After our own heart

By CHRIS SHERMAN, Times Restaurant Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 10, 2000

Love's sweet reward is in good hands. Pierre Vivier, a Frenchman turned Floridian, excels in the art of chocolate, all the better for discriminating palates who savor bittersweet as much as sauvignon.

TALLAHASSEE -- The topic with Pierre Vivier may be chocolate, but the frame of reference is often wine.

But of course. Vivier is French, very much so, despite 20 years in the football-mad capital of Florida, where he created its first French restaurant and helped found the local soccer team.

Specifically, he is from the Rhone region near the Alps, home of exceptional red wines and the equally prestigious grand cru chocolates of Valrhona, which he uses to make the couverture that encases his candies.

The qualities, techniques and the vocabulary of wine are always part of chocolate.

Vivier carefully pours molten chocolate into a heart-shaped shell. Handmade chocolate candies require one’s complete attention.

The new taste for fine chocolate that draws consumers from across the nation to his mail-order and Internet business follows the taste in wine, he says. "Americans are beginning to know good wines and buy them," even though the price is higher. "People who taste my chocolate say, "I didn't know there could be such a difference.' " Among those who have noticed are the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Connoisseurs of both wine and chocolate prefer dark to white and complex, even bittersweet tastes to sweet. Like wine, good chocolate is to be "tasted" with all the senses, and Vivier is eager to demonstrate as the most chocolatey of holidays approaches.

The aromas of chocolate are complex, from spicy cinnamons to hints of coffee, and yes, wine. They are inescapable as soon as one enters his small, lab-sterile factory on the wooded northeast outskirts of Tallahassee.

Examine his chocolates with your eyes, and you'll see a deep, glossy (but not waxy) shine, smoothly enrobing each piece. At the bottom, where the glorious lava could leave a large, jagged puddle, the "foot" flares out only slightly, showing the chocolatier's precise care in removing the excess. The smooth texture extends beneath the surface: In the mouth, the chocolate will transform into a fluid as silky as merlot, while lesser chocolates become grainy and pasty.

Buying fine chocolates Labels of chocolate products are confusing, as they are not required to list the percentage of chocolate used. However, there are clues.

Flavor? Chocolate has plenty to excite the taste buds. Sweet is not the only one, and shouldn't be first and foremost; increasingly, adult consumers appreciate the dark, savory flavors once associated with baking chocolates to the bland milk chocolate of childhood. As in a good Burgundy, there can be hints of mint and earth as well as fruitiness. Like good wines, those flavors should have a long finish, lingering for several minutes as if a spice caravan stopped and set up a bazaar of its riches.

Bite into a Vivier candy -- the pretty Mozarts with the yellow music score on top or the Mimosas or the Fantasies, any one will do -- and it will tickle one organ that wine cannot: the ear.

You can hear how good his chocolates are. They SNAP!

That audible crack and the sharp break in the chocolate itself signify the magic that distinguishes chocolate from wine and most other foods. A fragile solidity, beautiful to see and touch, will turn into a luscious liquid after only a moment's exposure to human warmth.

That shape-shifting is no alchemy, but the precise science that is the basis of the chocolatier's art.

Pierre Vivier is one of the few people in the United States who still makes chocolates the old-fashioned way, by hand. Vivier, who hails from France, now lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Rainey. Together they operate a mail-order and Internet business, PV Chocolates.

Truffles and other fine candies made primarily of real chocolate, not sugar or paraffin, live on a precarious balance at around 93 degrees. At room temperature and up to 90 (needn't be in the fridge) they should break with a tell-tale snap. Before chocolate reaches body temperature, it will convert to slow-moving liquid.

It does, and should, melt in your hands. But how much better in the mouth, where its silkiness spreads out, the flavors have time to dance, and the goodness drips slowly into the body.

Enough of the pleasure! If you're smart, you begin to see the problem. Chocolate is tricky to work with and always has been. The cacao bean produces both remarkable flavor and a lot of fat, which we know as cocoa butter, so sensuous that it is a preferred base for lipsticks and suntan lotion. Working with the two in their various, evolving states takes the right combination of natural ingredients and human skill at every stage.

"It is a long work," Vivier says.

