Extrema: more bonbon month data

[mrissa]

I bought a bar of Lindt's 85% dark chocolate at Byerly's last week. The first two squares made me think, Wow, maybe I've found a chocolate too dark even for me!

The four squares I've had since have made me think, Nope. Dark. But not too dark.

I used to eat milk chocolate, but now unless there's some other reason (like fleur de sel caramel in the middle!), I just don't.

timprov points out that they are unlikely to acquire the technology for making me 130% dark chocolate by my 40th birthday, so I'd better find an asymptote soon.

Where are your required asymptotes? Alternately, have you been enjoying International Bonbons and Movie Magazines Month with any particularly notable concoctions?

Comments

[mkille.livejournal.com]

they are unlikely to acquire the technology for making me 130% dark chocolate by my 40th birthday

I would be surprised if they got the technology for turning you into a lesser percentage of dark chocolate!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am some percentage dark chocolate right now.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

It must be on the inside. *Way* inside.

[redbird]

Scharffen Berger 99 percent is too dark for me. 80 percent is a nice range. My current favorite chocolate bar is Cote d'Or's "Noir de Noir"; I'm much less fond of their flavored dark chocolates.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Flavored with liquid stuff mixed into the chocolate or with chunks of stuff interspersed?

[redbird]

I think there were solid flecks of orange-flavored something (not actual orange peel). I don't recall trying other varieties after being disappointed by that one.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I find that I've maxed out in the mid-80s myself. But this reminded me to try a tiny sample-size bar of chocolate with ginger, only 73%, and that worked out well too. There's a Chocolove brand organic chocolate bar, also 73%, that you can get at the supermarket and that I use for moral support on really bad days on campus (lack of lunch, too many students, etc).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've gotten Chocolove for moral support for myself once, and for several presents for people. I tell them to ignore the sappy packaging and focus on the chocolate. Most of the people in my life find themselves able.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

*googles asymptote, finds maths/graphs, flees* Um, can you explain your word to me please? And have you tried Green & Blacks organic chocolate at all, I adore their milk and white varietes but they do some evil dark chocs also, you might appreciate Maya Gold, dark with orange and spices..

[songwind.livejournal.com]

An asymptote is the point where the graph approaches but never reaches. So a food related asymptote would be something like "Marissa never quite reaches enjoyment of 97% pure cocoa"

On the graphs it's where the line starts pointing almost straight up/down or left/right. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried Green & Blacks, no. Haven't seen them anywhere.

I like orange with chocolate. That is a great goodness.

songwind is right about asymptotes. To clarify, they're not always like a wall. Sometimes you can fluctuate around the asymptote but never settle exactly on it -- but cross that exact number several times on your way to other numbers. (Graphs really are the easiest way to explain them -- it's much easier to draw than to stick words on.)

[redbird]

I first had Maya Gold in 1995, courtesy of bugshaw while I was visiting the U.K. I liked it a lot.

I still like it, but they've reduced the percentage of cocoa solids, and it's less intense.

Green and Black is mostly a U.K. brand, and North American distribution is spotty; your best bet might be a health food store (since their chocolates are both organic and fair traded). I'm quite fond of the Maya Gold drinking chocolate.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I give a thumbs up to Green & Black, though the Maya Gold isn't to my taste.

[ckd]

Whole Foods usually has the Green & Blacks Maya Gold; it looks like Minnesota has...two Whole Foods locations. (Heck, Cambridge has two, but then again, that's Cambridge.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've been to the Whole Foods up by the lakes, but we mostly don't have to bother with that kind of thing; we have Lund's/Byerly's.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I haven't had anything particularly notable (though the new Kowalski's dark and milk chocolate was tasty) except for my buttermilk pie. I had never made one before, and in addition it was in an experimental mnfiddledragon-friendly spelt crust. It came out delicious. I was very proud of myself. The recipe I went from was a little wonky - it called for a 10" pie crust. Who has 10" pie pans? So it took forever to bake.

Now if I could just figure out why my high-egg-content custards (like buttermilk pie or lemon mirengue, opposed to pumpkin pie or quiche) don't seem to come out as smooth as bakery ones, I'd be in business.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Are they slightly lumpy? is that what you mean by not as smooth?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they are slightly lumpy. And more opaque. As in, mine look very solidly opaque and professional ones seem pseudo-translucent.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Probably they have a higher grade mixer than you do? (Or than I do -- I'm not trying to be critical here.) Are you using a hand mixer or a stand mixer?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

In this particular instance I used a whisk. I have a Kenmoore stand mixer. It's very much like a poor man's kitchen aide. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, something other than the whisk would probably help with smoothness.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I keep forgetting that it is bonbon month...which hasn't kept me from enjoying bonbons. More on that in an upcoming post.

I once found a 100% chocolate (http://www.finedarkchocolate.com/Chocolate/Plantations/index.asp). It satisfies the chocolate cravings but isn't as much fun as a lower content--say, the kind with the fleur de sel caramel in the middle. (Oh, salt caramels! I love them so!)

70-77% chocolate is about right for me, personally. Mirth and I are big fans of Green and Black's (and alas, you can take "Big" to mean that we enjoy them a lot and that perhaps we should cut back a bit).

