Chocolate News

Der Spiegel, the popular German magazine and website, has published a great story based on a visit to Claudio Corallo at his plantation on Sao Tome and Principe. The story communicates pretty nicely the general impression one gets that Corallo harbors little love for the chocolate industry in general, and, perhaps, the gourmet chocolate industry in particular. I definitely recommend reading it if you are interested in learning about Claudio Corallos quest for the intense and true flavors in chocolate.

Striving for the World’s Best Chocolate

In a remote corner of the global village, an Italian believes he’s developed the best of all chocolate recipes. Claudio Corallo lives on an island off Nigeria and ships his small-batch chocolate around the world.

Most people, says Claudio Corallo, don’t have the slightest idea what chocolate is — or what it can be. The article continues>>

Mark Bitterman :: Feb.28.2008 :: Dark Chocolate, News, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »

After an examination by a committee of experts of the London Academy of Chocolate, Amedei (Tuscany, Italy) has won the Golden Bean award for “the best bean to bar chocolate in the world.” That has a nice ring to it. Once someone told me my Cassoulet de Castelnaudary was “the best cassoulet in the world,” my chest still gets puffy when I think of it (it is puffy now).

I imagine Alessio and Cecilia Tessieri, the brother and sister founders of Amedei, were drowning in Champagne on the night of the announcement. Nonetheless, they managed to comment: “We are very proud of this award. Our objective shall always remain that of producing the best chocolate in the world, dedicating it to all our supporters. We thank the Academy of Chocolate for this award, and for the seriousness and passion it puts in its worldwide work in search of good quality chocolate.”

Here is their announcement, edited slightly, because while I respect their palates, “harbouring” all those “colourful” extra ‘u’s hogs up RAM on my “computour.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.22.2008 :: Dark Chocolate, Flavored Chocolate Bars, Milk Chocolate, News, Single Origin Chocolates :: 1 Comment »

Bacon and Chocolate. To explore the latest Vosges entry, Mo’s Bacon Bar, my mind drifts, my soul swells, nostalgia and the unrequited passions of my youth swim in the deep glittery motes of my doe-like eyes. “Love, sweet love.” These most beautiful words, the plaintiff yet serene voice, the cap and robe, taken together, emblematize the luscious serenity of our most sacred of emotions. The also expose the lurking absurdity of it all, especially when you are incapably of ever uttering them, or any close derivative, without flashing back to the brilliant priest played by Peter Cook in The Princess Bride, who intones: “And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva.”

With these words ripe on the tongue, bite into the Vosges Bacon Chocolate Bar, officially known as Mo’s Bacon Bar. The bacon bar is a dark milk chocolate, combined with applewood smoked bacon, alder smoked salt, and 41% deep milk chocolate.

Vosges Haut-Chocolat is rightly famed for the witty and trendy blends concocted by Vosges founder Katrina Markoff, who possesses that rare blend of skills that ranges from concocting to packaging to marketing chocolate. As the list of chocolate candy bars grows (and I will always take off my hat to Katrina for making flavored chocolate bars and calling them “candy bars.” Humility? Playfulness?), the genesis and of ever-more daring and bold entries seems inevitable. My personal feelings toward the incessant perfection of the Vosges candy bar has gone from weariness to resignation to acceptance to embrace to enthusiasm. Vosges candy bars exhibit the clarity of purpose and democratic elegance of a backyard chicken coop.

So what does it taste like?

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.02.2008 :: Flavored Chocolate Bars, Milk Chocolate :: 5 Comments »

I have it from a friend that the famed, fiery, and furious Blacksal Salted Chocolate Bar by Domori has been discontinued! Blacksal, long a favorite of mine, combined a Ecuadorian 75% dark chocolate with pink Andean salt also from Ecuador. The result is a big bang of tobacco and heavily roasted tropical nuts brooding over a delicate and airy saltiness. Domori is also discontinuing the Vanilla bar (Madagascar Bourbon vanilla with cacao from Madagascar.)

What diabolical corporate machinations could be responsible for such a tragedy?After much digging, I found the answer: managerial comparison engines.Yes indeed, managerial comparison engines are to blame.If you are not familiar with this form of apparatus, I should clarify that these engines of the are the intellectual sort: there are no now managerial comparison engine powered electric toothbrushes or managerial comparison mid-engine powered Maserati MC12s.

So, to find the explanation for the mysteriously disappearing Domori Blacksal, we go to last years news that Domori was acquired by GRUPPO ILLY SPA, the monster espresso company.Illy took 80% of Domori’s shares for an undisclosed amount, with Domori retaining 20% ownership. Presumeably Domori retained substantial control over the direction and quality of its chocolate production.So why kill something so poetic as Ecuador cacao spangled with Andean salt?

