Hiatus

As you might have read in other posts, I have medical reasons for having a low-sugar diet. And right now, my doctor says no chocolate! So I'm going to take a hiatus to try to get better, and I'll get back to this fun pet project when I'm able.

Thanks for reading!

Formatting Issue, Cont.

So I've figured out what's going on: I have the blue links problem ever since my word processor of choice, LibreOffice, updated a few days ago. I now need to either re-install the old version or come up with a new "host" for my pre-blogging review process, which is a minor pain and might take a few days. Back shortly, I hope!

Formatting Issue

I've been writing up a couple posts (for tomorrow and next week) and have discovered some formatting problems, specifically with the color of (I think) links that have been clicked already. I suspect the issue may have something to do with a recent update in the program in which I write reviews, and then the transition when I copy/paste them into Blogger. I'm waiting to see if the finished posts look the same once they've been published, but in the meantime, I'm sorry for the weird, dark blue links.

Meta-Post on Ingredients

For some time I've been meaning to write a brief post on how I write my ingredient lists, just to be clear to readers, so here I go.

U.S. laws require that companies report ingredients in order of how much is in the product. Bread starts with flour and candy with sugar, and ingredients present in small quantities usually come at the end, which is why you'll never see soy lecithin or vanilla listed first on your chocolate bars. That's easy for me to replicate here. 

Where it gets more complicated, I bend the rules for simplicity:

• I break up ingredients that have their own ingredients. If I read “Cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, toffee nuggets (sugar, butter, vanilla), vanilla,” I just write “Cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, butter, vanilla.” I can't guarantee it's in appropriate weight order, but I just want readers to know the basics of what's in these chocolate bars; the details you can look for elsewhere if you really care. If the details are relevant to my review, I mention them myself. 
• I generally attempt to standardize ingredients. If a label lists “sugar,” I write “sugar.” If it lists “cane sugar,” I write “cane sugar.” But if an earthy-crunchy-organic company boasts “evaporated cane juice,” I write “cane sugar” for standardization purposes. I don't have a problem with “evaporated cane juice” as a label, this just makes things less confusing when I'm reviewing different but similar products every week.
• I try to use American spellings even if labels don't. Last week's licorice bar actually used the spelling “liquorice” in the ingredients, but aside from when it's in the bar's name, I'll revert to American spelling. I like talking about how a company is French or Danish or whatnot, but I'd rather my ingredient reporting be consistent.

I do see a benefit to just writing ingredients the way they're listed on the box, but at some point I found lists that were particularly confusing (or I was translating them myself and knew I might not do it the way the company would have), so I made a choice to go this route. And now you know!

Chocolove Almonds & Sea Salt in Dark Chocolate 55% Cocoa

3.2oz (90g) bar

Ingredients: Cocoa liquor, sugar, almonds, cocoa butter, sea salt, soy lecithin, vanilla

11g sugar/30g serving (36.7% by wt.)

When I was flipping through my bag of to-be-reviewed bars a couple weeks ago, I found that I had bought several flavored with sea salt and decided to review them as a pack. I started with the Vosges and Trader Joe's caramel bars, followed a tangent with another Trader Joe's bar, and am back this week with Chocolove Almonds & Sea Salt in 55% Cocoa.

Meta-moment: I've been violating the old maximum-1/3-sugar rule for two reasons: 1) Health-wise, I can do that now, and 2) many interesting bars come in dark chocolate bases that are a little higher in sugar than my usual. Unsurprisingly, I often find them too sweet for my taste, but with common brands like Chocolove, I have frequently seen the whole product line on sale and really wanted to give some fun flavors a try. So now I am.

Corporate Info: I have a soft spot for Chocolove, having lived in near its hometown of Boulder, Colorado and enjoyed the company's samples in my local Whole Foods. It's a relatively young company (Wikipedia says 1996; Chocolove's website doesn't say), hasn't yet been bought by a giant conglomerate, and is supposedly working with these guys to source its chocolate from well-treated cocoa farmers and communities. On the other hand, the chocolate isn't officially organic or fair trade, and Chocolove is rated a C by the Better World folks (same as Hershey's, much better than Nestle), so I don't want to give them my unconditional Choco-love (ha ha, I crack me up). But it's cheaper than most premium chocolate—$2-2.50 a bar—and reliably tasty.

