The Sixth Annual Chocolate Show was held November 13-16 2003 at The Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, NYC.

As the show matures, its vision and mission become clearer and clearer. It is an unabashedly consumer show. The show’s audience is chocoholics of all ages eager to be able to completely sate their hunger for chocolate. While I can’t say that everyone went away with their hunger completely satisfied it certainly was not for lack of variety or quantity.

The show’s $20 per day adult admission keeps many of the casually curious out of the Metropolitan Pavilion which is really much too small to handle the burgeoning weekend crowds. As I was leaving on Saturday afternoon, the line stretched from mid-block on 18th street around the corner to mid-block on Sixth Ave between 18th and 19th—a three-hour wait I was told. Even so it was uncomfortably packed inside. One drawback to moving to a space large enough to accommodate the weekend crowd is that it might seem bleak and empty for the smaller weekday crowds. Still, something needs to be done to be able to accommodate the number of people who want to attend—the pre-show estimate was 20,000 plus—and there is no way of knowing how many people waited in line and simply gave up or left when they saw how long the wait was.

Once inside was the show worth it? Well, that depends on why you’re there. From a simple economics perspective, if someone arrived early and attended all of the demos they’d be able to taste 10 or so desserts from top pastry chefs and chocolatiers from around the country at a bargain-basement price. There were a lot of free samples (at least on the weekdays, by Saturday afternoon I noticed that several exhibitors had run out of samples and were just selling). There was a lot of chocolate on sale but I did not notice a lot of chocolate at sale prices—most exhibitors were eager to be able to sell product at full retail in order to be able to recoup the cost of their stand.

Overall, the demos were very well attended and featured some very well-known names including Jacques Torres and Francois Payard as well as dozens of lesser-known personages including this author. Most of the demos were just that, demonstrations of how to make specific desserts and the attraction was to learn the tips and tricks of top pastry chefs and chocolatiers (plus you got a free sample).

One of the things that truly delights me about the show is to see if there is anything new, and this year there was. Two different companies chose to use the show as their official launch.

Patrick Coston, the ex-pastry chef at Ilo here in town, formally launched his new business, The Art of Chocolate. I was reminded elsewhere that Patrick was at the show last year, but it was unclear (at least to me) if he was representing Ilo or himself. I tasted two pieces, a caramel and a praline that were very inviting nestled in his spare blue and black packaging. Both pieces were shell molded with a high gloss that told of good tempering technique and clean molds. The bottom of the caramel was surprisingly messy, but it was nonetheless satisfyingly gooshy with a surprisingly strong flavor. I expected it to dominate over the chocolate but it did not. I had the same reaction to the pleasantly crunchy praline—the taste was surprisingly up front (the technical term is “forward") and I expected the chocolate to take a back seat to it, which it did not. Several others I’ve talked to echoed these same reactions.

I haven’t had a chance to talk to Patrick about it, but it seems to me that he’s working to develop his own middle ground between the sweet over-flavored American/Belgian style and the often-understated French style where it’s almost impossible to figure out what the flavors are they’re so subtle. It takes a lot of skill to ride this line, developing pieces where the flavorings are clear and strong yet do not dominate the taste of the chocolate. If this is, in fact, what Patrick is trying to do then I think he’s on to something big. I didn’t catch the price point and I’d want to taste a wider number of pieces before giving a formal rating, but I’d go out of my way to hunt these down. Unfortunately that’s just what you’ll have to do because there is no retail store as yet, only on-line and phone sales.

The other new chocolatier choosing to debut at the show was Joan Coukos’ Chocolat Moderne. Headquarters is a 9th floor loft on 20th Street. With degrees in French and Russian plus an MBA, in 2000 founder Joan Coukos was on holiday in Belgium in an antiques market where she saw a stand of antique chocolate molds and had an epiphany that chocolate was her future. Since then she’s been studying and honing her craft.

