|
It's been suggested that there ought to be a thread focusing on good dark chocolate, and also any other interesting/regional/specialty sweets that exist at a more ambitious level than a mass-market bag in the checkout aisle. Because there's an awful lot of it about nowadays. I'll kick things off on the subject of chocolate. Specifically I'm talking about stuff like single-origin dark bars that focus on the intrinsic flavor profiles of particular growing regions and cacao cultivars, because I find that it's every bit as fascinating and engrossing (and let's be frank, self-indulgent and pretentious) a subject as wine tasting, and without a lot of the downsides. Namely, chocolate doesn't get you drunk (okay, maybe not exactly a downside, but it means everyone can take part!); it's really not fattening because we're talking about lingeringly tasting small chunks at a time instead of sitting down and chomping through a whole bar in a sitting; and it's cheap! Which means it's super accessible. You can get yourself involved in tasting and naming the flavor notes of a whole bunch of different chocolate makers' signature bars without spending a lot of cash and without worrying about who's driving you home. Nowhere has the subject of the relative cost of fine chocolate as a "luxury" item been so vividly illustrated than in my favorite go-to food blog article (series), "What's Noka Worth?" https://dallasfood.org/2006/12/noka-chocolate-part-1/  Which I would think of as a standard starting point for this thread, because not only is it a hilarious story of a couple of scammers who thought they could pull off a ludicrous "sell off-the-shelf chocolate at an insane markup to rich idiots" caper, it's what kicked off my own interest in chocolate and sent me off on a journey of discovery to learn as much as I could about the making of chocolate, the sourcing of the beans, the production processes and techniques, and what makes the end result "good" and "bad". Most particularly, it introduced me to a whole lot of the most well-respected names of high-end chocolate makers out there, along with ways to find them and to spur yourself into trying new brands and origins without having to know what you're looking for to begin with.  The article is from 2006, but it's still very relevant today, since the market for high-end chocolate has only grown since then. I'll quote the final page of the article, for the current company links if not for the specific products which certainly have changed in the interim: quote:As a bit of an epilogue, I’ll offer a few alternatives to Noka, for those who may be interested in tasting top quality single-origin chocolates (as good as or better than what Noka uses) at much lower prices. Chocosphere is mentioned repeatedly and it deserves to be, because it has access to all the (dozens of) great brands on the market today and can get them to you quickly and packed properly against heat damage and such, and because one of the things they offer is a "Chocolate of the Month Club" which you can order for timeframes of 3 to 12 months; the 3-month starter version is $150 and works out to at least 5 bars (which average around $8/bar for the good stuff) each month, so it's pretty price-competitive all things considered. And what it means is they'll hand-select a set of random dark bars and ship them to you so you can try new stuff you might not have known existed. I've definitely found some all-time favorites through this method that I go back to again and again: the Domori Sambirano comes to mind in particular, which to me tastes intensely like sour cherries; and the Valrhona Ampamakia which (at least for one of the vintage years, I think 2005) was like rich peanut butter. Also the story of Chuao (not the company called Chuao, which does stunt chocolate with stuff like bacon and hibiscus in it, but the actual coastal valley in Venezuela called Chuao where they harvest some of the best criollo cacao in the world and all the big-name companies like Amedei and Domori fight like dogs over it), is a fascinating read, and worth getting into additionally from the POV of wanting to source the beans ethically and make sure they come from places where the locals are being treated fairly. Anyway, I don't want to make this an exhaustive OP, and I am anything but an expert from the actual cooking side of things. I just went to Trader Joe's though and picked up this stack for like $20:  I'll be trying these in the same spirit as the Noka article and seeing what the TJ selection has to offer these days. Meanwhile, let me reiterate that this thread is for more stuff than just chocolate; I'd like to hear about other niche candy and regional sweets traditions that have their own equally intricate rabbit-holes to go down. (Indian sweets for example, I've always found that to be a potentially huge subject that I'd like to know more about.) So I'll leave the floor to anyone else who has anything else they'd like to add! Data Graham fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jul 18, 2021 |
#
?
