Robin Autorino demands perfection. She demands it of herself, of the employees in her Longmont chocolate shop and of the ingredients she uses to make her award-winning chocolates. She demands it, too, of her chocolate-squirting robot, Frédéric.
Fred is a magnificent beast, about the size and design of a commercial-grade frozen yogurt machine. In 10 minutes, he melts hard chocolate feves — ovals of various percents and types of chocolate — into a silky, liquid stream. The stream pools into a slowly rotating basin, where it eventually works its way to the bottom of the tun, is piped up to the top and entered back into the endless stream.
Fred is precise and reliable. He saves Autorino hours every day by his mere existence. His is the work she doesn’t have to check. Fred’s diligence, efficiency and quiet servitude are the same qualifications for a good soldier. In that way, Autorino and Fred are alike. Autorino assembled circuit boards in the U.S. Navy for a large part of her adult life.
Autorino was shipped around the globe during that time. She had a son to support. Work was long and tedious, but Autorino found moments to share humanity and happiness. At dinner parties, home-weary friends and coworkers left with pretzels handdipped in chocolate by Autorino and her son.
After her time in the service, Autorino got married, moved to Colorado and got a well-paying job in IT. They were soon making more money than they needed and when the nest egg got too big to neglect their true passions longer, Autorino returned to food. She enrolled at the Culinary School of the Rockies, worked at a patisserie in southern France and returned to Colorado to work for good and bad chefs in Denver and Boulder. Six years after her decision, Autorino opened Robin Chocolates in Longmont. It was an incredible transformation in total, especially to those who knew Autorino had long been allergic to chocolate.
But it’s precisely because of that allergy that Autorino (and Fred) needs chocolate that strives for perfection. Most of the chocolate that comes in to her shop and small factory is from a high-end French producer, Valrhona. Valrhona sources from around the world, choosing only products that have distinctive characteristics and that are refined and shipped with care. Delegating that task to Valrhona, experts in cocoa sourcing according to Autorino, may not be the trendy decision, but she says it simply gives her the highest quality product from which to make her fare.
It’s hard to argue. Autorino pulls out about 12 bags of Valrhona feves and piles them on a stainless steel table next to Fred, whose chocolate stream looks like it’s constantly reciting gutteral Austrian love poems. Autorino splits the feves in two, handing over one half and eating the other. There are dark chocolates from Madagascar, Venezuela, the Caribbean and more. They each, in this context, unsullied by added sugar or flavoring, and produced by one of the world’s top chocolate sellers, taste almost unlike chocolate. There are the tastes of bananas, of deep leather and wood, of bright raspberry, but nowhere on the palate is the sweet flavor of chocolate found in many finished chocolate products. That is until Autorino pulls out a Dove chocolate bar for comparison. That, she says, she would have an allergy to. But the pure chocolate with which she works, and which dances like coffee or wine in the indefinable regions of the palate, does not bother her.
We try milk and white chocolate, too — a revelation given how over-sweetened and cast aside those two chocolates can be in many American chocolate products. Again, earth tones pop more than sweetness. The texture is rich from fat, but the flavor is light and varied.
It’s from these products that Autorino produces chocolate candies, fudge, pastries and more. We walk through the process of a classic heart-shaped chocolate candy. In the corner, two interns are cleaning small plastic molds, about the size of ice trays. Every square millimeter needs to shine. Any speck of haziness will result in an imperfect shell, and so any tray that is not glistening after the tedious cleaning process is sent back to the interns’ cleaning table. The interns are chosen from some schools and not others, none to be named here, but those distinctions have been made from experience, Autorino says. Chocolate is a game of millimeters. When Autorino spots an imperfection in one of the trays, I ask her to point it out. It is not a layman’s exercise. Autorino says she wasted countless chocolates early on in her career on imperfect trays, so the process is not only important to the integrity of the chocolate, but to the bottom line of her growing business.
In the back corner by her office, which has a small bookcase of thick culinary books, is an artist’s nook. Splotches of neon pink, green and yellow decorate a white protective sheet. Autorino picks a jar of yellow cocoa butter from a workstation. She dips her finger in and artfully flicks splashes of the chocolate into the shells. The effortless scarring of the molds is a process she mastered over several years as well. Autorino then picks up a small spray gun and loads golden cocoa butter into its magazine. She sprays the golden chocolate mist into the molds, and wipes off the excess on the ridges. Inside each crater is a glistening film of chocolate that will harden over the next day or two and become a shell.
She pulls from the rack a tray of hardened shells and approaches Fred. The tray is placed under his chocolate stream, filling each crater, careful not to crack the delicate shell, nor damage the two-millimeter thick chocolate lip that has formed, which will protect the integrity of the chocolate when the final touches are done. Autorino spackles the excess chocolate away, careful not to scar nor add any bubbles into the molds. This too is a time-perfected process that Autorino makes look easy. The trays are placed on the steel table and Autorino blow-dries the mold, delicately tamping down any bubbles that arise. The tray is carefully replaced in the rack.
Before I leave, Autorino asks if I want to try the best s’more ever. That’s not really a question. She knows that because she’s already pulling down ingredients as she asks it. The base is a shortbread cookie, the chocolate is a rich (above 80 percent) dark chocolate feve, and the marshmallow is a homemade brick that does not taste like Jet Puffed. She pulls out a blow torch and carefully browns the marshmallow. “It is,” I say, mouth tar and feathered with s’more.
There are a lot of options in Boulder County for handmade chocolate. Each place takes on its own personality and approach, Autorino says. Her customers, she continues, appreciate the attention to detail in her work. She says it’s a more European approach to chocolate, where chocolatiers are more like cafes.
It’s not for everybody. The pursuit of perfection is not for everybody, but it is for Robin and Fred. That’s why this chocolate tastes so good.