Echoed by their attractive packaging, Chocolat Moderne’s pieces are very well made and elegant, all of them shell molded using dark chocolate exclusively for the shells. The centers have unusual flavor combinations and many are caramel including a grapefruit caramel and a green apple/calvados caramel. Also unusual is Joan’s use of non-traditional nuts and seeds in pralines, including pistachio and peptita (pumpkin seeds). Unlike Patrick Coston’s forward flavors, Joan’s touch is more delicate but also very refined—more classical if you like. There is no retail location (yet!) so you’ll have to visit the web site to order or call. Although there are collections, you can call and ask for custom selections including an entire box of just one flavor. Joan also accepts wholesale orders.

New to the US but actually in business for more than 50 years is Mary‘s from Tokyo. I have long been a fan of Asian flavorings in chocolate—the wasabi/ginger combination from Vosges and the black sesame and green tea from Chocolate Garden (NYC). Mary’s offers their own takes on these flavors plus some new ones and adds some of its own unique touches.

One of those touches is very delicate decorations piped on to the tops of the seasonal flower chocolates. The stand-out (from a flavor perspective) is the Japanese Plum, which has a complex flavor that evolves slowly in the mouth over time. Other uniquely Japanese flavors that I did not try (but hope to soon!) are featured in their truffle line: purple sweet potato, bean paste, and soybean flour in addition to more traditional sesame, ginger, wasabi, and green tea varieties.

The Japanese are long known for a willingness to eat almost anything and everything, and some of their topping choices are unusual to say the least. There is a black bean bark as well as a Rishiri kelp bark using Tanzanian couverture.

Also new to the show (but not new to New York) was Australian Homemade. What’s odd about the company is that it’s Belgian, not Australian. According to corporate lore, the original recipes are Australian; the founder is a Belgian chocolatier, who after visiting an Australian aunt, returned to Belgium with the recipes, which turned out to be wildly popular.

There is no mistaking Australian Homemade chocolates from any others in the known choco-verse. They are huge (averaging just shy of an ounce) and square and most are decorated with transfers based on aboriginal Australian themes. Their size, coupled with their cost (under two bucks each), plus the fact that fillings are definitely Belgian in style (matching the American preference for lighter, sweeter, fillings) mean that they will be hugely popular here in the US as well. Australian Homemade shops also feature small-batch ice creams made on premises as well as coffees and other beverages. A couple of American architects bought the US franchise rights, so if there’s not a branch nearby, there probably will be soon so you won’t have to go walkabout in search of some.

Back at the show this year was Danish-born Fritz Knipschildt. He was introducing three new product lines, including dunkable pyramids for flavoring coffee, intense fruit syrups, and sauces. While his pieces and packaging have always been beautiful, the work itself I had found to be a little inconsistent. A small tasting during the show revealed that Fritz has really matured in the past couple of years and has found his stride. New to me this year was a raspberry red peppercorn piece that had all the hallmarks of becoming a favorite because of its unusual combination and deft handling of what can be very strong flavors.

Fritz, Patrick, and Joan were all together in one corner of the Pavilion, perhaps my favorite spot this year.

One of the most fun parts of the show for me was Saturday morning when I took my six-year-old daughter Alexandra to see what daddy did. Alex is a precocious kid and all parental pride aside, had little trouble charming everyone we met. She had a great time with the Foodoodlers (edible markers for food) in the kids’s corner while I met with Amy Singh, an 11-year old who makes her own chocolate at home.

I was introduced to Amy last year through Maricel Presilla (author of The New Taste of Chocolate and Pierrick Chouard (founder of the University of Chocolate and echocolates.com). And this year I received an envelope just before the show with a sample. While Valrhona and Cluizel have nothing to fear (yet!) Amy’s work is pretty amazing (at 56% a little sweet for my taste, but there’s some complexity in the flavor she extracts from the Venezuelan Trinitario beans she gets from the Hacienda Concepcion which includes fruit but no acidity and surprisingly little astringency), especially given the nature of the equipment she has developed.

She uses two vegetable steamer baskets wired together attached to the rotisserie rod of an outdoor grill for roasting. After husking wand winnowing the beans, they are first ground in a coffee mill (her melangeur), and then put through an Atlas-style pasta machine (her roll refiner) with powdered sugar and vanilla bean seeds. After a couple of passes through the refiner, they are put into another type of pasta machine for conching. The heat source is a standard PAR lamp.