Jul 18, 2021 18:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 17:46 |
|
|
I know gently caress all about chocolate but my parents like Theo and I've tasted some of it and it tasted fine. That Noka article you linked is pretty fun, and also a good cautionary tale about spending too much money on anything, really.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2021 07:09
|
|
|
I've always been fascinated by candy that's only available regionally, either because the companies that make it are relatively small-batch or because they don't travel well. Look at the Idaho Spud!  Literally made in Idaho and, I guess, resembling a potato, this thing's been around since 1918. It's described as "a light cocoa flavored, soft marshmallow center drenched with a dark chocolate coating and then sprinkled with coconut" and while I'm not particularly wild about marshmallow, I'd have to give it a shot based entirely for the novelty of it. The Chicken Dinner, which I think pretty much everyone who's taken a passing interest in vintage candy has heard of, has long since been out of production:  I've never seen an actual photograph of the thing, just the drawings of its cross-section in old ads, and I have no idea what was in it apart from its chocolate coating and "nuts" - every writeup mentions its nut content being touted as healthful and inexpensive energy, hence the name. What's weird, though, is the conflicting history I found: it was originally made by Sperry Candy of Milwaukee, but one report says that Sperry was later sold to Pearson's (who are still around, but I never see their stuff in shops) in 1962. However, the website for the Idaho Candy Company, makers of the aforementioned Spud, states that "In this factory Idaho Candy Company produced over 50 different candy bars over the years [...] Some of the bar names included [the] Chicken Dinner Bar". So was Idaho Candy making Chicken Dinners in its factory under license, or a regional variation, or...?  Maybe this uncertainty around its ownership is why no candy maker has ever revived the brand / recipe as a limited-time publicity stunt or whatever.edit: maybe the writer of the copy at Idaho Candy was confusing Chicken Dinner with Chicken Bones, a candy they actually still make:  The damned things actually look like chicken tenders, and are "peanut butter honeycomb[ed] into a molasses based hard candy [and] coat[ed] them with toasted coconut". That sounds pretty good, actually. Pastry of the Year fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Jul 22, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2021 12:23
|
|
|
Really neat stuff! The Noka article blew my mind when I read it years ago. Any suggestions on where to get decent baking chocolate these days? Does it even matter if there’s soy, extra cocoa butter or palm oil added, if I’m only using the chocolate to make ganache or mousse or whatever? I have a hard time finding anything in my area that doesn’t have a bunch of the additives I mentioned.
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2021 12:38
|
|
|
Came into this thread to post about Amedei and was happy to see it mentioned in the OP. I got a bar as a gift like 10 years back and it really blew my mind about dark chocolate.
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2021 18:01
|
|
|
This may be dumb but I have a couple of souvenirs from visiting cacao plantations in the last 3-4 years: The one on the right is from Kauai, at this place: https://lydgatefarms.com/chocolate-farm-tour/ which I visited in 2017 And the one on the left is from Costa Rica, which had a similar farm that I saw a couple of years later. I'm sure they're nice and fermented now (that's how it works, right?) Cacao farm tours are pretty fun. You get to see what the actual trees are like and how they're planted; in both places they're not in orderly rows like in an orchard, they're just sort of naturally strewn around as one element of a dense jungle full of other kinds of trees. The Kauai farm is sort of an organic demonstrator place where tons of different things are all being grown together in one place, so you had the cacao trees intermingled with a bunch of other crops; but the Costa Rica one was very similar, cacao trees just sort of here and there in a primeval forest with a trail winding around through it so you can see what they all look like in what amounts to their natural habitat. Hawaii:   The cacao beans are surrounded by this tart pithy flesh that's really tasty. Nothing like chocolate, more like just a kind of melonish sourness. Would make a very pleasant drink, though you don't get that much juice out of a pod, and they're kind of a pain in the rear end to pull down out of a tree as you can see. The Costa Rica tour was pretty full-featured:    (Christ what is wrong with imgur lately) This latter one involved demonstrations of pretty much every phase of the chocolate-making process, including the grinding (which you can see on the left) and the conching. They passed around some finished molded chocolates which came from one of two bins: one was from a big commercial maker, the other was from that farm right there. We were supposed to guess which one was which (they melted and molded both on-site, Noka-style). The one I guessed was the commercial one was smoother, whereas the other was grainy and the flavors were a bit weirder if I recall. Turned out I was wrong, the smoother-finished one was the local one  Anyway I did buy some from each place, of course. I can definitely recommend the Hawaiian one, even though they didn't seem too bothered about tempering (the finish on the wrapped bars was dull and a little tacky to the touch); the way they talk about being so isolated from the mainland and shipping anything anywhere is a big deal, and on the smallest and most primitive of the islands no less, I feel pretty good about supporting what they're trying to do. I guess what I'm saying in general is that at least from the places I've seen, and when the crop is criollo flavor beans rather than the Forastero industrial kind, chocolate farming is still very much a small-volume concern, focused around individual growers working just a few trees at a time, because that's all you need to get a crop going. It isn't like, say, coffee or wine grapes or (these days) cannabis, where you're going to be covering the hillsides with orderly rows of cash crop and ugly plastic sheeting. It's "yeah we got some cacao trees, want a bar we made ourselves?"
