Tag: dark chocolate

Not-So-Sweet Jesus

If you take a stroll down your supermarket’s greeting card aisle today, you’ll find Valentine’s Day cards long gone and Easter cards in full force. It’s only the start of Lent, yet the aisle is bursting bright with pink bunnies, yellow chicks, and painted eggs. I won’t be sending Easter cards this year (haven’t done so since my kids were little) but I will give up something for Lent. I’m thinking “foods with added sugar”.

I know what you’re thinking.  We live in an age where giving up tempting foods isn’t as difficult as it used to be.  Whole foods are so available we have an entire chain of stores called “Whole Foods”.  Sugar has so many alternatives I should revise my sacrifice to “foods with added sweeteners“.  Even processed foods have matured to where “healthy snacks” are pleasing to the palate.  I have options.

Doesn’t matter.  Dropping added sugar will still be a challenge.  My desk drawer (second one down on the left if you’d like to help yourself) is replete with black and red licorice, and some form of chocolate, be it a bar, a cookie, or those little baking morsels straight out of the bag.  Giving up licorice for forty-six days and nights won’t be a stretch, but NO chocolate for all of March and half of April sounds like an eternity.  What can I say?  Everyone has a weakness and mine is chocolate.  It speaks to me from my closed drawer with “come hither” seductiveness.

Straight out of the bag…YUM!

I’ll bet you’ll find thousands of blog posts about chocolate with a quick search.  I’ll bet you’ll find entire blogs about the sweet stuff.  I just checked my blog’s history and unearthed a dozen takes on chocolate (including this one from a year ago talking about the things people give up for Lent.  Chocolate tops the list).  So let’s make it a baker’s dozen because I invented a chocolate challenge.  I call it the “85 Percent Ascent”.

Let me explain.  There was a time when I liked my coffee sweeter than a Starbucks Sugar Cookie Frappuccino.  Together with artificial creamer I’d dump in sugar cubes or pour the white stuff straight from whatever you call those pourable glass containers.  That was a long, long time ago.  At some point (probably, er definitely my college year abroad in Italy) I realized coffee tasted pretty good all by itself.  I started to wonder why you’d “taint” coffee by adding the other stuff.  But let’s be real: it’s not like you go from Frappuccino to Americano cold turkey.  You’ve got to ease into the one extreme from the other.  Slowly I backed down the sugar (like years-slowly).  Slowly I backed down the creamer.  One day I eliminated the sugar altogether.  Today, I still go with a tablespoon of (almond-coconut non-dairy no-sugar) “creamer” but otherwise it’s straight dark-roasted coffee for me. I even fancy an espresso shot every now and then.

It’s a good analogy for my Percent Ascent challenge.  85% cocoa content is seriously dark chocolate (meaning not sweet at all).  If your go-to is a Hershey’s Bar or a Milky Way you’re down below 50%.  And moving from 50% to 85% is a serious ascent with chocolate.  It’s like standing on top of Kilimanjaro and seeing how much further you have to go to summit Everest.

A recent article on chocolate lists nine criteria for the healthiest and best-tasting bars in the world, including:

  1. The first ingredient must be cocoa, cocoa mass, or chocolate liquor (not sugar or milk chocolate).  In other words, put down the Nestle’s Crunch; it’s not even close.
  2. Ingredients must include real cocoa butter instead of (cheaper) vegetable oils.  95% of America’s chocolate manufacturers just dropped out of the race.
  3. The cocoa must come from an “Equator country” like Ivory Coast, Ghana, or Peru.
  4. The bar should be labeled “Organic” and/or “Non-GMO”.
  5. Bonus points: should be fairly traded and ethically harvested.

As if the search isn’t already difficult, NOW you have to go with >85% cocoa content.  Not so hard to find actually, especially if you go online.  I purchased a bar from five different manufacturers meeting every one of the above criteria, including Green & Black’s from the UK, and Theo from Seattle.   All five bars fall between 85% and 90% cocoa content (and yes, 100% is an option).  All five use scary words like “strong”, “super black”, and “extreme” to describe their product.  Not gonna lie; I’m a little nervous to take a bite.

As bitter as these chocolates are sure to be, I still have to give them up for Lent.  Every one of them has “added sugar” (albeit way down on the ingredients list).  So let’s just agree – I’m not going to break my Lenten covenant on a food that doesn’t even taste sweet.  Think I’ll opt for a piece of fruit instead.  I just hope it doesn’t come from the Garden of Eden.