Making chocolate and cocoa begins with the cacao beans of the cacao tree, and chocolate fanciers do have their favorite varieties and geographic sources. Of the three main types of bean, criollo is the acknowledged best; forastero, the most common; and trinitario, a flavorful hybrid. The Valrhona company owns a plantation in criollo-rich Venezuela for its supply, and beans grow in varying quality in the tropics around the globe. In France, Nestle sells a line of $1.50 chocolate bars with geographic appellations from Guatemala, the Ivory Coast and Sumatra, each slick black package marked with a map and ancient native sculptures.

After they are harvested by hand, the beans are fermented, then roasted and ground, and eventually pressed to divide the cocoa butter from the rest of the cocoa mass, called cocoa solids or cocoa liquor.

Consumers in America may rarely know the origin of the beans, but the quality shows in the price that manufacturers pay. Chocolate made from criolla beans costs chocolatiers such as Vivier more than others, even if the chocolate has a lower cocoa content. "You can taste the difference. And see how it is a little redder," he says, offering a sample of a Valrhona with 56 percent cocoa, most of it criollo, against the Caillebaut chocolate he also uses, which is 70 percent cocoa.

For each firm, the mixture of cocoa solid and cocoa butter differs, but the big issue is the non-chocolate content: how much sugar, vanilla, vegetable fat and milk are added. Europeans prefer at least 50 percent cocoa mass, and the amount is specified (the French Nestle bars are emblazoned 76 percent). In the United States, "chocolate" often contains less cocoa liquor or solids, especially sweet and milk chocolate.

However, chocolate has always been seasoned.

The chocolate beverage invented by the Aztecs, Mayas and Toltecs that intrigued Cortes and eventually Europe was both bitter and oily; some linguists say the name xocolatl means "bitter water," and it was often spiced with hot pepper.

The Spanish added sugar and spices such as cinnamon, but it was still more savory than sweet. Its detractors complained of scum on the top, and even its proponents used cornmeal to emulsify the mixture.

Cocoa beverages were so difficult and costly that at first they were the drink of the rich when they reached Europe. The servant who could properly make hot chocolate from cocoa held an elevated place in the household.

Only the new steam-powdered mechanical grinders of the 18th century made the use of cocoa powder available to the masses. Not until the 19th century did a series of inventive chemists in Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands come up with a press that removed cocoa butter from cocoa powder and devise a method to reincorporate powder and some butter into the solid chocolate we eat today.

The making of individual chocolate candies is a second complicated process, attempted by a small number of American chocolatiers. That is where Vivier comes in.

He apprenticed as a teenager in the chocolaterie of Maurice Jouvenal, a candymaker so well regarded that Vivier had to wait a year just to be an apprentice. He arrived in the United States in the 1970s to be the chef for a fancy new restaurant in Macon, Ga.. There, he met his wife, Rainey, and eventually moved to Tallahassee, where they ran Chez Pierre for 15 years.

Although chocolatiers are regarded in some kitchens as temperamental and fussy, Vivier is easygoing, laughs easily and sees his gourmet chocolate business as a relief from the endless hours of a restaurant.

Yet he is precise, and his balding head and trim soccer physique make him seem as sure as Patric Stewart's Jean Luc Picard.

He is keenly aware of temperature. The chocolate that is his medium constantly flows in a warming device, spilling over what looks like a stainless steel mill wheel that keeps it in a strangely lukewarm molten state.

To cool it to the right consistency, he adds solid chocolate a few chips at a time to temper the chocolate in his bowl, tediously and steadily stirring them together with a wooden spoon he holds in a firm over-handed grip. If he makes it too cold and too solid, he must reverse the process with more warm chocolate or brief seconds in the microwave. A degree too much, and he must start over entirely.

When it is perfect, he can make a ganache filling, or use it as a couverture for various candies. When he works by hand, he places a piece on a small trident, dips into the chocolate quickly and taps the fork on the edge of the bowl to drip off the excess. A minute later, the chocolate covering of the candy on the tray has begun to harden. To make filled candies, he pours a chocolate into a tray of molded seashells and shakes it off to leave only a thin, almost transparent film; it hardens quickly, and a second coating is added, then filled and the bottom layer affixed.

Crafting the fillings is equally important, for they must balance the chocolate. Vivier seeks out pecans from local growers, buys marinated European cherries and gets raspberries by the flat when they are in season. These combine with marzipan, hazelnut and pistachio pastes, liqueurs and whiskeys.

He is careful to make sure they are not too sweet. Filling and chocolate must be paired as carefully as dessert and a dessert wine. The candy cannot be allowed to compete with the taste of the chocolate.

As if anything could.

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