Making chocolates a rabbi can love
The road to candy greatness isn't as smooth as fondant -- at least not for Christine Buhr, who this summer unwrapped her kosher chocolate business. Her path ran from an Iowa farm to the seminary before heading into the world of chopped nuts and sweet fillings.
Buhr, who stops any conversation to interject something about the chemistry of chocolate, had a full life before launching her business, Renaissance Chocolates. In her tiny kitchen, housed in a nondescript Brighton office building, she's busy folding hazelnut paste into white chocolate to make the traditional chocolate filling known as giandujia. She's working flat out these days.
But as the High Holidays approach (Rosh Hashana begins next Wednesday at sundown), Buhr is also busy with her day job as executive director at Kehillath Israel synagogue in Brookline. There, she is better known by her Hebrew name, Dvorah. And though she earns her living in management, she's also an invested cantor (cantors are invested rather than ordained), with a master's degree in sacred music. And because she's strictly observant in her Judaism -- she converted in 1996 and will not drive on the Sabbath -- her double schedule means she's often caught in town, spending Friday evening through Saturday evening with friends, rather than returning to the Hudson home she shares with two Egyptian Mau cats.
This is all quite a change from her Christian Iowa upbringing on the 300-acre working farm where she was raised. Buhr's parents -- both physicians -- urged their daughter to pursue any and all interests, from 4-H to pottery. Such encouragement resulted in Buhr's earning a degree in graphic arts, but turning full circle in 1988 to enroll in the International Pastry Arts Center, in Westchester, N. Y., where she studied under master pastry chef Albert Kumin, who had worked for the Carter White House.
There, she learned very traditional chocolate making, with standard shapes and decorations that signify the nature of the filling within. Explaining this in her Brighton kitchen, she is tempering dark chocolate (heating and cooling it to stabilize it). The discipline she learned while training has stayed with her. "If you can't look at my chocolate and get a sense of what it is, that's wrong," she says. That means a chocolate truffle will always be rolled in cocoa and a kirsch truffle in powdered sugar, in the European style, while other decorations -- a mint leaf, coffee bean, or a bit of orange zest -- hint at other flavors.
Her respect for the craft has been recognized by her peers. After the pastry program, she started racking up awards, including three successive gold medals for her chocolates from the Salon of Culinary Arts of the Societe Culinaire Philanthropique. Such honors could have led to high-profile restaurant jobs. Instead, Buhr went to work behind the scenes in bakeries across the country, from California to Wisconsin. "I really like just doing production," she says.
What finally got her out of the bakery back rooms was religion. Although she now laughingly refers to her "typical mid-30s `what is the meaning of life?' crisis," the pull of Judaism was strong.
She began working with a rabbi who, after her conversion, suggested that her voice would qualify her as a good cantor. In the fall of 1997, she entered the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she would study for the next five years. This satisfied her spiritual cravings, but not her need to cook.
"I found it very, very hard," she recalls now. "I really struggled because I was doing meaningful things, but I wasn't doing anything creative with my hands."
After she was hired for the Kehillath Israel job in 2002, she found herself getting creative with the post-service meal. That led to more cooking projects, and finally, last fall, the idea of Renaissance Chocolates. "I always wanted to set up my own shop," she says.
Creating a dairy-free kosher product has meant a good deal of preparation. First, she had to find raw materials that suited both her tastes as a chef and her religious observances. "Chocolate has a character," she says of the search that led her to use Belgian Callebaut.
Then she had to begin the kosher certification process, making sure every metal tool, from spatulas to whisks, was ritually washed in a mikvah. The sinks in her tiny industrial kitchen were purified by blessings and flame. And each and every ingredient -- from the nuts and chocolate to the Leroux liqueurs that flavor some fillings -- had to be deemed kosher by Rabbi Abraham Halbfinger, the head of the local rabbinical council. To stay on the right side of the dietary laws, she's given Rabbi Halbfinger keys to her kitchen. "He looks in my shelves," she says. "He looks in my garbage. It keeps me honest."
Buhr is capable of producing from 30 to 75 pounds of candy per day, depending on what she's making. To get ready for the High Holidays, she has enlisted friends and family members. "Generally, the way it goes is [I] put in a lot of time making fillings and then have marathon coating sessions." About 4,000 truffles and 30 pounds of giandujia -- already hardened on baking sheets, waiting to be enrobed, or covered with smooth chocolate -- are stored in the freezer. These will make up some of the 300 pounds of candy she's preparing for her first holiday season. One of these days she's hoping to make her business a paying concern. "Candy satisfies everything in me," she says.
Renaissance Chocolates are at Sweet Satisfaction, 318 Harvard St. (in the Arcade), Brookline, 617-735-1000, $30 a pound; and through some kosher caterers, or e-mail chocolaterenaissance @yahoo.com. 
