Steven Potter
For Edari, chocolate means freedom from the old boys’ club.
The main ingredients in Syovata Edari’s life are her kids, court and chocolate.
But if the criminal defense attorney and mother of two has her way, that will soon change.
“I still love practicing law, I still have a passion for it, but I’d rather make a living doing chocolate and take cases part time,” says Edari, 44, who’s been a trial lawyer for the last 15 years. Most recently she took on the high-profile case of Genele Laird, the Madison teen violently arrested by Madison police officers in June for allegedly waving a knife at East Towne Mall. She helped Laird enroll in Dane County’s Restorative Justice program in lieu of facing immediate charges.
Less publicly over the last a decade, Edari has been building a business as a chocolatier, filling custom orders.
Edari is now hoping to step back from court and spend more time in the kitchen. For one thing, she’s tired of the old boys’ club legal system. “As a female attorney, as a female attorney of color, [it’s a system] that doesn’t want me in it, doesn’t want single mothers in it,” she says.
She’s found the chocolate business far more welcoming. “I could be a bad-ass lawyer and I still wouldn’t get respect, but with chocolate, it transcends the bullshit,” she says. “It doesn’t matter who’s behind it — if the chocolate is good, it’s good, and people are going to buy it because they want it.”
And they do want it. She recently delivered an order of more than six dozen golf ball-shaped treats for a client who was hosting an all-women’s golf outing. “One golf ball was a salted caramel with Maldon sea salt in a single-origin dark chocolate shell,” she explains with a calm confidence in her craft. “The other was a strawberry milk chocolate ganache with a white chocolate shell.”
Other recent orders she’s fulfilled have included his-and-hers wedding shower bonbons, an elaborate chocolate sculpture with miniature musical instruments and chocolate butterflies for Mother’s Day.
Although she specialized in bonbons and truffles in the past, these days she’s focusing on creating unique flavors for chocolate bars. Her family cooking background is a big help. “My stepdad is from Iran, my dad is from Kenya, my mom is Irish and Russian. We’re all big foodies in my family,” she says.
Edari is ramping up her efforts to make chocolate her full-time gig. In late April, she flew to France to attend a one-week master chocolatier course at Ecole Chocolat, where she learned a number of new techniques, including how to work with a food-grade chocolate stencil called a chablon. She spent 10-hour days in the school’s industrial kitchen with a diverse set of students, all with the same goal.
“It was a group of a dozen students. One woman was from Saudi Arabia, another from South Africa, one from Denmark, a guy from Hungary and people from all over the United States,” she says. All had to pass an online course before attending the French school.
“It was very science-heavy,” she says. “I was scolded for over-emulsifying my ganache — it had too many bubbles, and that would lessen its shelf life. There’s no way I could even learn half of what I did there from a book.”
Since returning home, she’s also purchased a $30,000 Italian-made automatic tempering machine that delicately warms the chocolate pieces (known as pistoles or feves) she uses to make her desserts. “This machine will do in eight minutes what it takes me an hour to do, and it does it continuously all day long.”
Edari is also in the middle of re-branding her business under the name CocoVaa, a play on her father’s nickname for her, “Young Vaa.” A new website, cocovaa.com, is in progress.
“My focus is on developing a local market, spreading out and seeing where it goes,” Edari says. “I like the idea of providing chocolate to my community.”
Inquiries can be made by phone at 888-803-6122, or email info@cocovaa.com.
