Thousands of people given chocolate for Valentine’s Day will force a smile, say something like, “Aww, Babe, you’re so thoughtful” and then secretly disdain the cliche bonbons they just received.

Sarah Rubin isn’t one of them.

It’s not just that she is genetically wired to adore chocolate. “My family? It’s always been chocolate. My aunts, my grandmother, all of them were chocoholics. And they passed that on to me,” Sarah said. She’s not crazy romantic, either. “I tend to be fairly reserved.”

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Chocolate for Sarah became a symbol of true love, after doctors diagnosed her with a milk allergy. The condition meant she might never eat chocolate again. That's when her husband, Matt Rubin, decided to become her personal chocolate maker.

He threw away her chocolate

“I was definitely angry,” Sarah recalled of the day her husband dumped her secret chocolate stash, hidden behind soup cans in a cabinet. “There was probably some ugly, angry crying involved as well.”

So-called “dairy-free chocolates” contained trace amounts of milk that made Sarah sick, but she craved chocolate enough to risk it.

Matt, didn’t get his wife’s attachment to chocolate or that of Americans who ate $18.5 billion worth of chocolate in 2018. “I never liked chocolate before,” he said. But he had watched Sarah suffer through pain related to her food allergy. Her dejection grew as doctors took away her favorite foods one by one to determine exactly what she could eat.

Seeing Sarah's grief over finally losing her cherished chocolate broke Matt's heart.

“As I’m holding it over the trash can, she started getting really upset and said, ‘I’m never going to eat anything good again,’” Matt remembered. “It was somewhere between despair and anger. I just really wanted to heal that moment.”

Right then, Matt decided to make chocolate Sarah could eat.

A critic who can make a grown man cry

Five and a half years later, the guy indifferent to chocolate, someone with no food production background and whose job in technology commercialization was far from the drudgery of grinding cacao beans, runs SoChatti, a full-blown Indianapolis business turning out vegan, dairy-free chocolate that would impress the most discerning chocolate lovers.

“Matt is a bit of a tinkerer. He’s always experimenting with our meals at home. So, I thought, that’s the approach Matt’s going to take," Sarah said. "It might be a good stopgap.”

She crossed her fingers, skeptically.

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Matt found cacao nibs at an Indianapolis health food store. He roasted them in the couple’s kitchen oven and then ground the nibs in a mortar and pestle or a coffee grinder before adding cocoa butter and sugar. Those first experiments may have left Sarah feeling like she might be better off without chocolate.

“Sarah is a critic that would easily make a grown man cry,” Matt said. “I would spend like four to six hours making a batch of chocolate, and she would walk up to it and taste it and go, ‘It tastes like capers,' and walk away.”

Love and obsession

Matt remained devoted. He had been in love with Sarah since the two met in college at Indiana University. He wasn’t going to give up.

“I was like, how hard can it be? Turns out making chocolate is really hard. But I didn’t know that at the time, and it was worth a shot.”

The couple recalled the cacao varieties they tasted on a vacation to Peru before Sarah’s diagnosis. Those memories prompted Matt to play with different beans. Within weeks, an initial $21 investment in that mortar and pestle and coffee grinder grew to stuff that filled an entire kitchen cabinet, then two. Before long, chocolate-making equipment crammed a corner of the Rubins’ garage, and Matt started pushing chocolate bars on friends.

“It was one of those hobbies where you kind of wait for the intervention banner to show up, where your friends just start to corner you,” he said, laughing. “But it turns out when you give away free chocolate constantly, the intervention banner never comes.”

Four months after the first batch Matt attempted at home in June 2013, a professional chocolatier told him his chocolate was good enough to stock in stores by the following Valentine’s Day.

The Rubins took the leap, eventually transitioning from solid bars to vacuum-packaging liquid chocolate, thereby reducing the chocolate's exposure to flavor-robbing air and allowing customers to enjoy chocolate as it tastes straight from tempering machines. It's pure chocolate flavor that usually only chocolate makers get to try at their factories.

Nothing will ever be the same

Matt sells the chocolate online at sochatti.com. The name riffs on cioccolato, the Italian word for chocolate. Think "so chocolaty."

After placing the packages in warm water for about 15 minutes, users squeeze chocolate through an attached spout directly onto fruit, doughnuts, popcorn, cookies or whatever else they want to cover in chocolate. Drizzle it into warm milk for hot cocoa or over stacks of french fries. Many customers fill shot glasses with different kinds and host chocolate-tasting parties.

As the company grew, Matt continued to geek out, designing small-scale grinding equipment that allows SoChatti chef and brand chief Jessica Halstead to produce hundreds of packages from a tiny shared kitchen at Indianapolis’ Jewish Community Center. There, she grinds and roasts single-origin beans, blending them with nothing more than cocoa butter and organic cane sugar.

Each day of chocolate-making begins with Halstead flavor-profiling beans. Like relationships, the flavor of the chocolate is always changing. Thirteen varieties are listed on her to-do board one morning, including Fiji, India, Honduras, Ecuador, Tanzania, Peru and Sierra Leone. No two batches are alike.

A single-origin bean from Peru releases red berry- and fig-forward notes. Tanzania tastes like blueberries. Honduras has a smoky stout flavor.

In 2019, SoChatti operations will move to a larger space. Matt is excited to see the company grow. So is Sarah, not just for herself, but for other chocolate lovers allergic to milk, one of eight major food allergens affecting 15 million Americans.

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe in a way how far the company has come, in looking back to that day of Matt making it in a coffee bean grinder in our kitchen, making a mess of our kitchen,” she said as the couple dipped spoons into warm chocolate and laughed at the memory. “There were moments where you’d think what came out of the oven cannot possibly be chocolate.”

Her delight is all Matt needs in his quest to make the finest chocolate his wife will ever taste.

“It was the act of love,” he said, “that never needed a thank you.”

Follow IndyStar food writer Liz Biro on Twitter: @lizbiro, Instagram: @lizbiro, and on Facebook. Call her at 317-444-6264.