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A day in the life: The Chocolate Man

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Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com on 2/4/2008

Editor's note: Visit our Faces of Arvada and Wheat Ridge page, where YourHub.com staff and readers can introduce you to more people who make this part of the metro area what it is.

At 5 a.m. Jan. 31, most of his Wheat Ridge neighbors are asleep, but Chef Will Poole of Wen Chocolates is already at work, baking five kinds of bread: brioche, chili bread, a multi-grain beer-based oat bread, potato bread and caramelized red onion, walnut and dill bread.

Chef, as his employees call him, rolls out of bed at 4:30 a.m. so he can have the bread ready for his partner, Loren Penton, to deliver to the company's retail store on Platte Street in downtown Denver by 8 a.m. While the bread is baking, Chef and Penton will check e-mail, process orders from the Wen Chocolates Web site, put together the list of products to deliver to the store, and shovel snow.

This is just the start of a typical workday that lasts until 10 p.m.

"There are days when I wish I could just work in the kitchen and be left alone, but it just doesn't work like that," Chef says.

Wen Chocolates is a high-quality specialty chocolatier, specializing in small-batch, artisan chocolates, made by hand and often using antique molds. The business has been based in Wheat Ridge for the past four years, and does most of its sales through its Web site, the store in Denver, and a few major contracts. Wen Chocolates has made it to the Sundance Film Festival, the Olympus Fashion Show, as well as local wine tastings and events. The business was featured on the Food Network show Road Tasted, and every time the show re-runs, sales jump a little.

Two full-time employees, Juan Huerta and Kate Antea, and a part-time employee, Ron Ingle, show up at 7 a.m. to start working in Wen Chocolates' main kitchen, rolling out 300 pieces of chocolate per day during the less-busy season. Just before Christmas, production kicks up to 1,000 pieces per day. All the employees are graduates of the Culinary School of the Rockies in Boulder, where Chef will go to help teach a class tonight to cap off his 17-hour workday.

At about 8:15 a.m., Chef makes his way into the 200-square-foot main kitchen, where Antea, Huerta and Ingle are filling truffles, assembling orders, labeling packages and putting trays of finished truffles in the refrigerator to cool. The temperature in the main kitchen is a balmy 45 degrees today -- chocolate doesn't do well at typical "room temperature."

To ready it to pour into molds, the chocolate must be tempered -- melted, slowly cooled down to 81 degrees and reheated back to 88 degrees so it won't stick to the molds, which today are hearts made from an antique mold, and a detailed silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge for a San Francisco-based software company.

All chocolates that need to be shipped are ice-packed with Polar Packs. Chef will drop the packages off at a FedEx or post office this afternoon on his way to teach tonight.

"That's the thing about this business," Chef says. "If you're any good, or you're busy, there's no birthdays or weekends."

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