Ten-twenty Illinois Street is located on a two-block stretch of red brick warehouses in a part of town known as Dogpatch. There isn't much to see, really-a PGE power plant, some converted lofts, and, off in the distance, the new UCSF campus in various stages of architectural undress. It's not a very pretty neighborhood, and little attempt has been made to dress it up.
It's also not where I expected to find one of San Francisco's favorite cult chocolatiers, but maybe I should have. Poco Dolce founder Kathy Wiley makes chocolates that are neither fussy nor overwrought. Unlike confectioners who drape their truffles with gold leaf or white chocolate filigree and cram them with enough nuts to choke a small child, Wiley's approach is minimalist. Her signature confection is a flat, one and one-half inch square burnt-caramel "tile." Sugar and butter hardened into toffee, a layer of bittersweet chocolate, and a few grains of sea salt on top-that's all there is to it. Even the navy blue packaging is a study in restraint.
"Kathy's clean designs have a very modern sensibility to them," says Karletta Moniz, who leads chocolate tastings in San Francisco and writes the Art of Tasting Chocolate website. She also praises "the adult flavor combinations."
Opposite: Spooning chocolate tiles by hand in the Poco Dolce kitchen.
In Italian, "poco dolce" means not too sweet. To ensure Wiley's chocolates live up to that promise, she doesn't add sugar to her bon bons, and she salts everything with sel gris, gray salt from the second harvest of Brittany's famous fleur de sel.
"The sea salt adds a savory quality so it's not too sweet," says Chris Tavelli, who serves the tiles at Yield Wine Bar down the street (one of only a few places that also carries her highly coveted sesame brittle).
Wiley has always preferred savory to sugary, and blames her affection for salt on her dad's family, whom she spent summers with in Tennessee. They sprinkled it over everything from apples to watermelon. "When I was a kid, my parents told me I was going to have open heart surgery by the time I was eighteen," she chuckles.
Back home in Anchorage, Alaska, her father was the head of a local grocery chain. He loved food and made frequent trips to San Francisco to eat at places like Chez Panisse. From time to time, Wiley would join him. She settled in San Francisco after college and cooked professionally for a while before migrating into technology; pre-Poco Dolce, she was the director of IT at a printing company. But she always planned to get back to food and open her own business.
"When I struck upon chocolate, it made sense. You can be creative and there is a technical aspect, too. It uses the right and left sides of the brain."
SALT OF THE EARTH
The Poco Dolce pantry is filled with spices and seasonings you'd expect to see on the line of a savory chef: pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, cayenne pepper, olive oil, and, of course, sea salt. "The salt adds texture, palate relief, and contrast," Moniz says.
Wiley, a self-taught chocolatier, founded Poco Dolce as a bakery specializing in regional Italian breads and pastries, but soon switched to chocolate. This was in 2002, before the now ubiquitous salted dessert trend hit the mainstream. She's not the only Bay Area chocolatier who uses salt-both Michael Recchiuti and Charles Chocolates offer a fleur de sel caramel, for example-but she is the most blatant, salting every single piece of chocolate she makes.
In order to get the right-size grains, Wiley and her team first comb through the sel gris to remove stray pebbles and grass that can slip through during harvest. Then they divide the salt according to size. Superfine grains are reserved for ganache and caramel, while medium-size grains are saved to garnish the tiles. Large crystals are broken down into smaller pieces. "It's about the proportion of salt to chocolate," Wiley explains. "You have to be able to feel it."
The same is true of ingredients like toasted almonds and crystallized ginger, which appear only sparingly in her bon bons and tiles. Local cookbook editor and San Francisco Chronicle food columnist Amanda Berne puts it simply: "It's the perfect ratio of chocolate to stuff."
Wiley buys her "stuff" as locally as she can, including 63 percent bittersweet chocolate from Guittard in Burlingame. "I like the fact that it's always going to be fresh," she explains. Almonds are California-grown, and Wiley brews the coffee for the Turkish coffee-and-cardamom-laced bon bons herself. "We do everything in house. We toast the coconut, brew the coffee, mix our spices."
She also eschews butter in her ganache, opting instead for cream or, sometimes, olive oil. The result is a noticeably silkier texture and a luxurious mouth feel.
LESS IS MORE
The 1900-square-foot kitchen that houses Poco Dolce's chocolate-making operation is practically no-tech. There's a toffee kettle, three tempering units in varying sizes, and a vibration table that removes air bubbles from the chocolate once it's been poured into molds. A rotating fan, the kind you'd find in any suburban superstore, cools the confections before they're packaged to go.
The space is undeniably quirky. Vintage posters from Vespa and TWA decorate the walls, and a replica of an oversize Doggie Diner head, the icon of a local burger chain, watches over everything from an alcove above the back door.
When the staff is working at full steam, they can make 3,000 chocolates a day and fly through 300 pounds of chocolate a week. To make the tiles, tempered chocolate is poured into custom molds. Inclusions like toasted coconut and hazelnuts are mixed in by hand, and then the tiles are salted and left to cool. The toffee-an almond-studded variation of what's in the burnt caramel tile-is heated in the kettle and then it, too, is poured into molds and scored by hand with a roller.
When it is cool enough to work with, pastry chef Jennifer Purganan, one of four full-time employees, slides what resembles a miniature pitchfork underneath the first piece. With a practiced flick of the wrist, she dips it into a small vat full of molten chocolate, swirls it gracefully through the liquid, and taps the fork against the side to encourage any excess chocolate to slip off. Finally it's onto a parchment paper-lined tray, where toffee squares are arranged like candy soldiers.
Nearby stand clusters of tiny white bricks dotted with almonds and pale green pistachios. "We're just perfecting our Italian nougat," Wiley explains. The nougat, also known as torrone, has a different consistency from the stuff you'd find in a dime store candy bar: it's chewy and often crumbly. To make her miniature "torroncini," Wiley uses half the normal amount of sugar and covers bite-size pieces with bittersweet chocolate. In addition to traditional white nougat, she also offers a "nero" version that incorporates chocolate into the nougat.
Wiley is always tinkering with new combinations. Right now she's working on chocolate-caramel ganache, goat's milk caramel, and mint chocolate-covered toffee, and she'd like to do an assortment of plain tiles made with a selection of regional chocolates to highlight differences in flavor. She's also obsessed with creating her own version of a dessert popular in Spanish tapas bars. The breathtakingly simple dish consists of a piece of toasted bread topped with a slab of chocolate that's placed in the oven just until it begins to melt. A drizzle of olive oil and salt finishes it off. It's taken Wiley the better part of a year to get her interpretation right. She spent six months alone searching for a local source for oil pressed from Arbequina olives, which are native to Catalonia. "It's fruity but it stands up to bittersweet chocolate. You can taste the olive oil notes," she says.
No matter what comes next from the Poco Dolce kitchen, one thing is certain: it will have the same uncommon and understated touch that has become Wiley's hallmark. "It's all about enhancing what's there," says Tavelli. "I think that's what she does."
San Francisco Buyer's Guide
Bi-Rite Market, 3639 18th St., San Francisco. 415-241-9760, www.biritemarket.com
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