Appearance: Chocolove's usual quilted-looking, heart-topped shape, kind of a greyish brown, very glossy, bumpy on the back.

Smell: Sweet, nutty.

Taste: Okay, yeah, it's too sweet for me and not super-dark, which makes it hard to pick out the other flavors. What I can say is that you get entire halved almonds and a well-incorporated, non-dominant saltiness. The wrapper says something about salt crystals, and that very well may be true, but they must be pretty small; while it doesn't taste like the salt is dissolved into the chocolate, there's more uniformity to it than I've found in other salty bars.

Conclusion: Chocolove Almonds & Sea Salt in Dark Chocolate 55% Cocoa didn't taste like anything special to me, but if you like almonds and salt in a relatively light dark chocolate, maybe it would be great to you.

Update: Germany!........and Blog Glitches

This, my friends, is a view of just part of the chocolate section of a department store in Bremen, Germany. I'm back from three weeks traveling through the country, and while I certainly didn't go just for the chocolate, I was frankly overwhelmed by the options Germany presents. I found confectionary shops all over the place, saw wide ranges from companies I'd only glimpsed in the US, visited a chocolate museum, came home with nine bars, and wish I'd bought more.

So what to talk about on the blog? I figure in this economy most people won't be hopping a plane to Europe, so I don't want to bore you with detailed reviews of chocolate you won't find in the U.S. Instead, I intend to start by posting general observations about chocolate in Germany, big or little things that surprised me or otherwise were different than what we see here. Then I'd like to write about the museum, which has a partnership with Lindt but nonetheless addresses other companies and the morally complex history of chocolate production and marketing, and—not at all controversial, but still cool—how chocolate is made, with a working small-scale assembly line. Finally, I think the bars I chose to review are interesting because they're all about the inclusions and flavorings, ones I have rarely or never seen in the U.S.; how well will chocolate pair with florals, or spices, or even beer?

While I work on these posts, you'll see some pre-scheduled reviews I wrote before I left. On that note, I want to apologize for the glitches over the last few weeks. I set reviews to publish weekly and see now that the first one isn't there, but I received a now-deleted comment on that post so it must have gone up at some point, and Blogger still claims it's “scheduled” for 5/12. I also had less internet access than I'd anticipated, which made moderating comments difficult. Thanks for bearing with me!

Dear Readers, I'm far from home and posting this (badly) from my phone. See you in a couple weeks!

What To Do With Excess Chocolate?

My newly purchased bars go into the pantry in a paper bag whose contents are the only food in the house that no one but me is allowed to touch. Once reviewed, all chocolate ends up in a big open-access bowl along with the other broken half-bars and regular chocolate purchases. So what to do with all that chocolate? Ah, first-world problems. Since I'm not a serious chocoholic, I don't actually eat straight chocolate all day, especially if I didn't really like a bar in the first place. But most of it gets used in the end, and here's how:

• Cocoa
• Aside from its obvious charms, in hot chocolate the milk mellows harsh flavors and overwhelms weird textures. Cocoa is endlessly customizable with sugar or other sweeteners, extracts, spices, coffee, a pinch of salt, whatever you like. Even inclusions are okay, since the pieces of nut or fruit just sink to the bottom.
• My quick-and-dirty way to make cocoa is to break up a few pieces of chocolate into a mug, add in anything else I want, and top with milk. I microwave until just hot, stir, and microwave and stir a bit at a time until chocolate is melted and thoroughly incorporated.
• Watery cocoa is the pits, but it can be avoided! You can use higher-fat milk for richness or whip the milk with a frother, which turns even nonfat milk into soft, pillowy goodness. I happen to use soy milk, which when shaken froths well on its own, but I also have a frother that I quite like.
• Baking
• Baking chocolate is still just chocolate, though it sometimes includes extra cocoa butter for creamy meltiness, and serious bakers probably have favorite brands for top-quality cakes and pastries. Personally I'm usually just experimenting with a basic brownie or cookie recipe, and I have enough random chocolate around that I can't justify buying E. Guittard wafers, so I chop up what I have and voilà.
• I don't recommend using chocolate with harsh or “off” flavors for baking, especially in items like chocolate chip cookies. There might be cookie around those chocolate pieces, but the chocolate will still be harsh or “off,” and now you have a whole batch of weird tasting cookies.
• Hoping someone else will eat it
• Some chocolate is appealing enough to others that it disappears before I get around to using it elsewhere. On the other hand, if I didn't like it much or it's directed at a very particular sort of audience, no one else is anxious to finish it either. Thus the absinthe bar is still hanging around. Oh well.

