At Bittersweet Chocolates, in downtown Olympia, there’s a machine Deb Smith and Cindy Uhrich affectionately call the Beast. It resembles a bandsaw, but instead of a blade, it features an endlessly circulating stream of molten chocolate, precisely calibrated in temperature and consistency. Last week I had the pleasure of watching Deb, chief confectioner at Bittersweet Chocolates and co-owner with Cindy, expertly drift a tray of tiny compartments through the stream and scrape the extra chocolate back into the infinite pool in the heart of the Beast.
Deb taught chocolate making and bakery and pastry arts at South Puget Sound Community College for many years, and watching her fly through the elaborate process required, one does not have a difficult time believing she’s done this before.
“I like to think I’m still learning,” she said, as an excellent teacher might, and then she asked, “Do you want one, by the way?”
I selected a triangular chocolate in the tradition of spiced Mexican xocolatl, with an elaborate design laid in gold dust. For the time being, I decided to marvel at it rather than eat it.
While a great deal of expertise informs the production at Bittersweet Chocolates, much thought has also gone into the business operations, and the way Cindy and Deb hope it will fit in to the larger community. Cindy and Deb both come from long careers in academics at SPSCC, and upon retirement, it rapidly became clear to both of them that they weren’t quite done interacting with students or the public.
After a year or two of discussion, they decided to open a gourmet chocolate shop. First, though, they needed to select the perfect space.
“It was really important to us that we be located downtown,” Deb said. “Downtown is truly the heart of Olympia in so many ways. The people are wonderful, and it really feels like a lot of good things are happening here.”
“And it just feels right,” she added. Downtown Olympia apparently agrees, as they’ve been blowing past their sales projections from the first day of their “soft” open.
“It felt a bit more like a grand opening than a soft opening,” said Cindy. “Word of mouth is a really powerful force here.”
Being a part of the bustling community downtown has also made networking a breeze. Early on, Deb and Cindy participated in a very successful gala for SafePlace Olympia, complete with custom designed chocolates carrying perfect, tiny versions of SafePlace’s emblem.
They’re also planning on doing a series of curated pairings with Three Magnets Brewing Co., a noted local brewery just up the street from their shop. Lionel, the sales rep for Three Magnets, stopped in one afternoon. Now, one of their chocolates features one of Three Magnets’ stouts, with the possibility of future collaborations already being discussed. Deb and Cindy have also spoken with Rumors Wine Bar about curating wine and chocolate pairings in the future, a combination just crazy enough to work.
These combinations reflect a happy harmony of attention and effort. It’s apparent Bittersweet Chocolates pays as much attention to sourcing as do their counterparts in the beer and wine industry.
“We went through a whole lot of chocolates before we settled on a direct trade chocolate from Venezuela. We also buy organic as often as we can.” Deb explained that even though they hadn’t fielded quite as many customers’ questions about sourcing as they’d expected to, it was still enormously important to them that their chocolate come from principled sellers.
“Direct trade is often preferable to fair-trade, really,” said Deb. “Since ‘fair-trade’ denotes an expensive certification, sometimes smaller growers can’t afford it, and it becomes more a question of marketing rather than a guarantee of fair business practices. Direct trade is pretty much what it sounds like. The money goes directly to the smaller producers, which is important to us.”
“This chocolate just tastes amazing, too,” she added, “which doesn’t hurt.” I eyed the chocolate in front of me.
“The response has been really positive so far,” said Cindy. “We had a former student come in—perhaps a bit prejudiced in our favor, maybe—who tried every single thing we had on offer, and reported that there was not a single thing he didn’t really like.”
Students are still a large part of the population that Deb and Cindy hope to reach. “Staging,” a term with which I was unfamiliar (it’s not pronounced how you think), is essentially a short food-industry internship, and eventually Deb hopes to be able to bring high school and college students into the shop in this capacity.
“It’s really important these days that young people have the chance to try something that maybe they hadn’t thought of, or that they have considered, but haven’t had the chance to try. A lot of gourmet food industry positions are kind of inaccessible,” Deb said.
If experience as a gourmet chocolatier or pastry chef is inaccessible, pictures of these foods are not. Impossibly artisanal examples of nearly every confection one could think of are all over social media now, further emphasizing their beauty and their impossibility. The golden, triangular one in front of me belongs to this subset of edible art. On my way out the door, with no one to impress, I finally ate it, and walked the remaining two blocks to my car grinning like a maniac.
Bittersweet Chocolates
513 Washington Street SE
Olympia, WA 98501
360-489-1812
