Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond Read Free Book Online Page B

am.”
    It was precisely at this moment, watching Manny De Costa pat his stomach and laugh in a jolly vibrato while offering me a second fresh Clark Bar, that I considered asking him to adopt me. This feeling was reinforced during our brief trip to the sample shop on the first floor, where Manny and his wife—who, it turned out, worked in the sample shop and was, if this is even possible, nicer than Manny—foisted a shameful amount of candy onto me, which I tried (not very hard) to refuse, and which I seriously considered donating to orphans, before deciding, instead, to eat it all myself.
    FEEDING THE BEAST
    That was my first taste of industrial candy production. I was delirious. I called Walter Marshall and explained, as calmly as I could, that I would need to tour the Haviland factory as well. Marshall acceded, without much enthusiasm.
    I arrived at the factory only to find a huge tanker truck parked out front, the kind commonly used to transport gas or heating oil. In this case, it was transporting corn syrup. The syrup was pumped into the building through an industrialsized fire hose, which was screwed into a valve in the side of the building—the corn syrup valve. It was labeled. This pleased me inordinately, as did the lobby and the stairwells and the elevator, all of which smelled like chocolate. (Is it humanly possible to dislike a facility in which the elevators smell like chocolate?)
    The factory itself was on its last legs. The machines were aging. The production floors were cramped and awkwardly laid out. Plastic tarps had been hastily affixed to certain areas of the ceiling, to contain leaks. The fellow assigned to show me around, a young engineer named Eric Saborin, was unfazed by these problems. Short of something landing on his actual head, he was not going to sweat a little clutter.
    The majority of the Haviland factory was composed of assembly lines, virtually all of which were dedicated to coating something in chocolate: caramel squares, raspberry jellies, coconut creams. On one floor, a machine plinked out soft kisses of chocolate, then sprinkled them with tiny white beads of sugar, to create nonpareils. Nearby, I watched row after row of peppermint disks enrobed in dark chocolate—the vaunted Haviland Thin Mints (HTM).
    A few words about this ferociously underrated product: The standard HTM has a chocolate-to-mint ratio of greater than 50 percent. If, like me, you buy seconds, you can often find mutant batches in which the chocolate layers have come out even thicker. A fresh HTM has an almost liquid center and a mint flavor that is mild enough to complement the chocolate, rather than overwhelming it. Even at retail prices, one can buy a five-ounce box for a buck. In short, the HTM makes the York Peppermint Pattie its bitch.
    Saborin was busy explaining to me “the volatile nature of the chocolate medium.” You couldn’t just melt chocolate down and start pouring. Oh no. It had to be prepped in special kettles, heated, cooled, then heated again, a process called tempering. A piece of chocolate that had been properly tempered had a beautiful sheen, almost like glass. “It should snap,” Saborin explained. He picked up an HTM and snapped it in two. Then, without a word of warning, he threw both halves into a trash bin.
    This happened so quickly I didn’t know quite what to do. I stood there in a little cloud of disillusionment. Saborin had somehow become inured to the holiness of his work product and this struck me as a very distressing situation indeed, given that I’m someone who has been known to eat the pieces of candy found underneath my couch.
    Haviland’s most intriguing area was the panning room, which consisted of two rows of squat copper urns, known as … pans. The panning technique originated in Italy, well before the rise of industrial machines. Basically, you threw a bunch of peanuts, or raisins, inside the pan, poured in a liquid sugar coating, and started spinning. The constant