Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

These are dried strawberries wrapped in layers of dark chocolate that took something like 160 tumbling passes to build. The fruit comes from California farms and is dried without sulfites, which keeps the berry flavor concentrated and bright instead of flat or chemically sharp. The texture is chewy, not leathery, and the sweetness is intense enough that it needs the cocoa to balance it.

The chocolate itself is 70% cacao from Maya Mountain, Belize, a single-origin bean that brings strawberry and cream notes on its own before it ever touches the fruit. Head Chocolatier Nicholas chose this origin specifically because its acidity and flavor profile mirror what's already in the berry, so the combination reads as unified rather than chocolate plus fruit.

The coating is applied through panning, a traditional technique where the fruit tumbles in a rotating drum while tempered chocolate is poured over it in thin layers. Each pass adds a film of chocolate that hardens before the next one goes on. After roughly 160 repetitions, the ratio of center to shell reaches about one-to-one by weight, meaning you're eating as much chocolate as you are strawberry. The shell is thick enough to snap cleanly when you bite through it, and smooth enough that there's no grit or clumping.

Because the strawberries are dried, they store at room temperature and have a shelf life measured in weeks, not days. There's no juice to leak, no refrigeration required, and no risk of biting into a mushy berry that turned hours after it was dipped. The trade-off is texture: this is a chewy, dense experience, not the soft give of fresh fruit under chocolate.