Chocolate is “What’s for Dinner” at Donya Marie’s

People often ask me how I go about selecting our “tales of culinary adventure”.  I suppose the best way to answer that question is that it’s a combination of buzz and serendipity.  It’s not just that we have to like what someone in the local culinary scene is doing, mind you, it’s more a matter of how many other people do.  One of the advantages of living in a relatively small city is that it’s not hard to find this out.But we still have to like you.

In the case of Donya Maries Beyond Chocolate, serendipity carried the day.  It was a few weeks before Christmas and my wife and I found ourselves cruising a holiday craft fair at (where else) the Fairgrounds.  Not being craft fair aficionados, our game plan was to find the booth where my sister-in-law was displaying her “craftiness”, pay our respects, then head home for a cup of hot tea.  We like to live life on the edge.

Heading down one of the aisles, a corner booth attracted our attention.  It was manned, and “womaned”, by a smiling, attractive couple offering samples of chocolate sauces and condiments for cooking.  “A chocolate vinaigrette,” I thought, “that’s a cute novelty concept.”  Dipping a piece of bread into a sample of said novelty, my next thought was “Wow…I was NOT expecting THAT!”

The “that” that my wife and I experienced should hardly have come as a culinary epiphany.  After all, anyone who has ever had a good Mexican mole should know that chocolate has a complexity that goes far beyond satisfying our sweet tooth.  But even this realization seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that chocolate is dessert, not entree.  Donya Marie Schweizer, founder and Chief Technology Officer for Donya Maries Beyond Chocolate wants to change this perception…one palate at a time.

Donya Marie is an unlikely evangelist for changing our perceptions of chocolate in the kitchen.  Growing up in the Southwest, her professional life was spent in the public service sector, initially in the court and prison systems and eventually in the State Contracting Department for Arizona.  Cooking was, at best, a necessary evil.  Finding herself the victim of state budget cuts, however, Donya began cooking out of boredom; which when you think about it beats the hell out of taking up booze and daytime soaps.

Such was Donya’s boredom that she began her foray into the world of chocolate by making her own truffles – which had the immediate effect of causing friends and family to secretly hope that she would not find meaningful employment any time soon.  It also occurred to Donya that making truffles could, in fact, be her new occupation.  Chocolate in hand, she showed up for her very first public market.  “At the end of the day I had only made $63, and I was convinced my husband and I would be hungry and homeless.  I was so depressed.”  I suspect that at some point Mrs. Fields felt like chucking her cookie batter as well and going into real estate.  And thank God Paul McCartney’s parents never convinced him to become an accountant.

Undaunted, Donya returned to the test kitchen, which just happened to belong to the University of Idaho.  While laboring over her handcrafted delicacies, she couldn’t help but envy what she saw going on at the other side of the kitchen.  “People were making sauces in 150 gallon kettles, and I thought ‘I should be over there doing that’.”  Donya Marie needed no other lesson in “economies of scale”, and the idea for chocolate-based cooking sauces was born that day.

There was, however, a technology hurdle that Donya had to overcome.  Determined that her chocolate would NOT use corn syrup, she found that the cooking process required a high degree of quality control.  “In developing my original ‘decadence’ chocolate sauce, I found that anytime you have a heavy sugar content you have to carefully test for the water activity.  If it is too high, there is a risk that the sauce will mold in the jar, which is why so many people use corn syrup to improve shelf life.”  But even as Donya continued to make her truffles, her success in refining the recipes and cooking techniques for her sauces began to bring in more revenue.

Donya Maries Beyond Chocolate was officially started in 2005, but it was in 2007 that Donya introduced the product that established her culinary mission.  “My husband Jason and I love bread, and we like to dip our bread in oil, so I decided to create a dipping oil using chocolate and spices.  I was amazed at the results, but not surprised.  There is no reason that you can’t put chocolate in foods.  It is so complex that it brings out flavors that you otherwise wouldn’t taste.”  It took only a few experiments to perfect Donya Maries’ Dark Chocolate Bread Dipping Oil – and to make Jason a believer.

The success of her chocolate dipping oil and a subsequent chocolate vinaigrette was all Donya Marie needed to guide her product development efforts along the path that, as her website proudly proclaims, turns “ordinary foods into extra-ordinary using dark chocolate.”  “We’ve taken our sauce concept from sweet to savory,” says Donya Marie.  “I like spicy food, but Jason doesn’t, so I have two flavors of everything, the ‘Donya Marie’ and the ‘Jason’.  I’ve developed spicy and sweet versions of our meat rub, for example, that really enhance the flavor of a good red meat.  I like to put them on roasts or ribs.  The spicy chocolate meat rub is not hot, but it uses the same signature spice blend that goes into our other products.”

Jason was convinced that his wife had gone over the deep end when she suggested a chocolate Bloody Mary mix.  Guess again.  This year, in fact, Donya Marie will introduce her chocolate margarita mix to round out a product line of pancake mixes and syrups, dipping oils, vinaigrettes, BBQ sauces, salsas, jellies, meat rubs, and more.

“Most of what I have done is by trial and error,” Donya admits.  But I’ve realized that growing up in the Southwest really influenced my palate.  There is a tradition of using chocolate in Mexican food that influences Southwest cuisine.”  But would something that plays in Santa Fe find an audience in Sandpoint?  Donya’s experience thus far is “yes” – but not without overcoming some stereotypes about chocolate’s place in the kitchen.  “At first I was offended because people would say things like ‘chocolate in BBQ sauce – are you nuts?  But 95 percent of the people who taste our products walk away with them.  The challenge is getting people to try cooking more with chocolate, which is why I like to prepare recipes with our products and then share them with customers through our website.  And this puts me back in the test kitchen, which is my favorite place to be.”

So much for the woman who not so many years ago found Hamburger Helper a culinary challenge.

If you want to get to know Donya a bit better, add her blog to your reading list and discover why her credo is “a balanced diet is chocolate in everything.”