Here's the dream: quit your day job, take up confectionary, open a cozy gourmet chocolate shop. Preferably in a provincial town where decadent desserts change lives. While it sounds (a lot) like a movie plot, it's actually becoming an increasingly common reality. Monica Elliot taught herself to make chocolates from library books and now runs Monica's Chocolates, an online service that allows her to deliver confections across the country. Marisa Baxter of Truffles in Paradise left a law practice dealing with international torture cases to launch her homemade chocolate shop. William Gustwiller abandoned his sculpting career to turn his chocolate hobby into big time business. It's never too late (or too early, seniors) for a career change.
Some chocolatiers attend culinary school or evolve from pastry chefs before focusing solely on cocoa?derived products. Formal chocolate education is broad, with schools such as the Culinary Institute of America and Canada's ?coleChocolat teaching history, taste physiology and business practices. The role of chocolate maker is equal parts scientist and sculptor, requiring a high degree of creativity and endless hours of experimentation. With continuing education or vocational courses about chocolate, you'll learn about the chemistry of flavor and texture. You'll garner experience with all of the techniques, "tempering" chocolate to give it an appealing shiny exterior and the proper SNAP! sound when you break a bar into pieces. Ideally you'll get to eat some samples.
The sales of premium chocolates are growing at a far more rapid clip than sales of other candies, forcing mainstream producers like Hershey's to offer new, higher?end labels and organic products. Chocolatiers tend to make $20,000 to $40,000 annually, according to the US Department of Labor, but many are self?employed entrepreneurs making their own fortunes. Famous chocolatiers such as Michael Recchiuti can charge up to $85 per pound for premium candies!
Like any entrepreneurial venture, chocolate making is risky because of the competition. Once you build a loyal clientele, you'll have to continue appeasing them. Stephanie Zonis, a food blogger, wrote about the experience of becoming a chocolatier, with busy seasons and no time for vacations at major holidays: Halloween, Valentine's Day, Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah and Mothers' Day. However, chocolate has relatively low initial costs and is best made in small batches, making it less prohibitive to start a business. A lot of chocolatiers start out in apprenticeships, learning tricks of the trade from more established confectioners.
Chocolatiers have to be okay with repetitive, tedious work (just think of the trays upon trays of marzipan frogs in Danish Pastry House). They have to maintain a level of pride in their work as artisans, with impeccable attention to detail. One of the main skills in chocolate making is decorating, so artistic prowess is important. Indeed, aesthetics can easily trump taste in marketing novelty chocolate. Luckily, chocolate is a big enough market that there's room for lots of specialties. You can decide if you want to create a niche for Fair Trade, extra super?dee?duper dark cacao varieties, filled truffles, gourmet bonbons or exotic flavor combinations. You can try out limited?edition recipes like bacon barks (ew, let's not go overboard) or lavender sage sweets. Some other crazy varieties I came across included blue cheese, prickly pear cactus and pop rocks. I would learn how to make chocolates just to try some of those!
I'd imagine the best part of being a chocolatier - and there are probably a lot of best parts, like being constantly enveloped in a heavenly aroma - is seeing people enjoying your candy. Because really, how could they not be smiling?
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Alyson Yee is a senior majoring in biology and French. She can be reached at Alyson.Yee@tufts.edu.
