So over the decades I’ve slowly graduated from Hershey’s-style milk chocolate to progressively stronger and stronger, darker and darker kinds.
Towards the end of last year a local boutique chocolatier started making some (very tasty) 91% varietal chocolates that were… pretty darn good.
So about two weeks ago I was out of all the good stuff. And I wondered to myself…
How would plain old Baker’s unsweetened taste?
Turns out it’s pretty good.
Awfully strong in the theobromine department, so you can’t eat that much without getting “overcaffeinated.” But minus all the cheap sugars and flavorings and such that goes into cheap sweetened chocolates it’s pretty darn good.
I realize it’s taken (inadvertent) years to get to this point so I don’t recommend jumping into it. And I seriously don’t recommend giving it, or any other 100% chocolate, as a gift to anyone else.
Note: I’m not about to give up half-and-half cream in my coffee.
I’m not quite at the point of
Submitted by Eve (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-07 19:27.I’m not quite at the point of baker’s chocolate yet, but I too am a fan of very dark chocolate. At the moment I prefer 72-85%. Organic tastes better, and I particularly like it without soy lecithin.
I need me some chocolate!
[Doh! I’ll have to look for some organic baker’s. Thanks for the tip, Eve. Ironically I quite enjoy lecithin (not sure if it’s soy, it’s the bulk stuff you can buy in health food stores) in smoothies and baking and stuff. But as far as I know I don’t need it in chocolate though. Thanks for that tip as well. —fl]
I try to eat organic
Submitted by Eve (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-07 21:03.I try to eat organic everything when given the option, and it almost always tastes better than the alternative (dairy products are a good example). Almost all chocolates contain soy-based emulsifiers, generally in the form of soy lecithin (it’s really hard to find chocolate without it). It tends to make the flavor more intense, but I think it’s worth avoiding since unfermented soy can cause a large number of negative effects on one’s health (the amount in chocolate is negligible, but it doesn’t take much soy, so I avoid it wherever possible…plus almost all soy these days is highly processed, which adds a lot of toxicity). Also, I find that dark chocolate without emulsifiers tends to be of a smoother quality and much more rich (better mouth feel, which is an actual term in chocolate critiquing, apparently). In my opinion, chocolate’s much better off without the stuff.
I also try to buy fair trade when possible, as most cacao is imported from places where workers are exploited and not paid a living wage. I think it’s worth paying the tiny bit extra (or sometimes the same price, depending what chocolate you compare it to), and the chocolate generally maintains very high quality standards.
Ugh, no. I don’t like
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-07 20:17.Ugh, no. I don’t like chocolate, and the darker it gets the worse it tastes. Baker’s chocolate is… less tolerable than raw jalapeños. White chocolate is okay (though hardly one of my favorite flavors). I’m assuming that since white chocolate contains almost no theobromine, that’s the part that my taste buds are reacting badly to.
(What the hell? I had to reload the captcha thing because it was asking me to type in what looked like a pair of ankhs. How do you type that?)
[Mmm, raw jalapeños! (Ok, minced as a garnish.) I’m not sure why it’s so bitter but it could be that. As for the captcha? Sheesh, Nightfall, I’m looking for a new solution again. Sorry about that. —fl]
I would guess that white
Submitted by Eve (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-07 20:38.I would guess that white chocolate contains no theobromine whatsoever because white chocolate contains no cocoa mass at all (and therefore is not real chocolate). But I’m not an expert, just an obsessed amateur.
[Yup. White chocolate is something else, usually milk solids and sugar backing up 50% or more cocoa butter. Which wouldn’t be all that bad if the butter wasn’t denatured to get rid of its natural flavors. Which, allegedly, can vary quite a bit by variety. Wikipedia says you’re right — it has very little to no theobromine. Thanks, Eve. —fl]
Off topic, but speaking of
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-08 00:21.Off topic, but speaking of erroneous symbolism or whatever, I went over some of the earlier posts to see if I missed any responses and on a whim clicked on a link for misogyny watch. There are some youtube videos on that site. Normally I wouldn’t bother because my computer has no sound (rarely need it anyway since I’m near-deaf) and lipreading videos is often a pain, but noticed that youtube now has “caption transcriptions”. However, it doesn’t appear to be ready for primetime, as the results are largely gibberish (the march 1 video has lines like “Korean veterans handles she suddenly got to be but what what I said oh my God it’s over”). A random sampling of videos on the youtube site shows that it generally doesn’t get much better than that. And also, given the large number of political terms and phrases that show up, it seems to be largely focused on transcribing American political speeches.
Dunno, just thought it was amusing.
OK! So less than a week ago I
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-08 11:14.OK! So less than a week ago I was ordered by my doctor to have no sugar/honey/HFCS/nectar/etc, no flour, no white rice, no refined cornmeal, no caffeine, and no artificial sweeteners for at least several months. (Also almost entirely monounsaturated and MCT types of fats with most protein from legumes and soy, so this is no Atkins license to have all the bacon you want!! Never been a big meat person anyhow!)
So here I come to this blog expecting to take my mind off bacon and waffles with whip cream that my roommates are pigging out on.
And what do I find? A discussion of chocolate!!!
PFFFFFF!!!
Oooh, I clicked on comments
Submitted by Sungold (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-08 20:13.Oooh, I clicked on comments hoping to find other lovers of dark, dark chocolate – and instead of the promised five comments, I find zero! Figleaf, I think there might be an issue with your comments; maybe spam attempts are being counted? If that’s all it is, I imagine it’s the least of your headaches.
Anyway, that theobromine link was excellent. I’d like to run the experiment: how much dark chocolate does it take to equal one good cafe au lait?
But I also have to gently scold you as a sexblogger for not pointing out the really crucial point about theobromine – that it’s credited with making chocolate into an aphrodisiac. Or so says Wikipedia. Who knows, it may be untrue, but again I’d be happy to be the guinea pig.
My mate gave me a bar of pure dark chocolate from Germany a few months ago, as a coming home present after he’d been traveling. The gesture was sweet; the chocolate, not so much. If sex is like chocolate, then I guess I like mine with a hint of sweetness. The pure stuff ended up in yummy baked goods, so no complaints.
Happy birthday, figleaf! I hope your celebration was perfectly bittersweet.
Oh-oh. Now I see other
Submitted by Sungold (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-08 20:15.Oh-oh. Now I see other people’s comments, only after I commented myself. Looks like this is maybe a bigger issues after all? Phooey!
[Hi Sungold, thanks for the heads-up. Actually I think it’s the new page-caching module I installed to help deal with the heavy load all the spam’s generating. I’ll go see if I can fine tune it a bit. Meanwhile, yeah, bit silly of me not to dwell on theobromine’s other well-documented effects. On this blog no less! Doh! —fl]