Sweet Somethings -- Wax Orchard's Chocolate Sauces Are Hot

ON THE COUNTER IN BETSY SESTRAP'S kitchen, next to the sink, are plastic bottles filled with fruit juices and concentrates. She's working on flavors for the new fruit-juice coolers from Wax Orchards. Betsy has the formula down for tropical citrus; now she's tinkering with strawberry and raspberry.

Across the way, in the cannery of their Vashon Island farm, Betsy's husband Robert is part of a three-person production circle. He is screwing lids, one by one, onto jars of a sauce that has been the salvation of dieters, diabetics and chocolate lovers across the country.

Betsy says Robert is the inventor, and points to his fruit-processing machines throughout the building. In fact they're both inventors, and pragmatists. And makers of some darn good chocolate sauce for sundaes, baking and, as often as not, eating right out of the jar.

This is no ordinary chocolate sauce, in several ways. However, most people need to see nothing more than two little phrases on the label:

FRUIT SWEETENED.

FAT FREE.

Johanna and August Wax probably hadn't envisioned all this. Estonian immigrants, Betsy's parents started Wax Orchards in the 1920s in Kent, where today the street from Covington to Maple Valley is still called Wax Road. For starters, the Waxes grew more poultry than fruit. In the 1940s they moved the family farm to some 200 acres on Vashon, concentrating on pie cherries and then apples. Eventually Betsy and Robert took over.

In 1970 a hailstorm battered that year's crop of Gravensteins. Mother Nature served up lemons, so Wax Orchards made cider.

Betsy and Robert then figured out an alternative to the traditional cold storage of apples: freezing the pulp, which let them press cider all year round. Betsy devised recipes using cider, and co-wrote a cookbook about it. In the '80s she came up with a fruit-based alternative to sugar and a secret processing method that thickens the sauce without boiling the heck out of the fruit.

The resulting fruit butters, sauces, conserves and chutneys were good for business, but nothing like when Betsy ventured into chocolate. Heaping praise on the original Classic Fudge Sweet early on, a Dallas newspaper article was picked up by the wire services and reprinted across the country.

The fudge hit the fan.

Today, 70 percent of Wax Orchard's sales come from the chocolate sauces, and it has a string of national distributors in addition to its mail-order business (1-800-634-6132). Locally, the products are well-stocked at Olson's and Larry's markets, among others.

A warning to the hopeful: It's true that most Fudge Sweet sauces are nearly fat free (one-tenth of a gram per teaspoon). That's not, of course, the same as calorie-free, though 16 calories per teaspoon still lightens the guilt.

And the fruit sugars can't be ignored by diabetics. Although fruit sweeteners are proportionally higher in fructose, a slower-acting sugar, it still has as many calories and carbohydrates as honey or sugar, says Margaret O'Leary, a register dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Virginia Mason Medical Center. She calculated the exchanges for a sugar-free dessert cookbook that Wax Orchard sells, "Sweet Inspirations" by Patti Lynch of Issaquah.

O'Leary says fruit-sweetened products are a nice alternative for people who shy away from artificial sweeteners. A cook at a summer camp for diabetic and non-diabetic children used fruit sweeteners to make the same desserts for both groups. They turned out to be equally popular with the camp staff.

It may take a few tries to come up with fruit-sweetened versions of your favorite recipes. The pumpkin pie I made with Fruit Sweet was a little too sweet; the brownies with Amaretto Fudge Sweet were not quite sweet enough (though a little Peppermint Stick Fudge Sweet spread on top took care of that). As toppings for sundaes at a family party, though, they were an unqualified hit.

I guess a little experimentation is only fair, keeping in the tradition of the Sestraps. After a half-hour of tastings fudges and coolers, I'd hit my sweets limit, but Betsy was headed back to the kitchen.

"Now that I have these things out," she said, "I'll keep at it until I get it right."

How long will that take, I wondered, envisioning weeks of mixing and tasting.

"Oh," Betsy said, "until dinner."

Molly Martin is assistant editor of Pacific.