Hey, do you read Orangette's food blog? She recently gave a recipe for Salt-caramel ice cream (http://orangette.blogspot.com/2006/11/scoop-alongside.html) that sounds just divine, but I don't have a very good ice cream maker and I don't really need an excuse to experiment with ice cream. And she's absolutely right about the Gray Salt Caramels from Fran's chocolates. Oh, baby!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't tend to experiment with ice cream myself: I live in a town with Sebastian Joe's and Pumphouse and Crema and so on. So other people do plenty of good experiments for me, which I appreciate.

But no, I hadn't read that food blog; I'll give it a look.

My favourite chocolates..

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

...Richart Chocolate, particularly their spiced chocolates. (Curry praline is MY FAVOURITE!)

http://www.richart-chocolates.com/b2c/chocolate/products/250

Re: My favourite chocolates..

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

[temporus.livejournal.com]

I've had 99%. It's...um...practically the same as baker's chocolate. (Which I have also, um, unfortunately eaten as a child, not quite understanding the difference between baker's chocolate and chocolate bars at the time.) We had a chocolate tasting with some members of my congregation, and it was fairly universal among those present that 85% was about the tolerable limit. After that, there were some that could handle it up to around 93% and were okay. And I thought the 99% was interesting, though I would probably not enjoy it regularly.

We did learn one thing. Too much really good chocolate in a moderate span of some hours, and you get both a buzz, and then the associated hangover, not unlike drinking too much.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My tolerance for chocolate bitterness has gone up immensely in the last decade. The stuff about women getting a higher tolerance for bitterness in their mid-20s was very, very true for me.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

It's been some years since I've had them, but Fanny Mae's dark chocolate vanilla buttercreams worked in a way nothing ever has... the dark chocolate was SUPER dark (keeping in mind that I had them long before I started dabbling in the world of 78%, so I no longer know how they hold up), but the buttercream center mixed in the mouth with the chocolate and made this sublime sensation... I keep eyeing the website, thinking I should give in and buy some, just to see if my memory is right...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Bad buttercream is a great evil, but good buttercream, oh my.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Burdick's (http://www.burdickchocolate.com/) makes a truly divine hot chocolate -- three of them, actually, the flavors being white, milk, and dark -- and the dark chocolate is, I tell people, the Guiness of hot chocolates. It's thick and fairly bitter, but ohhhhhhhhh so tasty (so my analogy actually fails for me, since I don't like Guiness, but y'know). It consists of shaved-down chocolate bar (none of this powder crap), you make it with milk (none of this water crap), and it's about one part chocolate to two parts milk (none of this moderation crap!). To make it properly at home, you need an aerolatte to aerate the milk, rather than relying on a whisk. So Good.

Regarding asymptotes, a story about cheese:

I like my cheddar extra sharp. The extra-er the sharp, the better -- usually. I'm at the farmer's market in Bloomington, and a stall there is selling one-year, two-year, three-year and four-year cheddars. I try a bite of the two-year, and yowch! That's a cheddar that bites back. I tell them I'll buy a block.

The lady, glancing at the block as she puts it in a bag, says, "oh, this one's almost a three-year."

I should have told her I wanted a younger one.

For the first time in my life, I was defeated by cheese. I could not eat this stuff, and I tried. Oh, how I tried. But this cheese didn't bite back; it put on steel cleats and marched around my tongue, leaving nothing but ow in its wake. I sliced it thinner and thinner, putting smaller and smaller pieces on my crackers (I often eat normal extra-sharp straight, no crackers), but I reached a point where I realized I was trying to get the cracker to hide the taste of the cheese entirely, and that's the point at which I conceded defeat and threw it out. (My fiance gave up long before I did.)

So I guess I've found my chedder asymptote.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's very good information about the Burdick's indeed. I need a replacement dark hot chocolate because last year's most excellent dark hot chocolate is not being made this year, apparently. The one I've tried is all right but not winning my heart quite as thoroughly as one might hope.

As for cheese, I have a ten-year cheddar in the fridge. It is Good.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Unless there are factors other than the age which made this farmer's cheddar so terrifying, I now am afraid to go within five feet of your fridge.

I highly recommend Burdick's. I'd feed you a sampler if you were anywhere in my vicinity.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I suspect but cannot prove that there were factors other than age. I mean, my 10-year cheddar is sharp -- sometimes the apple is necessary for reconstituting some of the mouth cells that have dessicated in the time it took to chew the cheese -- but not biohazard sharp.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I toured the Scharffen Berger plant this weekend. >swoon< I picked up a bar of their limited batch Las Islas which is to die for.

[carbonel]

I like the Lindt's 85% and the Chocolove 88%. I haven't yet found a chocolate too dark for me, though the 99% is really only for nibbling.

What I'd like to find is an 88% or so chocolate that has candied ginger in it. Or cacao bits, or coffee bean bits. But those seem to max out at 60% or so.

In this corner with the 88 / Subject of suckers' object of hate

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= I'm pretty far gone: 88% minimum, 90% and 100% usually.

[brooksmoses]

timprov points out that they are unlikely to acquire the technology for making me 130% dark chocolate by my 40th birthday, so I'd better find an asymptote soon.

It seems to me that you just need to talk to those MIT boys who made 307 ale....