Chocolatier Pete Hoepfner has a nickname: “the candy man.” Some confectioners would find this nickname flattering. Hoepfner doesn’t.

As proprietor of Pete’s Treats, chocolate truffles are Hoepfner’s specialty. Like the round fungus after which they’re named, truffles require a surprisingly long time to take shape. Working on a batch of 2,400 truffles requires Hoepfner to stand for 30 hours at a time over a chocolate tempering machine — both boss and employee of a one-man sweatshop.

During grad school, Hoepfner found work at restaurants. He went on to work as a chemist, developing rat poison for Bell Laboratories, and as a longliner, hauling fish and octopus out of the Bering Sea. The industriousness of the cook, the precision of the scientist and the patience of the fisherman: all three are required to turn raw chocolate, cream and butter into a tray of truffles.

“I can endure pretty much anything after longlining for years,” Hoepfner said. “Being a fisherman, your time doesn’t count… Everything I do, I either have to hand somebody a fish or I have to hand them a box of truffles. That’s the only way I get paid: I physically have to hand something to somebody.”

Each truffle begins as a golf-ball-sized lump of ganache, either plain chocolate or flavored with mint, jalapeño, Kahlua, champagne, caramel or a berry concentrate. Here, again, Hoepfner chooses the least expeditious method possible, foraging for wild berries to feed into his steam juicer, and creating his own mint butter rather than relying on store-bought extracts he finds too cloying.

When salted caramel became the flavor du jour, Hoepfner began to salt his truffles, first with plain sea salt, and then with alder wood smoked salt, imparting a tang familiar to anyone who’s been inside a smokehouse. Hoepfner has also dabbled with truffle fungus salt, though truffle-flavored truffles have yet to appear on the menu. Salt crystals should be large and flat, Hoepfner said — flakes that melt immediately rather than hanging around on one’s tongue.

Unfortunately for Hoepfner, his perfectionism doesn’t extend to his business practices. Quick to give discounts and happy to receive IOUs, Hoepfner is clearly uneasy about the idea of squeezing money out of his customers. Regular-sized Pete’s Treats truffles sell for $3.54 apiece. Hoepfner calls himself “the world’s worst businessman,” half in jest.

“My prices are all screwed up,” Hoepfner said. “I mean, how much do you charge for these dang things? That’s the problem. It isn’t like I want to make a bunch of money out of Cordovans, but then, when you go to any other place, a box of four is $10, while I’m charging $5.”

For all his confectionary obsessiveness, Hoepfner is an easygoing presence in the Ilanka Community Health Center kitchen. The only things that seem to seriously irritate him are pretension or price-gouging by other chocolatiers. One trendy Seattle-based confectioner dispenses chocolate broken into irregular chunks: they call it rustic, Hoepfner calls it lazy.

“The guy is selling bags of chocolate, 2.5 ounces for $7,” Hoepfner said. “All this dude’s doing is taking tempered chocolate, pouring it out and throwing some nuts in it!”

With the help of three cannery workers, Hoepfner produces about 9,000 truffles each year. Hoepfner recognizes the need to increase his profit margins, and perhaps even to open a storefront. But he’d like to put off these decisions, and remain lost in pleasure of the craft, a little longer.

“There’s potential here,” Hoepfner said. “There’s a business in here someplace! And at least it keeps me out of trouble in the meantime.”

suzy@lstchocolatemachine.com

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