return to the press main page   "On the Side | In L.A., her caramels are redolent of Shore" date: June 11, 2006 by: Rick Nichols Bigger fish were frying here last week: Daryl Hannah, for instance, got hauled out of a walnut tree in South Central where she'd been starring in a made-for-TV protest of the eviction of urban farmers who'd been growing corn and beans on the once and future site of a big warehouse. But in a quieter precinct of Hollywood one morning, down a side street off Sunset Boulevard, past a compound where day laborers gather, a molecular miracle was about to occur. For more than three hours, a batch of Christine Moore's buttery Little Flower caramels had been bubbling in a 20-quart pot. The sugar had been slowly brown-ing, locking lips finally with nitrogen, leaving the proteins in the cream and setting up a transformative moment (scientists call it a Maillard reaction). Stir it constantly for 30 minutes at this point - as helper Teresa Gomez was doing in her long silver mitts - and you'll get rich, deep caramel. Mess up, and you'll have a pot of napalm. It has been seven years and two young children now since Moore, a child her-self of Maplewood, N.J., started her small-batch, stovetop cult caramel-making. And she is approaching, well, something of a transformative moment of her own. Each year sales have doubled. Her candy is in 60 stores now (mostly in Cali-fornia, but in one in Philadelphia - Capogiro, the gelato place at 13th and San-som). She was already worrying about the coming crush of Christmas orders. Unadulterated caramel It is rare to find caramel this reliably fresh, this pure and uncompromised, this supremely tender: Once a caramel-lover finds it, he's stuck. But so is Moore - with finding the time and the hands to stir it, pour it into slabs, cool it, knife-cut it, and wrap it with a twist. The caramel had its heyday a century ago, back before they started extruding it by machine, adding caramel color, inch by inch ruining its good name. No less than Milton Hershey was a small-potatoes caramel-maker in Philadel-phia before plunging whole hog into the new world of cheap chocolate. Moore's trajectory has been the reverse: When she had children she gave up the pastry-chefing that had taken her to Paris, and had a fling making chocolate truffles in her home kitchen. She soured on that after an entire batch melted next to a baking stove, and settled on restoring the reputation of the caramel. An old friend From her days in France, Moore fondly remembered the yielding chew of the Brittany-style caramels from a Parisian shop. There was an even deeper, more resonant role model, too - the saltwater taffy she'd grown up with during Jersey Shore vacations on Long Beach Island. So you may envision in the bite-size sizing of the hand-cut caramels and the very particular and jaunty twist of the waxed-paper wrappers, the outlines of an old, familiar friend. Take a bite, though, and there's something else going on. Some are lightly scented with vanilla, some with mild oil of lemon. The ones that stick with you, though - the grown-up caramels - are infused with a flaky gray sea salt called Le Paludier Sal Marin de Guerande, the tang of Brittany dialing down Jersey-girl sweet. Bigger fish were frying here last week, all right. But in a rented commerical kitchen (www.littleflowercandyco.com) off Sunset, Christine Moore and her two-woman crew had already finished hand-wrapping 30,000 pieces of caramel, and moved on to consider what happens after seven years of simmer. The lease for a retail shop is in the works, as is a line of proprietary tins, one of which Moore intends as an homage to the real seashore, sketched with the swaying grass and shifting dune fences of Long Beach Island. Perfect vessels for a fresh twist on a beleagured classic - the saltwater caramel.