Food Network junkie gives up home brewing for chocolateering

HUNTINGTON -- The remnants of Walt Lewis' former fun are pushed up against the basement wall.

The pool table is gone. Two pinball machines sit lonely, and the keg taps are dry on a refrigerator pasted with faded ribbons from Lewis' award-winning homebrew.

Walt Lewis could care less. He has a new love in his life -- chocolate.

"My kids are none too happy," Lewis said with a laugh of his grown kids, his 27-year-old son and 24-year-old daughter. "They used to call it the fun room, but the pool table is gone, and yeah, it's now gutted and there's a tile floor, a triple bowl sink and it's a chocolate factory."

Since 2006, the Huntington resident has become a one-man Willy Wonka, molding and hand crafting his own Mexican-inspired, custom-crafted chocolate business called Chiammaya, that pays homage to the origins of chocolate more than 2,000 years ago by the Mayans.

A dark chocolate mixed with various blends of cacao (32, 41 or 71 percent cacao) almonds, cinnamon and sugar, Chiammaya has been for retail sale in the past few months at Old Village Roaster in downtown Huntington and on his Web site for a while.

Lewis' journey to find the perfect chocolate began innocently enough -- with this Food Network junkie's first trip in October 2005 to the Food of the Gods Festival in Oaxaca (pronounced wa-HA-ka), Mexico.

Although he admitted that his Spanish was laughably limited to dos cervezas por favor (aka: two beers please), Lewis said he saw snippets of two stories about a vanilla fest and one on chocolate stores in Mexico that made him start searching for chocolate-themed vacations.

"It had been a year and a half after the divorce, and I was like gee, I'd like to go to the beach, and gee, one day I would like to go to Mexico, and I thought what's wrong with right now," Lewis said. "I was alone and didn't know a soul on the trip, but I've always had a passion for cooking, and I figured what better way to a woman's heart than chocolate."

Lewis, who said Oaxaco was to chocolate like Seattle is to coffee, fell in love with the ancient Mayan traditions of hand-crafting and drinking rich, dark chocolate grinding in almonds, cinnamon and sugar.

"It was every corner they were grinding chocolate, and so every 10 feet you would smell this wave of chocolate," Lewis said. "They were getting it fresh ground with stones creating a lot of friction and rolling it into golf ball-sized chunks for hot chocolate. ... They drink hot chocolate like we drink coffee."

When Lewis got back home to Huntington he began the arduous process of months of research to build a one-man company to find the freshest ingredients of cacao, cinnamon, sugar and almonds and began making that intoxicating blend of chocolate like he tasted on the streets of Oaxaco.

"I really kept asking, 'Why don't we have that here in the U.S.?'" Lewis said. "There is a big fresh movement happening for fresh and organic foods, but this was something that hadn't really been done here."

Since his initial trip, Lewis has made three more trips to Oaxaco to learn more of the secrets of making the chocolate.

He's been all around the country picking up unique machinery to take his chocolate up a notch from mainly a grittier chocolate solely for drinks and baking to a smoother textured bar that also is good to eat.

He went to Los Angeles to pick up a tempering machine that heats and smooths the chocolate before it is poured into the chocolate mold.

Northbrook, Ill., resident Elaine Gonzalez, a nationally known chocolate historian who has been a great help in helping Lewis network his business, said Lewis is one of a small but growing number of small, family-run chocolate makers in the United States.

Gonzalez, who led chocolate-themed trips to Mexico from 1990 until last year, said it's been great to see folks such as Lewis take such a devoted interest in the roots of chocolate history and to pay homage to chocolate's founders.

"I think in general now we are more interested in the people who grow things," Gonzalez said. "Anytime you see how chocolate is made down there you come away with a whole new appreciation of chocolate because it is truly a laborious thing. You have to give Walt credit because he has pretty much done it on his own, and he has been very conscientious, and if he runs into a dead end, and he has, he doesn't give up. He finds another way to do things and to his credit is really improving the product."

Gonzalez said there are maybe half a dozen folks in the states who are doing something similar to Lewis.

She consulted renowned Chicago chefs Rick and Deann Bayless, whose hot new Mexican restaurant, XOCO (slang for "little sister" from the ancient Aztec language), is grinding cacao beans in their front window to make the chocolate for their hot, frothy drinks.

Gonzalez commended such original recipe chocolate makers as Bayless and Lewis who are trying to replicate the ancient process still used on the streets today in Oaxaca.

"It is all a throwback to the original way that chocolate was manufactured," Gonzalez said. "I have often thought I would like to take this woman (who stone grinds the cacao on the street) back with me and show her those same techniques that the indigenous people have been using for centuries are still the basis for the manufacturing of chocolate.

"They may have made them high-tech but the indigenous people knew how to roast the beans before the skin would come off, and they figured out the only way to grind it and that it has to be rubbed in the beginning with stone. It always gives me goose pimples to think about how privileged we are to still see the way it was done."

In 2007, Gonzalez, who was speaking at an American Association of Candy Technologists national conference, had Lewis, who has built a mobile production facility out of a former U-Haul truck, do a demonstration following her talk.

Until then, Gonzalez had not yet seen the dark-brown truck that is outfitted on the inside with a replica of a street stand with stone and timbers, as well as chocolate grinders for making batches of chocolate.

"I was talking about the origins of chocolate in Mexico and then invited the people out to the parking lot to see Walt, and I had no idea it was going to be so adorable," Gonzalez said. "It was just the cutest thing, and I think that was one of this early plans was to take the truck to fairs because it really lends itself to that."

Lewis, whose day job is a computer technician for his family's business Allied Realty, said at that show he made invaluable contacts such as Long Grove Confectioners, out of Long Grove, Ill., (north of Chicago). These folks who make chocolates for Williams and Sonoma and others invited him up for their chocolate fest.

Since then he is slowly adding another conferences and fests to his plate.

Last year, he did the Retail Confectioners International show in Dearborn, Mich., and is going to their show this year in Lexington.

In the Mountain State, he attended Ripley's Chocolate Festival and did a demonstration last fall for the Marshall Artists Series event called Smoke on the Water.

This year, he's heading back to the Ripley Chocolate Fest set for March 27 at the McCoy's Conference Center.

Last fall he added his first consistent retail outlet, Pete and Vicky Cooper's Old Village Roaster, a mom and pop coffeeshop at 919 4th Ave., that fresh-roasts its own coffee beans and which carries a wide variety of specialty chocolates.

Huntington resident Tim Bailey said he saw Lewis' big brown Chiammaya truck driving around Huntington and got curious.

"I thought that was weird, I had never heard of it, so I googled it and found out it was a company base right here," Bailey said. "I'm all about anything Huntington, so I thought I would check it out. I think it's great. I love chocolate, and I think you can't beat it especially for hot chocolate. I got some of the early stuff at Central City, and it was a little gritty, but since he's got the new machine to temper it, it's a lot smoother and better now. It's a really good blend of those four ingredients."