Bigfork chocolate maker whips up Valentine's Day treats with a kick

A box of chocolates always has the potential to add a little spice to a relationship, but the candies made by Bigfork’s Mojo Chocolates make it a sure thing.

With a blend of French dark chocolate, caramelized pistachio nuts and a healthy dash of powdered chipotle chilies, the red foil wrapper might be equal parts decoration and caution.

Neal Brown, Mojo’s proprietor and sole employee, is an unlikely chef. He’s been a truck driver, a brewer and bar owner and worked on airplanes.

“My work history is a little A.D.D.,” he said.

But chocolates are a fairly recent occupation. After Brown found himself staring at a plate of truffles at the Methodist Church’s silent auction, he told Dana Whitney, who made them, that he’d make sure to win the auction if she’d let him in her kitchen to see how they were made.

“I was driving home eating these truffles and I thought, ‘My Christmas presents are taken care of for the rest of my life,’” Brown said.

If only it had been that easy. Not long after, Brown and his wife, Pattie, sold The Raven bar in Woods Bay and Brown decided there could be something to this chocolate thing.

He went to a pair of week-long workshops at the University of California at Davis with Terry Richardson, whom many consider to be one of the world’s foremost experts on chocolate and confectioneries. Now, Brown talks about chocolate in terms of levels of crystallization and monitors each stage of the process with constant checks from an infrared thermometer.

Brown said he brings the chocolate — and the cocoa butter crystals inside it — to “Stage five,” which means it melts at 92 degrees. Perfect for the old “melt in your mouth, not in your hand” catchphrase.

But instead of sticking to Hershey’s-style milk chocolate delights, Brown decided to emulate the old-world European flavors, using only the highest-end ingredients to create dark chocolate treats.

  “There’s a lot of chocolate that just isn’t chocolate anymore,” Brown said, tracing America’s predisposition toward milk chocolate to the bars put in soldiers’ K-rations during the World Wars. “What I make are traditional European recipes. Europeans trend toward high-end chocolate and the competition there is very stiff.”

Not that tossing some chipotles into the vat screams “Belgian,” though. To find that inspiration, one needs to look a little further back in time and a little closer to home.

Putting spices into unsugared chocolate was the preferred method used by ancient Central and South American peoples like the Aztecs and the Incas. Though for his recipe, Brown investigated various types of mole, a traditional blend of spices that originated in Spain but perhaps reached its zenith in Central America.

“Customers always want to know about the hearts,” he said. “It came out of making mole and it takes a couple of days. There’s a wide variety of spices in new world moles.”

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, Brown will churn out 80 or so of the foil-wrapped hearts each day, whether for special orders or to keep the jars placed at certain businesses around the Valley full. Brown attributes that not only to the tongue tickling taste, but also the chemicals in chocolate that help elevate people’s moods, something that never hurts in the dark months of winter.

“It’s an energy and a mellowing effect,” Brown said. “I try to keep a little chocolate in my pocket wherever I go. I make a lot of friends.”

Brown’s delicacies, whether  chocolate hearts, truffles or any of his other treats, can be purchased by calling Mojo Chocolates at 837-5018. His chocolates are also available in Bigfork at Electric Avenue Gifts and in Kalispell at Ceres Bakery.