Kristen Hard’s passion for culinary creativity began at the tender age of five as she scoured her house for spare sticks to construct homemade lollipops, barely able to peak over the kitchen countertop.  That initial curiosity has led to years of rigorous research, which propelled Hard’s success to a level commonly reserved for tenured chocolatiers well beyond her age.  Hard, 32, hails from Atlanta and is a true daughter of the South.  After traveling the world as a chef, she brings her culinary pride and recognition back to her hometown. It is through her experiences abroad, that the evolution from chef to chocolate maker has taken place.

After working in several restaurants and cafes throughout college, Hard traveled to Italy to explore the world outside her Southern roots.  While in Rome, she was hired as a private chef aboard boats crossing the Atlantic and sailing the Caribbean.  In the small confines of the boat’s kitchen, Hard experimented with creating chocolate, stopping at local ports to purchase fresh ingredients on a weekly basis.  It was at one such port where Hard discovered the alluring cocoa bean and her true love affair began.  While watching a group of Caribbean women crush cacao beans with their bare hands, her passion for discovering chocolates’ many aspects ensued.  This endeavor served as the basis of her first line of truffles and bars, showcasing a sustainable and deeply satisfying premium dark chocolate infused with an array of organic herbs, spices, teas and fruits.

After returning to Atlanta, Hard began her wholesale company, K Chocolat, in 2004 creating a line of truffles with holistic characteristics informed by her work done with a local herbalist.  Just five short years later, she opened her first storefront, Cacao Laboratoire du Chocolat and Boutique, in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood. Each step in Hard’s journey has been a progression of getting closer to the source of chocolate.  With the unveiling of her “Love Bar,” made directly from the cocoa bean in 2009, Hard’s evolution continued as both the first bean to bar chocolate maker in the Southeast and the first female bean to bar producer in the U.S.  Since then she actively sources her own cocoa beans, working hands on with farmers in the harvesting and fermentation process and is heavily involved in elevating cacao farming practices.

Recent Accolades:

o   Best New American Chocolate- Food and Wine Magazine

o   100 Things to Taste in America- Food and Wine Magazine and CNN

o   Named one of nine of the nation’s best purveyors of factory-free goods by Details Magazine

o   Awarded in 7 categories in the “Best of Salon Awards” of the San Francisco International Chocolate Salon 2010. Categories included Best Dark Chocolate, Best Truffle, Most Delicious Ingredient Combination, Best Dark Chocolate Bar, Best Organic or Fair Trade Product.

Pod To Chocolate
Thursday, February 17 at 7PM
Kristen Hard of Cacao Atlanta Chocolate Co
PHOTOS AT BOTTOM
Luc Clairmont: [at confession] Each time I tell myself it’s the last time, but then I get a whiff of her hot chocolate, or… 
Madame Audel: …Seashells. Chocolate seashells, so small, so plain, so *innocent*. I thought, oh, just one little taste, it can’t do any harm. But it turned out they were filled with rich, sinful… 
Yvette Marceau: …And it *melts*, God forgive me, it melts ever so slowly on your tongue, and tortures you with pleasure. From the movie, Chocolat

I don’t know if it was the full moon, or the wine, or those delicate little discs of chocolate – actually, I do know – it was all three, combined, that made February 17^th one of For Food Sakes’ most memorable events. Chocolatier/Chocolate Maker Kristen Hard took us on a journey from Venezuelan cacao farms- machetes in hand, chopping purple (!) chocolate pods- to the Caribbean, where she pried secret recipes out of a trio of bewitching women. Along the way, we sampled her hand-made, exquisite chocolates, and sipped wines supplied by Michael Doerfler (For Wine Sake).

 The guests arrived at the lovely home of Dean and Amanda Trevelino, following the candlelit path past their pool to a sleek, modern terrace, where we enjoyed charcuterie and our first glass of wine. Their house – with its top hung pocket doors, wooden slat bathroom floors, white Barcelona chairs and sinks that double as sculpture – could easily be found on the pages of Architectural Digest. It’s that fabulous.

 Here we all mixed and mingled – biding our time really in anticipation of the Real Reason we were there – the chocolate – until Esther introduced the Trevelinos, Michael from For Wine Sake, and Caline Jarudi (Director of Operations and Marketing) and Kristen Hard from Cacao Atlanta. Kristen invited us to take a piece of brie and move upstairs to the kitchen for the chocolate tasting. Hurray! I, for one, could not click my heels fast enough up the spiral metal staircase to the main level.

