I have met many people who don’t eat chocolate.

Some of them are dieting, so they are depriving themselves.  Tsk!  So sad.

Some of them say that they simply don’t like chocolate. I believe that they mean what they say… I just don’t believe that they’re actually from this planet.  Never mind that I want to carefully edge away from them and call the immigration authorities… I usually manage to quell that reaction.

Time was, when I talked about chocolate, I had to specify “real chocolate”, not that adulterated stuff - like milk ‘chocolate’, white ‘chocolate’ and other unholy confections.  More recently, though, it’s become commonplace for people to assume that I mean THE REAL THING, namely smooth, dark chocolate, high in cocoa content.

There’s an explosion of connoisseur chocolate. All the brands that used to cater to the kiddy-kandy crowd (like Nestle (in the US… Nestle elsewhere always knew what real chocolate was), Hershey, and others) have added “premium” lines of dark, rich chocolate, and some of them are not half bad.

After sampling many kinds, I seem to have settled on Lindt Excellence 70% Cacao bars. They recently went up to $3.29 per 100g bar at my local Wal-Mart, then dropped back to $2.97 before Christmas (2008). My local supermarkets and drugstores have jacked it up to prices in the $3.79 range, and didn’t drop ‘em for the Christmas period.

You might have just decided that my tastes are hopelessly plebeian, but I’m unrepentant. If it means that I can be content with a fix that is still within my means, I regard it as a good thing.

On the other hand, I recently came to the conclusion that I should throw away chocolate.

Yes, yes, I heard some gasps of horror there.  Obviously, if I’ve sampled some that’s not to my liking, but haven’t handled the remainder too badly (which means my fingers never touched…) then I’ll give it away to any taker. Otherwise, into the garbage.

What!!??!!

Well no. It’s not quite what you think.

You see, being /i/n/s/a/n/e/l/y/ … er… insatiably curious, I keep trying different brands and … um… models(?) as they come to my attention.

Many of them are rather decent - unlike a lot that used to appear on the shelves, pretending to be strong dark chocolate, when in fact they were chocolate-colored crayons. Yes, I’m sure that many of those eastern-European and Middle-Eastern brands were more wax than chocolate. But things have definitely been picking up as chocolate fanatics have bribed food scientists to publish claims about chocolate being (not just good, but) good FOR you.  All the producers who want to stay in the game have now had to UP their game - in many cases, quite a lot.

It turns out that I like both the German-Swiss style and the particular blend of beans that Lindt has used to create my favorite chocolate. After many samples of their expanded Excellence offerings, where they feature the chocolate of Peru, of Madagascar, of Cuba(?), etc., it turns out that those others - while quite good - just don’t do it for me the way the original recipe does.

Branching out, it seems that I rather like some better examples of the Dutch process, but that I mostly just don’t appreciate the French process (which is also, apparently, embraced by Hershey on my side of the pond).   Nestle?  They’re Swiss, aren’t they? Not sure why I don’t like their effort as much as the Lindt classic Excellence 70% - perhaps it’s that they are Suisse (French-Swiss) and have been tainted by the French process?  Dunno.

It’s not _bad_ really, and I won’t turn up my nose at a sample. It’s just that there’s a certain underlying … er… ah… sourness to that style. That’s probably not accurate, but I can’t think of a better descriptive term just now, so there it is.

On the other hand, many people appear to like, and even prefer, the Hershey and French versions of good dark chocolate, and that’s not a bad thing. One benefit is that those other styles take some of the pressure off my favorite, and help keep its price from going through the roof.

On the down side, any increased demand for any style of chocolate puts more demand on cocoa producers (not to be confused with coca). So the prices are still being pushed up.

So, let’s say that I’ve opened a new chocolate-bar wrapper and found that the content is good-but-not-great. Why would I throw the rest away? Why not just enjoy the almost-greatness of it? Any chocolate is better than no chocolate, right?  Yes, but I’m also fat.

I’m fat, and I don’t want to give up my chocolate. Yet I want to prevent growing more fat and even, gawd help me, grow less fat.  So, I’ve decided to not waste the calorie intake on anything less than the best.  That simple.

The better it is, the more satisfying it is. The more satisfying it is, the less I can allow myself and still achieve some semblance of… well… satisfaction.  Yes?

Also, the dark stuff doesn’t disrupt my blood-sugar level the way other dessert-ish things do (and gawd knows I love my desserts - ref. the waistline for confirmation of that).  The cookies and pie can go and, as long as I can still have some dark chocolate, life is still worth living.    Ahem.  Don’t press too hard to find out how much (or little) I might be exaggerating there.

Back to the styles of chocolate, for a moment:  I wish that somebody would undertake to sample and classify all the widely available kinds of dark chocolate and sort them according to the major styles to which they seem to conform, as well as according to the major source of their cocoa.  You know, tabulated, ranked.  Sorta like the Tom’s Hardware or the Help Authoring Tool Matrix of chocolate sites.

Monee Kidd’s Chocolate FAQ is interesting as a summary, though a bit dated.

If you want to adulterate your chocolate, with fillings and such… don’t bother. Buy ‘em ready-made from Leonidas. If you can get them relatively fresh where you live, you can exchange a few dollars for a little bit of heaven. Unfortunately, they can’t be saved. As soon as they lose freshness, they become rather ordinary.  That’s the price of using the bestest (yeah, I know it’s not a real word), freshest ingredients.  Oh, but their site uses Flash. Oh well… can’t all be perfect. 

I tried Cowgirl Chocolates a few years ago, and quite enjoyed several of their spicy products. Time to place another order!

Y’know what I’d really like to find?  I’d really like to find a source for good-quality LIME-creams covered in good dark chocolate.

Apparently, I’m drastically in the minority on this one.   Many confectioners offer assortments of filled chocolate candies, often including fruit creams, fruit jellies, or even real-fruit (or fruit-rind) bits in chocolate. But how often have you ever encountered LIME in the mix?    I think I’ve hit a lime-centered chocolate perhaps twice in my entire life.

When I was a kid, I liked the _green_ LifeSavers (back when they were lime-ish). I was disappointed when most jelly-beans (back before the million flavors of Jelly Bellies) that were green turned out to be mint or that gawd-awful early attempt at (gag) green apple pseudo-flavor.  But as I left childhood behind, and dropped such sins as milk-chocolate candy bars, in favor of dark chocolate, chocolate truffles, and chocolate pralines, I’ve really, really missed any opportunity to enjoy a combination of two of my favorite flavors.

There was a rumor on the web about a lime-flavored ball of chocolate wedges, similar to the Terry’s Orange (which I sorta like), but I’ve been unable to track down the lime ones. They were a different brand, and only seasonal. Apparently not the Christmas season, because it’s the past month or so that I’ve been looking. Maybe they were too much like the Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Terry took ‘em to court.  Dunno. I just know that not finding the product (after seeing a couple of references - from previous years) was disappointing.

What I’d _really_ like though, is for some producer on the order of Leonidas or perhaps Ghirardelli to start selling high-quality lime creams in dark chocolate.

This’d be one of those times where it’s not as much fun to be against the flow. Contrarianism can have its drawbacks. 

Well, back to the hunt.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2009