A minor disappointment
I am very fond of chocolate. As soon as I start a bar of milk chocolate, I can't get myself to stop eating it until it's all gone, the whole 100 g or whatever amount there is. Thus I must avoid milk chocolate at all costs.
Bitter chocolate with a higher percentage of cocoa solids is better in this respect. After I've had a little, I don't really want any more of it because of its bitter taste. I find that chocolate with 60-70% cocoa solids isn't bitter enough to prevent me from wanting more, so I usually end up eating Lindt's 85% chocolate, which is sufficiently bitter that I don't want to eat more than a little at a time.
Well, recently I had the opportunity to buy a bar of 100% chocolate. (Actually the ingredients statement on the packaging says it contains at least 99.99% cocoa solids.) Needless to say, I couldn't resist such a challenge, so I bought it and promptly started eating it, expecting something truly disgustingly bitter.
Unfortunately I was quite disappointed. I really couldn't feel any
difference in taste between this and Lindt's 85% chocolate that I usually eat.
It would be interesting to perform a doubly blind experiment about this,
but I very much doubt I could tell the tastes apart at better than chance level.
So I guess there's no reason to want to eat the 100% chocolate, except
for the snob appeal, and I fortunately don't know any chocolate snobs
that might be impressed by such a thing.
posted by ill-advised at 9:31 PM
5 Comments:
I tried a bar of the pepperoncino one. It was too much.
Didn't like Lindt's 99%, either. It just crumbles in your mouth, it's like eating cocoa powder with a spoon.
For me 70% Lindt is just right. Even better if it's 70% Novi.
The only time I met with the simple chocolate was in Oaxaca, Mexico. It is famous for chocolate-making and once you're there on the chocolate street you see nothing but 2 main ingredients plus optional additional ones: cocoa and sugar and the most often third - cinnamon. You pick the how much off each ingredient you want, they mix it and grind it and voila - there's your chocolate. They also sell it in packages. I still have some and do with it like they do - hot chocolate. :) This is the best chocolate I've ever eaten in my life.
Didn't like Lindt's 99%, either. It just crumbles in your mouth, it's like eating cocoa powder with a spoon.
That's interesting -- the Cuorenero 100% that I've tried doesn't crumble. Its consistency isn't really noticeably different from Lindt's 85%. I haven't tried Lindt's 99% yet, though.
Incidentally, today I've tried a bit of Cuorenero 100% and Lindt 85% one after another and think I can detect a slight difference in taste, but it's really minuscule and negligible for all practical purposes :)
I'm really curious what the other Cuorenero 100% taste like -- if 99.99% of it is cocoa mass anyway, I wonder how much of an effect the remaining 0.01% can have on the taste? Anyway, their website mentions some really bizarre flavours -- chilli peppers, rosemary -- hardly things I'd expect to find in chocolate bars. Maybe one day curiosity will get the better of me and I'll order their 20-bar assortment pack :)
@aljaz:
I like hot chocolate too. But I'm afraid that if I drank more hot chocolate, it would be even harder to resist having too much of it :) Resisting solid chocolate bars is hard enough, I'm not sure how I would be able to resist something liquid :)
Nice to hear that the simple and traditional chocolate-making approaches are still practiced in Mexico. I read a book about the history of chocolate some time ago and remember their mentioning that Aztecs always drank their chocolate (solid bars are a much more recent invention), the frothier, spicier, bitterer, the better :) It's nice to see that some of that tradition is still alive.
P.S.:
Having now finished eating (with the help of generous friends) that bar of 100% chocolate, I must say that I no longer think its taste is quite equivalent to that of Lindt's 85% chocolate. The former is more bitter and more disgusting after all. In fact, now that I've returned to Lindt's 85%, the latter almost feels somehow sweet. :-)
P.P.S.: I've recently noticed an interesting article about chocolate snobs in Salon. I must say that some of the bullshit on the Cuorenero packaging and website seems to be targeted at precisely that demographic.
Anyway, having gone through two or three more bars of Cuorenero's 100% chocolate over the past few months, Lindt's 85% now tastes so good that I can almost use it as a special treat when I want to pamper myself a bit :)))
Post a Comment
<< Home