It’s 11 a.m. on an ice-cold Thursday morning when chocolatier Aditi Malhotra heads into the basement of her Lower East Side shop and begins concocting a batch of strawberry dark-chocolate truffles. The six-hour affair includes mixing fresh strawberry puree, spices and dark chocolate by hand, and tasting the concoction four times before pumping it into bonbons, adorning them with candied ginger toppings.
“The way to know if you make the perfect truffle is if the flavor lingers on your tongue,” notes Malhotra, who owns Tache Artisan Chocolate. She calls her line of work a passion, not a job.
“No one would spend hours locked in a basement making chocolate if they didn’t love it,” she says.
Tasting chocolate all day sounds sensational — but for those who craft these bite-size bits of heaven, the work can be bittersweet at times. The job requires patience, creativity and perfectionism — and a strong body for hours of standing, stirring and lifting.
Valentine’s Day — the busiest day for most chocolatiers — can be particularly difficult to manage.
Malhotra is already logging 80-hour weeks preparing new truffles, booking chocolate-making classes and reviewing box designs, while Jacques Torres, whose chocolate empire stretches from his flagship store in DUMBO, Brooklyn to an Upper West Side outpost, has hired seasonal workers, plans to make 10,000 bonbons and truffles for Feb. 14 and will extend shop hours that day.
Business can be brisk. Malhotra orders five times the chocolate for the holiday than on an average week, and Torres counted 3,600 transactions the day before Valentine’s Day last year, up from about 400 on a typical day.
Seasonal peaks aren’t limited to Valentine’s Day. The two weeks before Christmas is crazy for chocolate sales, while there are a bonanza of brown bunnies to make for Easter. And Mother’s Day brings a steady flow of people buying last-minute treats for their moms.
“There are low tides and high tides throughout the year. Now is a high tide, but they have to reinvent themselves in June,” says Neill Alleva, who wrote “The Ultimate Guide to Finding Chocolate in NYC” with Rob Monahan.
For example, during warm-weather months — when interest in chocolate pieces wanes because it melts so quickly — sweet shops rely on lollipops and ice cream to keep customers coming back. The versatility of chocolate is a bonus, say city chocolatiers, which helps when adapting to seasonal demands. The dark brown delicacy can be molded into any shape — a heart for upcoming Valentine’s Day, for example, but also a reindeer for Christmas or a bunny for Easter — rolled into a bonbon or served as the base for a cookie, cake and ice cream.
Most aspiring chocolate makers are surprised by how fussy the ingredient is, says Michelle Tampakis, a pastry instructor who specializes in chocolate at Manhattan’s Institute for Culinary Education, which has experienced a surge of enrollment with the recent recession because unemployed people are looking for a career change.
“There are a lot of nuisances. It’s impacted by temperature, how you stir it, humidity, its age,” she says, describing cooking chocolate as “difficult, messy and unpredictable.”
And there are still other challenges. Because fresh chocolate is costly to make — no preservatives means a shorter shelf life, and quality products are key — high-end chocolatiers also have to overcome customer sticker shock at thumb-nail sized nibbles that often run more than $2 a piece.
When Rhonda Kave opened Roni-Sue Chocolate in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side in 2007, shoppers asked if $2 was for the tray, not the piece.
“They are comparing it to something on the counter at Duane Reade, so sometimes there is resistance to price. We try to overcome that by educating them about chocolate and giving samples,” says Kave. “If you have the palate to distinguish chocolates, you’ll pay.”
Competition in the haute chocolate market is fierce, however. There are more than 80 independent and chain chocolate shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and half of them are concentrated in lower Manhattan and northern Brooklyn, according to Alleva.
“There is a lot of chocolate in a small area,” he notes. “Finding a niche is really important.”
But chocolatiers say they embrace the competition and enjoy experimenting with recipes to keep their business interesting.
“You never know what is going to hit,” says Kave. She found success withchocolate-dipped bacon — dubbed pig candy – but a gazpacho truffle she invented “never made the light of day,” she says, because it tasted “muddy.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom: Of course, the easiest selling point is just about everyone loves chocolate.
“There isn’t anyone you can’t work with — unless they are diabetic or allergic to chocolate,” notes Malhotra, who carries samples of chocolate in her purse that she hands out as business cards at bars and events.
“You never know who will be your next customer.”
Sweet suggestions for aspiring chocolatiers
Get educated: Whether it’s a pastry program or a class on chocolate making, some culinary education is a must. “I took a spice course,” says Rhonda Kave of Roni-Sue on the Lower East Side. “It taught me so much about flavor and ways to enhance it.”
Keep it fresh: No matter how pretty a piece looks, if the base ingredient is weak, customers will turn to the countless other chocolate shops around the city. That’s why Kave gets her cocoa from Belize, where she works with local farmers to find the purest product. “The more I got into making the stuff, the more I looked at the core ingredient,” she says.
Show off: Customers love to see how their favorite bars are made — so craft your sweets in front of customers. “We love taking people to the places where they make the chocolate. It takes a lot of creativity,” says Neill Alleva, who wrote “The Ultimate Guide to Finding Chocolate in NYC.”
Start small, dream big: Aditi Malhotra of Tache got her start by partnering with established French chocolatier Christian Vautier before rebranding it as her own this fall. “Now all the chocolates are my recipe,” she boasts. Start-up costs aren’t too hard on the wallet, but it’s difficult to grow in the chocolate business, because you’re too busy making chocolate to invest in bigger equipment, says chocolatier Jacques Torres, who toiled in his DUMBO shop before expanding.