AUBURN – For hungry gourmets, they’re unique, almost-too-pretty-to-eat desserts: Huge strawberries stuffed with gobs of New York cheesecake, chocolate chip cookie dough, provolone or caramel apple pie, smothered in chocolate.
For Susan Eminger, they’re maybe the start of something deliciously big.
Each berry, the centerpiece of her new business, is five or six bites.
“It’s a full dessert serving; most people can’t eat more than one,” she said. “You really have to make them to order: No one wants to buy yesterday’s berry.”
The executive chef worked for a Denver caterer several years ago, making hors d’oeuvres and traditional dipped-chocolate strawberries, when her husband floated the idea of stuffing a berry with cheesecake. Hundreds of tries later, she nailed it, and didn’t tell anyone.
It took three years to patent the process, just a little longer to perfect it. From the kitchen in her Vernon Street home, she started Eminger Berries quietly in April and hit the Web in September.
She’s going for a high-end market online, charging $42 for six. Locally, it’s $2.75 each with free delivery. So far, she’s cook, driver and cleanup crew for a company she hopes to grow into a storefront.
Eminger said she already has accounts with Key Bank, which is giving her berries as corporate gifts, and with Spruce Point Inn in Boothbay Harbor, which offers boxes of two as a special guest amenity.
Her goal for 2006: land in a high-end catalog like Williams-Sonoma and get on Oprah’s favorites list, like Isamax Snacks of Gardiner.
Eminger starts her creations with long-stem strawberries from California, Florida and New Zealand. (They aren’t grown in Maine.)
She cuts out a wedge from the bottom. “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a Pac Man,” Eminger said. Then the stuffing begins. She uses everything from whipped eggnog to Key lime pie.
She says she spent thousands of dollars getting the overnight shipping just right. Everything has to arrive cold, intact and tasty.
“I recruited a focus group of event planners and wedding planners throughout the country” for feedback, Eminger said. She asked things like, Is this something you’d recommend? How’s it taste? How’s it look? “The feedback was all negative at first, but encouraging negative.”
Most of her clients now are from New York City.
Eminger, a Johnson & Wales culinary school graduate, still has the first job she got after moving to Maine as cook for the lunch buffet at The Black Watch. She does berries in the morning, then the restaurant, then more berries.
She said the restaurant, the Maine Small Business Development Center and the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments have all helped her get launched and find supplies.
After a busy holiday – last week, she filled a 50-berry order from Washington, D.C., with three hours’ notice – Eminger is closing for two weeks after New Year’s to have her second baby. She expects to be back in full swing for Valentine’s Day, “which I think will be a bigger strawberry market than Christmas.”
For more information, www.emingerberries.com
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