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2021 21:21
|
|
|
what can you say about labor practices in present-day chocolate-making? particularly in the growing operations - I know you use the word "plantation" which has kind of a particular subtext here in America, maybe not in this context... I mainly ask because "fair trade" and sometimes "slavery-free" seems to be a common theme in modern chocolate marketing
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2021 14:25
|
|
|
I've been wondering about that. I know the word "plantation" has been getting slowly migrated out of common usage in things like rum and sugar, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were happening in chocolate too. As of ten years ago at least terms like "single-plantation" were certainly not thought twice about, but I'm sure there's better terminology available. I don't know though. As for actual labor practices, I don't know much either (aside from how chocolate from places like Côte d'Ivoire is still considered questionable at best, so I guess things haven't improved much since ~2006), but this is as good a place as any to put findings.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2021 17:20
|
|
|
Fruits of the sea posted:Really neat stuff! The Noka article blew my mind when I read it years ago. I think application matters a lot here... for actual baking, my favorite (and often cheapest!) option is good ol' Baker's Unsweetened Chocolate. Makes great cupcakes / cakes / brownies. For ganache and mousse the conversation is more complicated but ultimately it's based on personal preference more than anything else. I probably have the palate of an 8-year old but single origin chocolates are fun and interesting for a tasting event but IMO highly unnecessary for the vast majority of recipes.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2021 18:07
|
|
|
I haven't been able to find it for some years now, but that will never stop me from recommending folks pick up a Thick, Dark Bar of Copper Monkey if you should happen to stumble upon it---besides being Powerful, it is oddly Distinctive in a way that otherwise I'd only really encountered with Ghirardelli prior. In better times, you could find all sorts of random dark chocolates and whatnot on some kind of discount via Marshall's and/or Home Goods. Similarly, I'm guessing the pandemic essentially short circuited the broader roll out of Ruby Chocolate given the timing and all?
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2021 14:24
|
|
|
I had a thread a while ago where I went through my process of doing bean to bar chocolate. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3859513&pagenumber=2&perpage=40 Since then I've made a number of different batches including making some white chocolate. There's a process you can do where you use coffee beans and cocoa butter to make a coffee "chocolate" that i've been wanting to try too. Cacao Barry just released a product called Evocao that they say is made from the whole cacao fruit. The place I order my beans from just got a shipment of jaguar cocoa in https://shop.chocolatealchemy.com/products/mexico-bicolor-pataxte-jaguar-cocoa-lot-a-direct-trade-2021 It looks really interesting and totally different from the normal cacao.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2021 15:27
|
|
|
That's a hella cool thread, even if short — tons of hands-on info packed in there. I didn't know about cocoa butter silk or about the refrigerator-for-8-minutes trick to tempering. More art than science as they say, no matter how much actual science it involves...
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2021 15:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 17:46 |
|
|
I kinda got busy with work and other stuff and feel off updating it next time I make a batch I'll update it again. Cocoa butter silk is a game changer for tempering it's the sole reason I got a sous vide setup. I got a larger grinder a few months ago but it was damaged in shipping I'm still trying to track down parts. The part that holds the grinder stones broke I tried JB Weld to fix it and it did OK for a bit but halfway through the batch I was doing in it it broke again.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2021 16:12
|
|