Chocolate

About 6 months ago Taska decided that she was interested in thinking about Chocolate in the same way that oenophiles think about wine. We've been trying many different chocolates, including some flavored chocolates (a Vosges 41% "Barcelona" bar that includes sea salt was particularly yummy).

We, and my parents, recently took a tour of Scharffen Berger Chocolate factory in Berkeley (highly recommended!) and the tour guides there were quite enthusiastic about our ideas, and mentioned several things about the already extant chocolate tasting/gourmet chocolate community. For one thing, it was claimed that chocolate has more flavor compounds than wine. I'm not sure, but I believe this means that chemically, it has more compounds that tickle our taste buds. Chocolate, or wine, will vary in the proportion of these compounds, giving rise to complex and subtle differences of flavor. Since chocolate has more, the idea is that it is a more fertile ground for taste variation and experimentation. I'm not convinced that this neccessarily follows, but certainly having more things to play with in terms of flavor can't be bad, and chocolate has the addition of texture as well.

Regardless of its comparison to wine, we're pretty psyched about chocolate, since it tastes better than wine, and nothing is particularly impaired after consuming it, except perhaps your waistline. We hope to embark on a tasting journey among the chocolate varieties that currently exist, and perhaps provoke others to join us via tasting parties and other fun forms of chocovangelism. Interested parties might wish to consult with xocoatl.org as a nice resource.

Chocolate of course must be divided into categories, the most obvious being milk vs. dark, which is probably roughly equivalent to white vs red, if one is interested in furthering the wine analogy. However, before that division, one must also make the distinction of pure vs adulterated. Chocolate + sea salt is amazing and interesting, however, it is not pure. To be pure, by our current off the cuff definition, we must have nothing, save cacao, cocoa butter, vanilla, lecithin, sugar in some proportion. The existence of any other ingredient should be considered as an adulteration. Note that milk chocolate would be one common form of adulteration, but not, by any means the only one. Milk chocolate is common enough to warrant its own category, but there must indeed be a third category for other forms of additions to pure chocolate. We will continue to keep records of our tasting here as they occur.