Format Changes

Thus far I have written in a free-form style, discussing whatever I want to about a bar and always addressing only smell and taste. While I enjoy this writing process, I'm changing it for two reasons.

The first reason is that I'd like to make a habit of discussing the company behind each bar. Chocolate is an amazing product, in which corporate backing can mean anything from child slave labor to community-owned farms with fairly paid employees. It's also fascinating in how frequently small companies are subsumed by larger ones, often huge international conglomerates, which might leave the product alone or might change everything but the name. Your choice in chocolate can involve personal taste, environmental effects, several countries' growers and processors, and a complex corporate history in a knot of often hidden ethical implications. It's worth a little research, especially for such an unnecessary luxury product. I'm not promising dissertations here, but rather a short, dedicated entry on the corporate background of each bar.

The second reason is that the casual reader might not care about the history of a company or what I was thinking when I bought a bar. Thus I want to deconstruct my mushy paragraphs into several easily perused categories. Here's my current thinking:

• Size/Ingredients/Sugar Content: same as before
• Introduction: how I bought the bar and any other personal musings
• Corporate Info
• Appearance
• Smell
• Taste: texture, general overview (sour/bitter/sweet etc)
• Snooty Reviewer Stuff: my attempt at analyzing subtleties of scent and flavor
• Final Thoughts, if applicable
• Conclusion: same as before

One more thing: I'll be posting more on individual chocolate shops. I've generally avoided such posts because they're usually specific to my town (Seattle) and I don't want to hold myself to any particular reviewing standards, but I recently had a good experience at a local shop and want to write about it. Shop “reviews” will still be relatively infrequent.

Describing Chocolate

As I rack up the chocolate reviews, I frequently encounter bars whose scent and taste I can't accurately describe. Some flavors are obvious to me, like dark red berries and raisins, tropical fruit, or red wine, but those don't always fit the bill. Other times I might use the same term, like tart, to characterize two bars that are indeed tart but in different ways, so my description is lacking.

With these weaknesses in mind I'd like to try a more rigorous vocabulary, and this chart seems like a good place to begin. I can think of two potential downsides. First, it might not help you as a reader to hear that a given bar smells of mushroom, or tastes of cedar. I'll try to minimize the over-description by first noting that the chocolate is mild, or bitter, or whatever else you might experience as someone who just wants to eat chocolate that tastes good. The second problem is that I don't entirely know what I'm doing. Chocolate doesn't usually come at you with a strong punch of vodka, ashes, or grass, so I'll be reaching for what are often very subtle flavor distinctions. I apologize for any confusion this may generate, and I hope you enjoy the process nonetheless. I think it'll be fun!

Irregular Posting

I have generally tried to post weekly, each Friday or Saturday. Recent events have made it difficult to maintain a strict schedule, so for a while posts will be more irregularly timed but hopefully still once a week.

A Reflection on Changing Tastes

Blogging about chocolate week after week has changed my tastes in the stuff. It's less the eating than the self-reflection: determining what makes one bar different from another, noticing patterns in what I like and what I don't, and adjusting my preferences as new bars challenge my senses.

Some of the changes are ones I expected, like a tendency to prefer darker (say 85% cacao) or lighter (60-70%) chocolate depending on what I've been eating lately. The same goes for other flavor elements and textural variations, which I seem to like in different ways at different times. Sometimes a new sensation can be impressive in part because it is novel; if I try that chocolate again later, I might think it's bland, or too strong, or a bit off. I try to be mindful of this phenomenon when I declare that a bar's flavor is well-balanced or overly sweet or sour or whatnot, but no matter what, my tastes are as changeable as anyone else's.

I have discovered some constants. Occasionally I'm blown away by a small piece of a chocolate with a distinctive flavor—it's like taking a bite of good funky cheese—but by the same token, I don't usually want a large chunk of it. For standard size bars, I like something that isn't too sour or bitter but is complex enough that I want to keep eating. Texturally, I generally prefer a more waxy or creamy chocolate to a brittle or chalky one. I don't care much about sheen, though. A glossy bar can be creamy and smooth or unpalatably fatty tasting, and a dull one can be rich and deeply chocolatey or crumbly and bland, so while I note appearance, it doesn't mean much to me.