 Upstairs at last, the minimalist kitchen with its espresso cabinets and white quartz counters served as the perfect backdrop to Ms. Hard’s clever concoctions. We began the tasting with a piece of chocolate trompe l’oeil: salami (Salami di Cioccolato), a chocolate “log” wrapped in plastic then cased in a white netting. Each round, thick slab is composed of dark chocolate with bits of all butter shortbread and amaretto biscotti, which combine to form a grainy (but not gritty) texture, mildly sweet and altogether yummy.

 This clever bit of chocolate was Founder Society Member Ansley Colby’s favorite. Pair it with some subtle cheese, like brie, and Ansley says it would be the “perfect thing to end a great evening.”

 In our case, of course, it was just the start of a great evening. Michael explained that there is no good way to pair wine and chocolate. For instance, champagne’s acidity can ruin the chocolate texture in the mouth. That seems terribly unfair, doesn’t it? He encouraged us to sample the different wines he brought in whatever order moved us. (See below for the full list of wines we tasted.) The guests seemed particularly smitten with the Earthquake Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, whose vanilla-mocha flavor combination would go equally as well with your favorite steak as it did with our chocolates. No easy feat for a wine to be so good and also versatile, but then again, there was a full moon that night so maybe it only works when the lunar cycle is just right.

 Back to the chocolate. Our second “course” was a simple little chocolate square, the Hispaniola Dominican Republic Varietal. Well, simple, until the dense dark chocolate melts in your mouth and you get just the vaguest hint of an orange note deep in the back of your throat. This was followed by another “simple” square, the Patanemo Venezuelan Varietal. This was milder, creamier and slightly sweeter than the Hispaniola, and is made from one of the most expensive chocolates in the world because it all comes from one tree and one type of bean. This is very rare in the chocolate world – a world utterly without regulations or standards (unlike wine). Kristen likens the chocolate trade to dealing in “drugs and diamonds.”

 Kristen takes all her chocolates from “bean to the bar.” She travels the world, traipsing through cacao farms, to find the best variety of beans. She is tiny – 5’5” but she has been known to grab a machete and hack away at the chocolate trees to remove their pods. She brings them to her factory in Inman Park where they are roasted, hand-sorted, cracked and winnowed before she grinds the nibs to form a paste, finally refining and kneading the chocolate to bend to her will. Chocolate is temperamental, she explained.

 She is a chocolate maker. A chocolatier takes the chocolate made by artisans such as Kristen and turns them into chocolate confections. (Kristen is also a Chocolatier.) There are many chocolatiers, but very few chocolate makers – only about 20 in the U.S. – and she was the first woman.

 Our fourth chocolate was the Aztec Aphrodisiac Truffle. Here was a dark chocolate truffle with a creamy filling that was not thick or waxy. Smooth, light, then suddenly – wow – what was THAT? That slight tingle in the back of your throat is a blend of six different chilis and spices – a secret recipe Kristen picked up in the Caribbean that she has not shared with anyone and vows she never will. Ah, such a sweet mystery.

 We had one chocolate left to taste, the Peanut Butter Meltaway. Small, round balls dusted with powdered sugar that are 100% vegan and made with locally sourced peanuts. You could really smell and taste the peanuts. As with all her chocolates, one bite and you want more, but you are also completely satisfied with just that one bite.

 And perhaps that is the lesson here. Her chocolates aren’t sweet, yet they’re sweet enough. Unlike commercial chocolate, there were no sugar bombs exploding in our mouth that night. Instead, we tasted real chocolate, deep, dark, bitter but somehow NOT bitter, sweet, but somehow NOT sweet, mysterious, complex and utterly delicious.

Kristen Hard is the founder/chocolate maker of Cacao Atlanta. Her factory and shop are located at 312 C N. Highland Ave. in Atlanta. She is opening a second shop in Buckhead this week in the Garden Hills area at 2817 Peachtree Rd NE. Stop by on Saturdays for freshly made chocolate croissants and stop by any time for a variety of hot chocolate in addition to her fiendish little chocolate delights.

Wine Menu
Antinori Campogrande Orvietto 2009
Pezzi King, Dry Creek Zinfandel 2008
Salentein Malbec 2007
Earthquake Cabernet Sauvig
on 2006
Gruet Demi-Sec. N.V.        Contact Michael Doerfler at (404) 872-0904 to order any of the wines.

PHOTOS PROVIDED BY KITTY RAY SWAIN