The UW Daily Online

The coming of The Chocolate Man

Reed Clark / The Daily

Bill Fredericks, a UW researcher, instructs intern Sammi Liaw on the art of chocolate-making.

by Christina Burke
03/07/2003

The soft, musky aroma of chocolate wafted out from the crack of a propped-open kitchen door in the Bellevue Community Center.

Inside, four chocolatiers, nearly covered with their ware, attentively worked over pots of brown-and-white melted sweetness and oversized bricks.

Among these aficionados is UW oceanography researcher Bill Fredericks. His interest for chocolate began when he put himself through school at the UC-San Diego as a cook, a cake decorator and a chemist. He also met his wife there, who helped him perfect the art of a chocolate connoisseur.

“My wife was a chocoholic from the word go, but because of her background, [she] lacked the baking skills,” Fredericks said.

She came to him with a recipe for truffles that called for melted chocolate chips. Because of his experience in the culinary industry, he knew that chocolate chips are not made from a high-grade chocolate.

Through his chef friends, Fredericks — now famous for his chocolate artwork and truffles — acquired the chocolate needed to make the recipe better.

After a couple of years, Fredericks said, “I got tired of spending so much time buying and breaking off small slabs of chocolate that we decided to start up a business.”

He said very rarely do people making chocolate buy it in small quantities, such as 10- or 11-pound raw bricks, but most purchase 100 pounds or even larger amounts. The price of domestic chocolate is about $3 per bulk pound, with European chocolate costing slightly more.

Fredericks started The Chocolate Man business 12 years ago to make extra money for his children’s college funds. He said it gave him “the reason to spend all the extra hours and the crazy time when it gets really busy.”

Since then, Fredericks has gone to chocolate chef school as well as chocolate technical and manufacturer schools. He tries to send himself to school at least once a year to stay on top of the latest chocolate techniques.

“My retirement will definitely be chocolate-related,” he said, laughing.

Fredericks is quite utilitarian when it comes to his favorite kind of chocolate.

“Asking what my favorite kind of chocolate is is like asking, ‘What’s your favorite vehicle?’ It depends. If you’re bringing 20 kids on a field trip, it’d be a school bus. If you’re bringing 300 pounds of cement, it’d be a flat-bed truck. If you’re going to the opera, it would be the Jaguar convertible.”

Fredericks said there are thousands of varieties of chocolate — all with different characteristics that are used for a variety of reasons.

“They’re all totally and radically different,” he said.

Fredericks’ company carries nearly 40 kinds of high-grade chocolate, called covertures. The average person eats what is called candy-grade chocolate, meaning it contains more than 50 percent sugar and only 12 percent milk solids. Covertures have much less sugar and much more cacao.

“Some chocolates are like an orchestra,” Fredericks said. “Lots of flavor develops. You have a beginning flavor, a mid-flavor and an after taste. Hershey is just flat. It’s like a two-note song. Row, row your boat, that’s it, it’s done and it’s gone. But you don’t realize that until you’ve compared it to something else.”

Fredericks became involved in another chocolate company five months ago. A friend of his, Gary Scoggins, asked Fredericks if he was interested in starting a chocolate company. They pooled together connections and inaugurated Choc Élan last October. It is a chocolate business shared with UW alumnus Dave Klugh, the vice president of sales and marketing, and Scoggins, the president of the company. Fredericks is the vice president. Klugh and Scoggins knew each other from the high-tech industry.

“Dave and I refer to ourselves as technology refugees,” Scoggins said.

Scoggins has more than 25 years experience in the technology field, ranging from digital-video systems to computer graphics to dot-coms. He has only been involved with chocolate for 15 months.

While in Bellevue, the Choc Elan team made samples to show to possible vendors.

Their creations included a dark chocolate called maracaibo from Venezuela with a dark-chocolate filling, a dark-chocolate heart filled with a fresh raspberry puree, a milk chocolate filled with an orange caramel, and a nutmeg-and-hazelnut paste hand dipped in milk chocolate.

“What we’re about is whole, fresh ingredients,” said Scoggins. “Everything that you put in your mouth is going to be from the freshest possible ingredients. Frankly, that’s the difference. That’s what makes us wonderful.”

Klugh, who graduated from UW in 1975, majored in oceanography and geology. He was in the Navy working in the tech field for 11 years.

“I like our products, as you can see,” he said patting his stomach.

Klugh said his customers are broken down into “number of bites.” He compared chocolate connoisseurs to wine connoisseurs. “Two biters” or “three biters” are more into the pleasure of the experience, whereas “one biters” would rather take the whole experience in all at once.

“Just like there are estate wines, there are estate chocolates. They get the same types of scrutiny,” Klugh said.

He also said the best chocolate makers will go all over the world to find the right combination of beans to make the best chocolate possible.

The fourth member of the team is Sammi Liaw, a culinary student in one of Fredericks’ classes “who showed promise,” as he said.

Fredericks teaches classes in the Experimental College a well as at Sur la Table in Kirkland and South Seattle Community College, where his next class will be taught in April.

The group hopes to get a full-time kitchen soon with assembly lines for dark, milk and white chocolate.

Fredericks said he enjoys chocolate because “it’s very creative. To really get into it, chocolate is an extremely complex beast. It changes seasonally; it changes per plant location environmentally. You can do a tremendous amount with chocolate. It’s a fun media. It’s definitely artwork.”