“Costa Rican single-bean chocolate is probably the best piece of chocolate you can eat today,” Dietrich says. That’s true, he says, whether someone is sampling Dietrich’s European line of round truffles his assorted-chocolate line of crèmes, nuts and caramels or the single-bean line, which he says is the direction fine chocolate is heading. “When you eat a good chocolate, it will not leave a film on your tongue,” he explains, adding that the flavor in high quality chocolate is in the aftertaste, which “lingers on the palette.” When you see 10, 12, 15 ingredients, you don’t want to buy it.”įor most people, though, the eye isn’t the arbiter the taste buds are. “If you buy chocolate, the best way to judge it is to look at the ingredients list. Dark chocolate, he says, contains cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla and a binding agent such as lecithin. It’s the additives, he says, that distinguish bad chocolate from the best. “We melt it down and add butter, whipped cream and natural flavors,” he says. It’s all injected or layered into chocolate vessels Dietrich fashions by first liquefying 10-pound bars of chocolate he gets from select chocolate manufacturers in Europe and the United States. The filling is very light and very smooth.” “The texture of a chocolate truffle and the texture of a real truffle, that’s the relationship. It has to do with the filling, Dietrich explains. To cooks, a truffle is the fruit of a European fungus, highly prized in French cooking, very rare and very expensive. That, of course, explains the selection and the taste, but not the name. “We rotate a little bit so every time you buy a box, it’s never the same.” “Every year we add a new flavor,” he says. For the summer, he’s selling “Chocolate Nips,” quarter-size discs of chopped, roasted beans covered with single-bean chocolate from Costa Rica.
Whatever flavor seems interesting.įor Thanksgiving, he made pumpkin spice. Dietrich makes more than 30 varieties, flavoring his fillings with such exotics as hazelnut, rum, cinnamon-honey, apricot, mint, vanilla, pistachio, raspberry and orange.
Evans Ave., the piece de resistance is the truffle, a hand-crafted dome of chocolate with a velvet-smooth, flavored filling. It’s easy to sell, and the nice thing is I don’t get any returns the whole year.”Īt Dietrich’s Chocolate & Espresso, 1734 E. “People like to come in, look, smell and enjoy. “Everybody likes good chocolates,” Dietrich says. The man to whom 5280 magazine gave the Top Candy Store award in 2004 and the Top Breakfast award in 2005 is still hard at work proving, one piece at a time, that candy really is dandy. You’d think all that would be true of Erich Dietrich. You’d think by now he’d be a bit sour on sweets, not confecting heaven in a box-like kitchen in the back of the tiny Evans Avenue shop he’s leased for the last 11 years. That he’d be pure loco at the smell of cocoa, not busy sculpting bite-size candy out of chili powder or white tea. That he’d be tired of six-day weeks, hanging on as one of Denver’s last independent chocolatiers. You’d think that at age 59, he’d want to hang up the candy-making apron he donned in Germany when he was 14 and swap the thick aroma of exquisite chocolate for the fresh scent of a greener pasture.Īfter 44 years munching dark chocolate - his favorite - you’d think Dietrich would be 350 pounds, not a trim 185. You’d think that after making 10 million or so chocolate truffles, Erich Dietrich would be sick of them.
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