The master of milk and dark - Western Wanderings; chocolatier Richard Donnelly's class on chocolate making

Sunset, Oct, 2003 by Peter Fish

Kings of chocolate, you imagine, are figures of Falstaffian amplitude. But Richard Donnelly has the restrained look of a mild-mannered graduate student, with wire-rimmed glasses and reddish hair poking out from under his cap.

Still, Donnelly does sport a nearly perpetual smudge of chocolate on his upper lip. And he has garnered a reputation as one of America's premier chocolatiers, thanks to creations like chipotle chocolates that fetch $65 a pound.

Me, I like chocolate as much as the next person, which is saying a lot given that the average American's consumption of the product has risen to 12 pounds annually. To be honest, I probably like chocolate more than the next person, a weakness that manifests itself every October, when I buy 10 times more Hershey's Kisses than we could ever distribute for Halloween.

So when I show up at Donnelly's shop in Santa Cruz, California, I am eager to start his introductory chocolate-making class. Here Donnelly works to impart techniques to people like me who have previously only been enthusiastic consumers.

"We'll start with tempering," Donnelly says to me and my fellow student, a psychotherapist from Massachusetts. He notes my blank look. "Putting the chocolate through the process of heat control," he explains Prior to this moment, I had associated tempering only with molten steel. But one hallmark of adult life is that things you have a fierce but ignorant enthusiasm for turn out to be more complex than you imagined. "Tempering ensures that the chocolate is homogenous," Donnelly continues. "That it has a nice snap, that it's shining." Shortly we are pushin8 hot melted chocolate around Donnelly's cool marble slabs until it reaches 80[degrees], a temperature we ascertain by spooning a daub onto our upper lip.

While we temper, we hear a bit about Donnelly's career. He was, he says, "always disappointed in chocolate as a child." The American version, he felt, was too sweet, too pasty. It was on a visit to France that he tasted the real goods. "I thought, I want to learn how to do this," he says. So Donnelly apprenticed himself to French and Belgian chocolate-makers, returned to the United States, and eventually opened the Santa Cruz store in 1988.

Nowadays, Donnelly still finds most American varieties wanting. And Belgium makes a lot of chocolate, "but only a small percentage is really good." Swiss chocolates can be good, although the nation specializes in milk and Donnelly prefers dark. As for the raw ingredient, the chocolate itself, he works primarily with Belgian Callebaut and French Valrhona.

The therapist and I labor on. We're not attempting elegant truffles; we're constructing chocolate pecan-cherry stacks and chocolate-dipped strawberries and orange slices. I have a brief scare when my sea of inched chocolate floods the floor and I drop a pecan stack; I feel like Lucy Ricardo trying to keep up with the conveyor belt. In the end, both the therapist and I produce three large trays crowded with chocolates. Mine look like something a 7-year-old would make. But when I pop one into my mouth, it is ambrosial.

At the end of class, I ask Donnelly the inevitable question: "Do you ever get sick of chocolate?"

"Not if it's good chocolate," he says.

Me neither. I took the three trays of chocolates home. Donnelly had advised us not to make any more of the chocolate-dipped fruit than we could eat in one evening. After a few hours, he said, the fruit would overripen and the taste would be less than perfect. That didn't turn out to be a problem.

Donnelly Chocolates: $150 for a 2 1/2-hour class. 1509 Mission SI., Santa Cruz, CA; www.donnellydaocolates.com or (888) 685-1871.