Using these tools, all fashioned from household appliances, Amy was able to generate a particle size of around 20 microns, well below what can be felt on the tongue, and in line with many of the best chocolates in the world that shoot for about 16 microns.

(Meeting Amy was also a lot of fun because she is one of the few people that have recognized me from my appearance on Oprah and the first to ask for my autograph – I got hers in return, as well as a very cool Amy’s Chocolate t-shirt for Alexandra.)

Demo: Taste Trends in Chocolate

One of the highlights of the show, for me, was getting one of the scarce demo slots in one of the two theaters. On Thursday at 5:00 I gave a 45 minute talk titled Taste Trends in Chocolate with free samples.

There were a number of trends I highlighted during the talk, which was attended by about 135 people:

1. American chocolatiers are producing some of the finest confections in the world, being very experimental with exciting new flavor combinations and styles. While we have a long way to go to match the best European chocolate manufacturers, there is also a lot of exciting movement in that direction, too.
2. After many years, 2003 saw the introduction of what may be the first really edible low-fat, low-carb chocolate truffle. Gayle’s Miracles. Formulated by licensed nutritionist and chef Gayle Reichler (creator of the Active Wellness program) and weighing in at a mere 1 gram of fat, six grams of carbs, and 30 calories each, when I was first introduced to them I did not immediately get the taste sense that I was eating a low-fat, low-sugar product. Available in three varieties, dark, milk, and mint, Gayle’s Miracles truffles are available in bulk and in 16-piece boxes.
3. The industry is catering to more and more dietary challenges in addition to the “low net carb” craze. nSpired Natural Foods’ Tropical Source Candy is producing a line of chocolate bars for people allergic to dairy and wheat. The bars, which are produced in Israel, are both dairy free and gluten free, and are made from fair trade cocoa. What does not make sense to me is that they did not take the next logical step, which would be to produce the bars in a nut-free factory, making the product available to millions who have life-threatening sensitivities to nuts. That aside, the bar we sampled, the plain “Rich Dark” bar is sweetened with evaporated cane juice which, in conjunction with toasted soy flour gives the bar a distinctive toasty caramelly flavor that many will find attractive. There is no indication of the cocoa percentage, but this bar tastes like a light semi-sweet chocolate. For people with dairy and gluten sensitivities, these are a welcome addition to the pantry.
4. Although not new to the choco-scenti, terroir chocolates continue to be a hotter than hot trends. Terroir chocolates are those made from beans from a defined growing region. We sampled some Hacienda Concepcion, a single-estate (all of the beans used to make the chocolate come from a single plantation) chocolate from Michel Cluizel, sourced from importer eChocolates.com. Because of the acclaim (and premium prices) of terroir chocolates, we are already starting to see abuses of the use of names. For example, there are many, many, more tonnes of chocolate produced each year from a famous growing region in Venezuela than there are beans grown and exported from that area. Consequently, it is quite likely that we will see quasi-governmental initiatives like France’s AOC, Italy’s DOC, and Spain’s OC coming into being to oversee and certify claims for a product’s using beans that actually were grown where the label says they were.
5. Unusual and fun flavor combinations are also a hot trend, and to demonstrate this, we sampled the Dolfin Rose Pepper bar, imported by Nirvana Chocolates and available on chocolatesource.com as well as many other places on-line and off. Made in Belgium using chocolate from Belcolade, Dolfin is one of the few mainstream European chocolate companies experimenting with flavors at this level. Their green anise seed, hot masala, and other bars are quite good, and Dolfin has what I consider to be the best consumer packaging anywhere for their bars.
6. Although I did not identify this trend at the show, in follow-up conversations with several people I can say that flavored caramels is a hot new trend in chocolate. Chocolat Moderne was sampling several, and outside the show I have received review samples from two chocolatiers, Chuao in California and Caprice in Rhode Island that make extensive use of caramel as a vehicle for flavors, the way most chocolatiers use ganache. The results can be a little monotonous without a great deal of care, flavored caramel centers—flavored with something other than fleur de sel—are just coming on strong and will be with us for a long time.

And that’s it for this edition of The Chocolate Show Report. Good night, everyone.