Forest Road Chocolates
My profile of the exceptional chocolate project from St. John's local Stephanie Porter.
I get it: Chocolate isn’t a hard sell. But trust me, if you live in the St. John’s area and have not tasted Forest Road Chocolates, you’re missing out. This is exceptional, interesting chocolate-making. Follow them on Instagram and Facebook. -JRS
The website for Forest Road Chocolates reads: “Hand-painted, small-batch chocolates. Foraged, found and traditional(ish) flavours.” An apt description, as a box of these chocolates might present you with such flavour combinations as follows: river mint and mojito; pineappleweed, passion fruit and coconut; or partridgeberry in ruby chocolate with raspberry crisps.
Like me, you may be unfamiliar with some of those ingredients—until recently, I had no idea what pineappleweed or river mint were, or that they grow wild here in Newfoundland and Labrador, for that matter. (Fascinating that the native ingredients can seem new, while those from elsewhere are familiar.)
What strikes me most about Forest Road Chocolates, however, is not the creative flavours, or their beautiful appearance, or their deliciousness (and they are delicious); what fascinates me is that they are the product of a non-professional, self-trained chocolatier Stephanie Porter. Porter has no formal experience or education in cooking or pastry, in fact her “main gig”, she tells me, is as a managing editor with Boulder Books, a publishing house in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Porter also does some work on the side as a freelance editor and writer.
The self-taught chocolate-maker has been making chocolates for a number of years, but primarily as a pastime; at Christmas, for example, she and some friends would get together and roll truffles, drink wine. The aim was social, and they would give the results to family and friends as gifts. Each year, Porter would come up with new flavours to try, and learn something more about the process—clearly, she had an interest in chocolate-making beyond the excuse to spend time with friends. “I had my eye on Ecole Chocolat, it’s an online chocolate-making school in California,” she tells me, “I often thought, someday, I’ll do one of those.”
The pandemic and first lockdown proved opportune. Porter started taking courses and expanding her practice—“messing around with it,” in her words. She laughs, adding: “Eventually, however, you realize this is really expensive, so I should start selling a few in order to keep practicing.” That practice became Forest Road Chocolates.
Porter tells me that the inspiration to experiment with the colour and appearance of the chocolates came from a past trip: “I went to visit my friend in Vancouver four or five years ago. She took me to a place called Beta5. That was the first time I saw chocolates that were bright—blue and green and pink and super shiny.” The potential of this visual side of chocolate-making captivated her, the “playful, but polished appearance” of the chocolates, as she puts it.
Porter began preparing chocolate in multiple colours, not only shades of brown and white, but pink, green and orange, for example. She applies painterly strokes of colour, makes use of drizzles and toppings (coffee, berry crisps, honeycomb) that provide visual and textural contrast—the end effect being, to employ a cliche, chocolates that appear “too pretty to eat”. (You’ll overcome that thought pretty quickly.)
When it comes to the ingredients, Porter relies on quality: She uses Callebaut chips, a superior chocolate from Belgium. “I used to order them by the ten-kilogram bag from Ontario, and then I realized there’s a wholesaler in Donovan’s” she tells me. Now Porter purchases her chocolate there, she says, adding: “It’s $150 [per bag], but it’s a lot of chocolate”. You can see why a passion for home chocolate-making can make for a pricey hobby.
Porter’s experimentation with foraged and “traditional(ish)” flavours came out of her position at Boulder Books; she was working with forager Shawn Dawson on his first guide and cookbook, The Forager’s Dinner, at the same time as taking the online chocolate courses. This exposed Porter to the potential of wild ingredients, and Dawson encouraged her to explore, offering her pineappleweed and other products.
Before long, the use of local elements became central to the Forest Road Chocolates project. By way of example, the box of chocolates I tried—which Porter had prepared for Easter—included variations on Newfoundland and Labrador products like blueberry, partridgeberry, river mint, damson, honeycomb, etc. “I have some chaga and maple ones for the next box,” she tells me. (Chaga mushroom is a fungus that grows mainly on birch trees in cold climates.)
I ask Porter how she develops new ideas for flavour combinations—do they start with the ingredients? Yes, she replies: “I mean, I don’t invent any of the recipes I use, they’re all based on master things. But then you use different ingredients and see what works”.
Chocolate can be complicated, as it requires consistent temperatures, ratios, etc. Doing so on a professional level out of a non-professional kitchen, you can imagine, must be more so—especially at volume. Take that box I tried, which had twelve chocolates, each one unique in flavour and appearance. “Yeah, Easter I kind of burnt myself out a bit,” Porter recalls, “I thought, I’m going to make 250 boxes, but I only have enough molds to do 150 at a time.” Do the math: Twelve types of chocolate, each prepared and decorated by hand, times 250. (Every box sold, by the way.)
What lies down the road for Forest Road Chocolates? The day of our conversation, Porter displays some documentation she acquired, her registration as a home-based business. She also has a food establishment permit that enables her to sell at markets, do pop-ups, and so on. Towards the end of our chat, Porter hints that she may take the summer off; a follow up email confirms this. “If we get a hot summer, it’ll be impossible to work with chocolate anyway, and the summer here is too short to be extra-busy juggling the day job and a small business”.
Note that, by taking the summer “off”, Porter means the making and selling of chocolate; she does have plans to upgrade her kitchen, do some work on design and product packaging, and “plan how to move forward in the fall”. In addition—“most importantly” in her words—she will garden and forage for ingredients for Forest Road Chocolates for the rest of the year. Her email notes that she has already collected plenty of spruce tips and lilac.