savor — guide to food & dining on the azalea coast Truffles are often infused with essential oils and liqueurs, making for creative and endless flavor combinations. Clockwise from top left: Choco Geo’s ginger infused white chocolate truffles rolled in toasted almonds, and dark chocolate rolled in cocoa powder. Sue Papach, owner of So Sweet Chocolates, hand-dips and decorates all of her truffles before selling them to customers. Choco Geo’s truffles coated in toasted coconut add sweetness to the dark chocolate ganache center. Starting with the highest quality chocolate, cocoa and cream ensures truffles will have a rich and complex flavor. 82 WBM february 2014 case. Each truffle is decorated by hand and enveloped in dark chocolate with unusual flavors such as grapefruit and tarragon. Joan Winkler, the owner of Choco Geo, learned the complex chemistry of chocolate making by spending years in the kitchen and taking chocolatiering classes. She says starting with simple truffle ingredients allows for delicious fla-vor combinations, such as dark chocolate raspberry or white chocolate ginger. True chocolate will have a highly com-plex combination of flavors when tasted, Winkler says. “If your first reaction is ‘Wow, this is really sweet,’ it’s probably not a good piece of chocolate,” Winkler says. Winkler will sell hundreds of her handmade truffles at the Wilmington Wine and Chocolate Festival in February. Her classic dark chocolate truffle is a favorite among customers. She attributes the high-quality chocolate and cream she uses in her truffles to their success and popularity. Artisan chocolate truffles, slightly irreg-ular in shape and size, should also have a clean finish on the bottom, says James Snyder, owner of Temptations Gourmet Foods and Café, which carries 15 to 20 different truffle flavors at a time. “When they are decorated by hand, every truffle is slightly different, not identical like machine-made candy,” Snyder says. “It’s higher quality if it’s handmade.” Temptations provisions its truffles from Sweet Shop USA, a Texas-based company that uses certified kosher ingredients and hand-dips all of its truffles. Snyder says truffles have been a Temptations staple for almost 30 years because of their quality and timelessness. Fritzi Huber, a local artist, created her own truffle recipe from sweet childhood memories of eating them with her father, a Swiss-born aerialist who performed in the circus. The family traveled to New York City every Christmas where Huber’s father would buy her a truffle from a candy store on 86th Street. She was never able to find the same quality of truffle again so she began experimenting with making her own to give to family and friends. Now Huber makes several hundred Fritz Huber Truffles during the holidays, using the highest quality chocolate, heavy cream and butter. Named after her father, the truffles are a nostalgic indulgence with a rich complexity and density of flavor. “It’s very layered in the taste sensation it creates. If the truffle is good, you start feeling it deeper in your palette,” Huber says. “Then the flavor subsides very cleanly.” THE BEST WAY TO CULTIVATE A CHOCOLATE PALETTE is to simply indulge and eat.
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