Excerpt: Remarkable chocolate grown locally
by Teresa Politano, The Star-Ledger
 

Diane Pinder talks poetically about chocolates, much as a sommelier talks about wines. Try the sea salt and olive oil truffle, she urges.

Sea salt opens your taste buds, she says, to the flavor of the chocolate. You won't taste the olive oil, but it gives the truffle a velvety texture (compared to the pudding-like texture of chocolate emulsified with butter).

Try it and you're stunned. This is chocolate as you've never had it; chocolate with so much spirit that it seems also to have soul. And it will instantaneously render all your other chocolate experiences -- from Hershey to Ghirardelli, Godiva, even Valrhona -- as flat and mundane.   And, snap, Pinder has seduced another groupie.

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Pinder opened Donna & Company, an artisan chocolate shop in Cranford in 2005. It's a quaint, old-fashioned shop filled with modern, sophisticated and sometimes shocking flavors of chocolate -- cinnamon chipolte, drunken plum, balsamic, blood orange, even a Thai chocolate, with peanut butter and red peppers. Eating these chocolates is an event -- the layers of flavor, the texture, the undercurrents. She's been noticed by "The Today Show" and "Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?" Business is so good -- keep your fingers crossed, she says -- that she's negotiating with some retail specialty stores to sell her chocolates.

Meet Pinder and you're not surprised -- she is passionate and uncompromising. And she didn't just open the shop on a whim. "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to be really credible about it."

So, Pinder, a former intensive care nurse who had also done pharmaceutical marketing for Saatchi & Saatchi, first did trend research, developed a business plan, took a course in New York. But she was really inspired by Ecole Chocolat, a professional school of chocolate arts in Tuscany, where she learned from master chocolatiers.

Donna & Company sells two separate lines of treats, a fun line -- hand-dipped Oreos and pretzels made with imported CocoaBee chocolate, and Donna Tuscana -- artisan chocolates developed in the spirit of Pinder's Tuscan experience. Pinder is fussy about chocolate's origin, how it's grown and processed. She makes each chocolate by hand. Artisan, to her, means clean, with noteworthy ingredients.

And she uses her chocolates to promote her other passion -- taking care of the soldiers who take care of us. Pinder is a '70s Vietnam War protester who somehow ended up with a military family -- her son served in Afghanistan, her daughter is at Fort Dix and her son-in-law is in Iraq. When her son was away, she slept in his bed just to stay close.

She sells chocolate bars for Fisher House, a temporary residence near military bases for family members of those wounded in the war. For every bar she sells for $1.50, she donates $1 to Fisher House, to cover the cost of housing while a soldier is receiving medical care. She invites Girl Scouts to make hand-dipped Belgium chocolates to send to Walter Reed. Pinder's still a caregiver. But in the ICU, she wasn't always able to make people happy. At Donna & Company, she can.