Gray Lady, Meet Gray Salt Caramels

If you love Fran's salted caramels, well, you're in good company -- the salted kind make up 75% of Fran's caramel business. How good are they? So good that when the New York Times Magazine did an article on caramel + salt, Fran's is the first non-NYC purveyor they mention:

Leave it to the Americans to take such destruction one step further, by pairing it with chocolate. In 2001, Fran Bigelow, a chocolate maker in Seattle, was looking for a new garnish for her chocolate-covered caramels when she tried some of the gray salt she had been seeing in restaurants. She had to give out lots of free samples to get people to try it. But now, she said, her salted chocolate caramels make up 75 percent of the Fran’s Chocolates caramel franchise. “The salt pushes the flavors forward, giving it more depth,” she told me. Once people experience it, they rarely go back: “When you try plain — I mean chocolate-covered — it just doesn’t awaken your palate.” Other palate-awakening chocolates include the salted caramel-filled thimbles from Sahagun in Portland, Ore., and the salted caramel balls from L’Artisan du Chocolat in London — also their top seller and worth their weight in shipping costs.