PITTSBURGH — Amanda Wright was an academic before she decided to become a chocolatier, so it's no surprise she's a teacher at heart.
Soon after she launched A519 Chocolate, the gourmet chocolate shop she opened in 2015 in Greenfield with her husband, Andy Rape, and relocated a year later to Millvale, she started offering interactive truffle-making classes along with her boxes of hand-painted candies. Students get hands-on instruction in everything from tempering chocolate and molding it into shells to creating the sumptuous caramels and ganaches that fill the handmade truffles.
"I really enjoy producing that layer of education," says Wright, 34, who was a research assistant studying adolescent brain development at the University of Pittsburgh when, in a seminal moment 10 years ago, she decided to go to culinary school on the West Coast.
