For the Love of Chocolate

The Lake Champlain Chocolates Factory Store and Café offers a chocolate – saturated tour and sweet confections

Story and photos by Sally Hale

"This," says Rachel Bruce, Lake Champlain Chocolate store worker, "is the Dark Chocolate Jamaican Rum Caramel Bar. It's dark chocolate, obviously, with a liquidy gooey caramel center. The bar is cooked with actual rum. The alcohol cooks off, yet it leaves a distinctive flavor profile in the caramel that is not super sweet."

Bruce pauses, extends an ivory tray, and then, with the bite-size chocolates gleaming under the muted Lake Champlain Chocolate store lights, utters the suggestion that is all too easy to follow.

"Would you like to try one?"

Chocolate. For the past seven years, Lake Champlain Chocolates, located in Burlington, Vermont, has produced, in one 24,000 square-foot location, culinary confections ranging from raspberry chocolate truffles to Aztec hot chocolate to organic chocolate squares to Vermont chocolate gift baskets. Thirty full-time workers are currently employed at the factory - a number which, during peak-chocolate buying seasons such as Christmas and Easter, can climb to 100. Tours are given Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the hour, with the public offered the chance to view the chocolates – which are shipped to 1,200 specialty stores nationwide – in their factory state.

Lured by the promise of viewing – and walking – through what one can only hope is a micro-version of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, I came before Bruce the tour guide with, not a golden ticket, but anticipation. And Bruce, who has been working at Lake Champlain Chocolates for the past two years, stands before the tour group of six with an arsenal of chocolate related items: a container of cocoa nibs (or pistils), natural cocoa beans, a plastic model of a cocoa pod (which bears a striking resemblance to a football), and assorted photographs of cocoa trees and cocoa pods spread across a very solid – and very stationary – table.

Indeed, upon finding my seat – a not exceptionally comfortable pine bench – it becomes clear that this tour will involve no mobility. It is called, as Bruce said, a "through the window" tour, with the good people at Lake Champlain no doubt realizing that it was wise to put a wall of glass between their chocolate creations and a presumably chocolate-loving public.

The reasonably timed 30 minute presentation begins with an engaging anecdote that soon melts away the disappointment over a stationary tour: the birth of Lake Champlain Chocolates was, according to Bruce, an accident.

"Jim Lampman, owner of the Ice House Restaurant on Lake Champlain (in Burlington ), always used to give out chocolate boxes at staff parties every year," Bruce said. "Finally, his pastry chef said, ‘Look, these are terrible. Your chocolates are no good.' So Jim challenged him to make something better. He came in with truffles, everyone loved them, and Jim started selling them to various restaurant patrons. You could say that it was an accident, or [that] it was fated to happen."

If photographs of cocoa beans and cocoa trees, which are then passed around, fail to grab your attention, Bruce wisely offers mounds – yes, mounds – of chips, or "pistils," of dark, milk, and white chocolate for the tour groups sampling pleasure. She then proceeds to break down the components of the three different groups of chips in a mini-lecture of what could be called Chocolate 101: Lake Champlain's dark chocolate, we are told, contains 54 percent cocoa, cocoa butter and no dairy - "People with lactose intolerance will like this one!,” says Bruce - while milk chocolate contains 34 percent cocoa mass, melts faster and is "significantly sweeter." White chocolate, the tour group is informed, is plain cocoa butter and sugar – the fattiest of the chocolates.

"We buy the pistils, or chips, from Callebut, a Belgium company," Bruce says. "Chocolate grows on trees, and it's too cold to grow chocolate in Vermont …The factory can produce one ton of product in a single day. In the tank, the chocolate heats up to 120 degrees and down to 84 and back to 90, heating and cooling and reheating. It's a really intense process – there's a lot that goes into it."

The tour, while stationary, still offers a behind-the-scenes look at the mechanics of the chocolate manufacturing world. Indeed, the tour provides the unique experience of allowing individuals to watch the laborious chocolate-making process at work: the dark chocolate ganache and similar chocolate confections do not, as the tour demonstrates, fall out of those chocolate trees in gift-worthy form. Not only does this particular tour group observe a worker pouring, and later cutting, layer after layer of frozen hazelnut chocolate with a large cutting machine to produce the factory's signature Continental Praline, but we also watch tray after tray of chocolate balls, or would-be truffles, placed on a conveyer belt by hand on the factory's large enrober, which accommodates 15 truffles at a time. The chocolates are then coated on the front, hardened, and put through a chocolate waterfall – a 3-inch high literal curtain of chocolate that only Willy Wonka could outdo.

"One or two people [then] squeeze a bottle of white or dark chocolate over the truffles," says Bruce. "Every single truffle is hand decorated."

The tour predictably offers a much-anticipated sweet morsel near the end, the aforementioned Jamaican bar. If you're one of the three people in the world who dislikes caramel, as I do, you will still find it hard to resist the melt-in-your-mouth appeal of the combination of near-liquid buttered sugar and the dark chocolate shell, which virtually collapses on contact with the roof of your mouth. The tour ends with an approximately two-minute video which, if you're focused on the chocolate treat in your mouth, you may not give your full attention.

Walk down the stairs to the main store's softly glowing pumpkin-colored walls, courtesy of the multitude of hanging pendant lights, and you will spy the end result of the labor intensive manufacturing process. Packages of gold-wrapped Caramel Leaves beckon at $9.95, while the $11 Milk and Dark Chocolate Truffles – housed, appropriately, in a chocolate brown gift box - sit comfortably next to a basket of the multi-colored Small World Truffles.

You may encounter Lake Champlain Chocolates store worker Jeremy Appelbaum in that most enviable of positions: surrounded on four sides by such truffle confections as Raspberry Vienna, Mango, Pistachio, Vanilla Malt, Dark Almond, and Marzipan, not to mention Dark Chocolate pretzels and Almond Crunch bars. Appelbaum – and the staff's - hands down seasonal favorite is the Spice Pumpkin truffle, which three bites in tastes identical to a ginger-spiced pumpkin pie in truffle form.

Indeed, all the preservative and additive-free chocolates must be eaten immediately – both figuratively and literally.

What is your favorite type of chocolate treat?

Lake Champlain Chocolates Factory Store & Café hours of operation:

- Monday Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

- Operating hours for Sunday are noon until 5 p.m.

- Tours operate Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.