This Saskatoon pharmacist makes $100 luxury chocolate bars in her garage
Venessa Liang crafts edible artwork as FoodiePharmBabe
This story was originally published on Nov. 24, 2024.
Venessa Liang removed the chocolate bars from their moulds and brushed a bit of edible gold dust on them to cover up tiny blemishes along the edges.
"I know this probably seems super minor of an imperfection, but to me I just need it to look perfect," Liang said, hovering over the bars.
"Even though you're gonna break it once you buy it anyway. But I just want them to be absolutely beautiful when you get them."
That is, if can you get them.
Liang's luxury chocolate bars — the most expensive one costs $125 — only go on sale once a year and they always sell out. This year's sale was on Nov. 22, so if you're reading this you'll have to wait until 2025 for a chance to try them.
"The fastest I've ever sold out is three minutes and the longest it's ever taken is 12," Liang said during a tour of her kitchen the day before the sale. She had turned her garage into a Willy Wonka-esque laboratory filled with professional and D-I-Y chocolatier equipment.
Liang is an oncology pharmacist during the day, but for a month or so every year she spends her off hours making chocolate. She only makes a couple hundred bars each season, plus a few dozen advent calendars with chocolate bon-bons. Each bar is carefully made and decorated, resembling small sculptures.
"I'm treating each single bar like it's a piece of art, so what I'm selling isn't just a tasty chocolate bar, it's something that I've poured hours and hours into, in terms of flavour combinations, artistic styles, painting, and then the actual chocolate used," Liand, who imports the chocolate that acts as the base of her products, said.
"So this is why the chocolate bars are $50 to $60 and not your $5 grocery store one."
This year Liang made a $100 chocolate bar (or $125 for the larger size). The Taste of Dubai bar is a Saskatchewan riff on a chocolate bar made in that country that went viral earlier this year. Liang's version features toasted kataifi (string phyllo pastry), with a turmeric gold chocolate ganache and pistachio bresilienne.
Liang wasn't always into luxury chocolate, but she was already an accomplished cake maker when producers for The Great Chocolate Showdown asked her to compete on the show. When filming ended, Liang took what she learned from the chefs and chocolatiers on the show and kept experimenting.
"When I make cakes, it's very easy to hide mistakes, very easy to fix something that you've messed up," Liang said.
Chocolate is not as forgiving as cake.
"I learned the hard way that when I made mistakes with chocolate," she said. "'Oh, it's just, you know, a couple degrees off, it'll be fine.' Well, it's not fine. Chocolate has a very narrow window of success and a very wide window of error. So it's very easy to mess up. It's very hard to perfectly hit your temperature, your humidity, the speed."
Precision is key to Liang's hobby and professional life.
"I'm an oncology pharmacist, so that means that I help cancer patients with their care. So I calculate chemotherapy doses. I counsel them on their medications, the side effects of chemotherapy and how to manage them. And that can be stressful, but it's also very rewarding," Liang said.
"A lot of people ask me when will you quit your job and do chocolate full time. I think the reason why I enjoy it so much is because I only do it once a year. It gets my creativity flowing and it kind of gives me a little bit of a break from the heaviness of work."
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