Festive function celebrates all things chocolate

How far would you go for chocolate? Would you battle the mid-day traffic, stand in winding lines and be content with a small taste of victory and mellifluous flavors to start your holiday shopping now? If so, then the 5th Annual Los Angeles Luxury Chocolate Salon was the ultimate test of a chocolate lover’s devotion.

Crowded taste · The 5th Annual Los Angeles Luxury Chocolate Salon was stocked with chocolate, toffee and caramel displays, so much so that the event erred on overwhelmingness, but the samples proved enticing. - Mimi Honeycutt | Daily Trojan

The Los Angeles Luxury Chocolate Salon is a celebration of all things chocolate, toffee and caramel. Sporting vendors including the award-winning Jer’s Chocolate, CocoTutti and Butterfly Brittle, it seems like a cacao-dusted paradise.

For $30 at-the-door tickets and $9 for parking, guests have unlimited access to all things chocolate.

Tables with samples of chocolate bars, brittles, caramels, wine and even tequila encircled a ballroom at the newly-renovated Pasadena Center on Green Street.

A cooking demonstration commenced on one side of the room. A recipe for strawberry trifle was taught by master chef and chocolatier Ed Engoron, who recently published a dessert recipe book called Choclatique.

“I hope to show people easy ways to make desserts and how to eat really great chocolate,” Engoron said.

His company, also called Choclatique, crafts more than 250 flavors of chocolate truffle, with interesting flavors like Caramel Corn and Margarita Madness. After Engoran, other speakers took the stage. Author and foodie Lucy Lean introduced her new cookbook, Made in America: Our Best Chefs Reinvent Comfort Food, where pictures of duck-fat-fried chicken and spicy ginger whoopie pies had attendees drooling.

Yet this chocolate event is less a salon and more a shivaree. Despite the abundance of chocolate stands, lines stacked up and wound around other tables. Wait-times never quite reached Disneyland proportions, but it was enough to give the atmosphere an edge of frenzy.

After conquering the line, samples were freely given, albeit in pinky-nail sizes. Thank goodness chocolate stimulates happy hormones or it might have been a bloodbath. Yet for most chocolate lovers, the lines were not a deterrent. Hearing about the salon from meetup.com, attendee Glacel Salagan just knew it was about chocolate.

“It’s my first time so I didn’t know what to expect,” Salagan said. “But I like the fact that it’s a chocolate and wine tasting — I love chocolate.”

A couple of companies, however, were not as enthusiastic about handing out free samples. They soon felt the weight of neglect when all the other booths had lines to rival Magic Mountain. For Frederik Sisa and many others, the samples were a key draw.

“I come for a love of chocolate, and all of its flavors and manifestations,” Sisa said. “If you can try it and decide if you like it or not, you reduce the risk you’re not going to like it and waste your money.”

At its heart, the salon was a showcase of the artisans in the chocolate industry. Chocolatier Art Pollard, whose company Amano Artisan Chocolate has earned more than 100 awards since 2007, has a simple recipe for the most enticing chocolate.

“In the end it’s all about flavor,” Pollard said. “It’s all about using the very best quality ingredients. So, I travel all around the world and work with different farmers and help them improve their processes. And we get some of the finest quality chocolate in the world.”

Though Amano is best known for its Madagascar chocolate, Pollard’s personal favorite comes from Chuao, a little village in Venezuela that can only be reached by fishing boat.

Gourmet chocolate is not irreconcilable with helping the world either. According to Josh Handy, with Pacari Ecuadorian Organic Chocolate, keeping farms small and sustainable makes for even better chocolate.

“One of the main things we are doing is buying from small family farms and encouraging permaculture (the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient),” Handy said.

Pacari encourages farmers to utilize old growth instead of planting new trees, and to allow other plants to shade the cacao. This makes the land habitable for the farmers and improves the chocolate flavors.

Recently, Pacari also developed raw chocolate bars to better illustrate the flavor of cacao. When vegan raw foodists showed an interest, Pacari began adding superfoods, like maca powder, to certain bars. The bars have proved to be a unique success.

“I think the gourmet chocolate market is bigger but we’re getting so much interest in the raw chocolate market and the sustainability that I think it’s an emerging market that could very well outpace the gourmet market,” Handy said.

For the average person, the complexities and political ramifications of cocoa come after that of taste and comfort. The lines of people waiting for a smidgen of chocolate-y goodness prove it. Mother-and-daughter team Daphne and Amanda Ormerod, owners of Bootleg Chocolate, understand why some cannot resist good chocolate.

“Even if the economy’s bad or whatever else is going on, you can afford a little piece of really good chocolate,” Daphne Ormerod said. “It makes you feel really good.”