolate Fetish, focusing on ceramics. There are connections between her work then and her work now:
“They’re both functional art.” In both cases, she is “bringing something artistic into people’s everyday lives.”
Bill was a corporate executive in his former life, so the family lived all over the world, in the Caribbean, London, Brussels – “lots of fine restaurants, lots of chocolate,” Bill says. When it came time to retire, they looked at Asheville. They refer jokingly to son Patrick, a trauma nurse at Stanford Medical Center, as their West Coast Research and Revelopment Department.
It’s all about the ingredients – eight kinds of chocolate from six countries, flavors ranging from saffron to lemon.
“When we’re developing a new truffle flavor, it can take months,” says Elizabeth. chocolatefetish.com
Chocolate Elegance, Gray, Tenn.
For Jan Scibor, chocolate is about community.
“I’ve been making chocolate, not as a business, but making chocolate for 25 years now.” The more she made chocolate, the more she was teaching others to do it, and eventually she started a business.
“It kept evolving.” An elementary school teacher from Wisconsin, she moved home and work to Gray, Tenn., when her husband had a job change, and they haven’t left.
It wasn’t a complete leap from teaching to chocolate-making – the connection is “the creative side. Definitely the creative side. And learning to plan out your time well.”
Chocolate Elegance is entirely an online store, and Scibor says she does a “phenomenal amount of shows.” Chocolate Elegance created a range of dipped cookies and biscotti, chocolate Christmas houses, Easter bunnies, shaped chocolates and seasonal gifts – Granny Smith apples dipped in caramel then chocolate, then drizzled with more – pretzels wrapped up in caramel, pecans and chocolate.
But baskets may be where the most love is. Scibor is a breast cancer survivor – she went through five months of chemotherapy in 2009 – and now she creates chocolate baskets for other chemo patients, including books, bracelets and other encouraging items.
Iraq – “I think that’s probably the farthest we’ve sent,” she says. A friend ordered a basket for her nephew, serving there, “and then we just added a bunch of stuff.” Thirty-five military personnel ended up enjoying the care package. chocolate-elegance.com