As far as inclusions and flavorings go, I like those that have a real presence. What I think of as good dark chocolate isn't a blank canvas, it's interesting and varied and perfumed; any extracts or pieces should complement the chocolate in intensity, neither overwhelming nor being overwhelmed. The few exceptions to this rule have been when I believed the chocolatier specifically wanted the additional flavor to bring out a new dimension of the chocolate. I've tasted this with spices and occasionally fruit, and of course there's the vanilla in many chocolate bars, which usually doesn't scream “vanilla” so much as quietly enhance the chocolate itself.

I feel similarly about texture. Inclusions might add interest or variation, crunch, chew, whatever, but they shouldn't cause me to ask “what are they trying to do with this?” I once ate a (never-reviewed) bar that was supposed to be fruit flavored but tasted like it had some sort of vaguely fruity candy dust embedded in it. The flavoring had neither the taste nor the texture of the fruit on the label and, seen from another angle, wasn't so counter to expectations that I would think it to be intentionally challenging—it was just gritty, bland candy. Bleh.

Finally, my reaction to certain brands has changed over time. I've always admired Theo's methods and goals, bold inclusions and flavorings, and sampling experience, but now that I've tried it many times over, I find its basic 70% chocolate to be too sour and not a good match for some of its pairings. (By contrast, I've been very impressed by many of the confections and some of the lighter bars, including but by no means limited to the super-creamy 45% cacao milk chocolate bar and the outstanding vanilla bar.) Once upon a time, my go-to dark bar was Endangered Species' 88%, but I now prefer Green & Black's 85% and have actually turned several friends onto that bar as well. My preferences may change yet again, as I'm trying more high-end chocolate and appreciating what it offers that cheaper bars cannot. But then, I suspect my financial constraints will keep my head out of the clouds.

Admittedly this post is pretty darned self-indulgent (okay, the whole blog is self-indulgent), but I think it's important. Even if they come across as the final word on a product, reviews are inherently subjective, and it's nice to remind myself of that once in a while.

We'll Be Back After the Break

I have a whole post lined up for today, but I misplaced my camera cord and can't download any photos. Taking a mini hiatus until I figure out what to do.


Update 8/28: Picked up another one. Back on track. 

I'm back!

Laptop died. Ate some chocolate. Repair place recommended buying a new laptop instead of fixing the old one. Researched. More chocolate. Traveled. Bought a MacBook. Chocolate. Spent time getting used to my first Mac. Ate chocolate and wrote a review in OpenOffice.org. Fought with iPhoto. More chocolate. Figured out iPhoto, more or less. Returned.


[Update a few weeks later: Screw iPhoto and its crazy file organization that can't be manipulated through or transferred to any other program. I downloaded Xee for basic cropping and rotating and use Finder (Mac's My Computer) for sorting and viewing. The user interface is less elegant, but at least I can save my photos wherever I darn well please. Blargh.] 

Introduction to the Chocolate Basket

Not long ago, a health issue required me to cut sugar to very low levels. I lost my beloved sour gummy candies, not to mention cake, pie, cookies, ice cream, and other items. I now eat a lot of very dark chocolate, usually with 70% cacao or higher. (Sugar content can still vary, but it seems to hover around the same level among straight chocolate bars with the same cacao content. Sugar content of flavored bars can vary significantly.) It's hard to find flavored bars of very dark chocolate, but they do exist, and some are in regular rotation in my chocolate basket. 


This is the basket in its current state. Straight chocolate bars are on the left; flavored bars are on the right.

I've picked up bars at regular and upscale supermarkets, Asian markets, and specialty stores. Cheap chocolate usually doesn't come dark enough and I avoid the most expensive bars, but this blog might be a good excuse to splurge.

If you haven't eaten a lot of dark chocolate, you'll probably find it somewhat bitter and lacking the creaminess of a nice milk chocolate (though dark milk chocolate does exist). I've found that what I'm used to strongly affects what I taste when I eat chocolate. If I've been eating a lot of 85%, 70% tastes overly sweet, as though the sugar overshadows the cacao. If I've been eating some sort of 65%, flavored bar, 90% tastes incredibly intense, like a full-bodied red wine. I suspect this will influence how I review the bars, which will be an interesting challenge. It also might influence what you think of the same bars--what's tasty to me might be unpalatable to you--but the experimenting sure is fun.


Molly D.