Some content sourced from the “Experience Life” / Life Time article, “How to Find the Healthiest Dark Chocolate”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #7

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

Last week

I worked outside of the box again this week. Bag #7 – of 21 bags of pieces – assembled a second layer on top of the section I can’t yet attach to the bigger section behind it.  From “Last week” to “This week”, you can see I worked almost entirely in black, which suggests I’m creating more of the outside of the piano.

Despite the majestic wash of Debussy’s “La Mer”, Bag #7 was completed in less than thirty minutes, with only one heart-pounding moment where I thought I’d left out pieces in the Bag #6 build.  Thank goodness I was wrong. Still on track.

This week

Running Build Time: 6.0 hours.  Musical accompaniment: Debussy’s La Mer and Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un Faune (try and say that ten times fast). Leftover pieces: One (clearly an extra, whew!)

Conductor’s Note: Today’s build wasn’t very exciting, so it helped to have Debussy booming in the background.  However, as I turned the page of Mr. Instruction Manual in anticipation of Bag #8, I saw pictures of… long, thin, reed-like pieces.  Holy buckets, Maestro, it’s time to make this piano a stringed instrument!

Confection Perfection

While grocery shopping the other day, my wife asked me if I’d eat something containing “77% dark chocolate”. I replied casually, “No, my limit’s more like 72%”. To those in the know, the percentages refer to the cacao content; not the broader term “chocolate”. And that level of technical shows you how far I’ve come from the 3 Musketeers bar of my youth.

Each of us taps into our particular coping mechanisms as we deal with impacts of the pandemic. My wife spends countless hours playing brain games on her iPad. More of my neighbors take daily walks than I’ve ever seen before. Me? I’m getting lost in a few rainy-day projects, but more to the subject at hand, I’m tapping into my dark chocolate stash. There’s something therapeutic about a small square of the good stuff slowly dissolving on the tongue.  Dark chocolate is medication for troubled times.  It sates my soul.

I can’t recall when I graduated from “candy bar” to “chocolate bar”, let alone dark chocolate.  Like most kids of the 1970’s, I was drawn to Milky Way, Snickers, Nestle Crunch and the like, due to an annual dose of “fun-size” every Halloween.  But somewhere I had an epiphany and realized chocolate was pretty good all by itself. The clincher: studying abroad in Italy during college.  Overnight it seemed, I graduated from the products of Hershey’s and Mars to the more refined of Perugina and Ferrero. 

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Thierry Muret, the executive chef chocolatier at Godiva, and after reading the article I thought, “Now there’s a dream job”.  Not so fast, Mr. Goodbar.  Turns out Monsieur Muret is an industrial chemistry grad who leans heavily on his knowledge of science to create Godiva-worthy delicacies.  Muret’s all about “molecular gastronomy”, or decomposing/recomposing the very elements of chocolate to develop new textures and tastes.  Think about that the next time you bite into a Godiva truffle.

This much I know.  Chocolate’s most common varieties are “milk”, “dark”, and “white”, and while each contains cocoa butter, they’re better defined by their other ingredients (i.e. the dairy in “milk”).  My taste for dark chocolate evolved over a lot of years, the way my coffee matured from “instant” to “espresso”, and my wine from “Chardonnay” to “Cabernet”.  The basic versions simply don’t cut it anymore.

Thanks to Monsieur Muret, this much I don’t know about chocolate.  There’s a tight temperature range (65°-75° F) where fine chocolate can be “tempered” (shaped into truffles, etc.) without altering its delicate flavor.  There’s also a tight time frame to temper, because you don’t want the temperature to fluctuate more than a degree or two.  But Muret colors outside of the lines.  He throws temperature and time frame to the wind to concoct new textures and tastes.  He once spent an entire year perfecting a single ganache.  Whoa; that’s taking it to a whole new level.

The path to chocolatier typically goes through culinary school, not the chemistry lab.  You start with a pastry degree (pastry degree?) and then specialize in chocolate/confections.  Nope, not what I studied in college – not even close.  But I do deserve a “tasting degree” for my years of experience.

If the pandemic goes on long enough, I may find the shelves of our grocery store devoid of dark chocolate.  No problem: I’ll settle for a good ol’ 3 Musketeers bar instead.  Milk chocolate (not to mention the dose of childhood nostalgia) is a passable backup coping mechanism.

The so-called experts say there’s “no high-quality evidence that dark chocolate provides health benefits”.  With coping in mind, I couldn’t disagree more.

Some content sourced from the 2/7/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “Nothing Could Be Sweeter Than Being Godiva’s Top Chocolate Chef”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.