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Mark Bitterman :: Jan.24.2008 :: Dark Chocolate, News :: 4 Comments »

There is so much to say about the combination of salt and chocolate that I will just stare, paralyzed, at the computer screen for three hours of insect brain-deadness… Salt and dark chocolate, salt and milk chocolate, salted chocolate, chocolated salt (I actually do have both).

But as with everything in life, the devil is in the detail. Salted 80% dark Italian blended chocolate (Salinae bar by Antica Dolceria Bonajuto) has nothing to do with 80% dark Italian Ecuadorian chocolate a chocolate (Blacksal by Domori), which in turn has virtually nothing in common with a 74% dark Italian blended chocolate served up side by side with Trapani and Cervia sea salts (Cioccolato Fondente al Sale di Cervia by Cioccolato di BruCo).

The power of salt to coax out, elucidate, and expand on the flavor of food does not stop with the savory. Actually, the idea that sweet and savory are somehow opposite is strange, and actually at odds with our natural affinity for diversity and complexity in food. Eat Ethiopian and you will find your fingers plunged in sugar on lamb with tamarind; eat dim sum and half the time you are eating donuts and pork. My grandpa was in love with apple pie with cheddar cheese. At any rate, chocolate is not even a sweet until after it is sweetened, and that can be done with much more deftness than is common.

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Mark Bitterman :: Dec.16.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Flavored Chocolate Bars, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »

If there is one go-to chocolate bar in our entire store, it is the Valrhona 2002 Chuao dark chocolate bar.

Looking for something delicate? Try Valrhona’s Chuao Bar from 2002. Looking for something with perfect, silky body? Try Valrhona’s 2002 cru bar from the Chuao valley in Venezuela. In the mood for understated yet superb balance of flavors? Why not the I suggest the 2002 Chuao Chocolate Bar by Valrhona? Looking for the perfect, brilliant mirror, crisp snap, lovely fragrance? Try Valrhona 2002 Chuao Chocolate Bar. Does eating one of the best freaking chocolate bars on the face of the earth strike your fancy? Valrhona 2002 Chuao cru chocolate bar.

Just want a dark chocolate bar that is super freaking yummy? Valrhona 2002 Chuao chocolate bar.

So, imagine my reaction to reading Bill Buford’s encomium to Frederick Schilling, founder of Dagoba Organic Chocolate, printed in this week’s New Yorker.

Buford writes: “Some bars have a harvest year. I got one from an Internet supplier, a 2002, made from ChuaoValley beans in Venezuela, three years past its sell-by date. Suspecting a gimmick, I ate it to confirm its staleness. I was surprised. It seemed fresher than the other bars I’d bought.”

“Seemed fresher?” That’s it? Buford bites into a piece of chocolate making history, and his comment is, “seemed fresher?” What the hell…

I love Buford as much as the next guy, but his economy of words here comes at the expense of his readers. One wonders if Buford, eating a seven course meal at Le Bernardin, summarizes the experience with, “Seemed Eric Ripert used fish.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.30.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: 1 Comment »

Question: What looks like a chocolate bar, has the same mouthfeel as a chocolate bar, and satisfies many of the same senses as a chocolate bar, but is not a chocolate bar?

Answer: A coffee bar.

Caffe Acapella has created a bar replacing chocolate solids with coffee solids. Or to be precise, they blend cocoa butter coffee mass to create a chocolate/coffee bar. Caffe Acapella makes a Caffe Acapella espresso bar called the Espresso Serenade (just plain espresso blend (of three arabica beans) and a Caffe Acapella cappuccino bar called the Cappuccino Connoisseur. I met the folks at Caffe Acapella in New York a few months ago. They had the zealous rabid glow of belief in what they were doing that is agreeable in anyone working in food.

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.23.2007 :: Flavored Chocolate Bars :: No Comments »

It isn’t every day that a new, serious, bad boy chocolate maker comes on the scene. But one hath arrived: Askinosie chocolate.

“Bad boy?” you say. “What kind of street creds does this Askinosie Chocolate company have, that you confer the rebel-serious badboy status? Askinosie… Any name that is so obscure that it can, in this day and age, still procure its own, unadulterated internet URL is surely just some couch-potato hobbyist toying with co-op cacao beans in a toaster oven.”

Well, quite simply, such is not the case. Shawn Askinosie had it all: Money (criminal defense lawyer), Religion (Christian). Enabled by money from the former and obeisance to the latter, he has ventured into that most dark, sensual, and alien land: chocolate. For a man who “loved the law since I can remember,” Shawn Askinosie is also manifestly attentive to the call of nature at its most unfathomable, at its most flagrantly indifferent to the constraints of human convention. Askinosie chocolate sings like the savagely furred bellow monkey. Askinosie chocolate also sings like a schoolgirl, like a castrati, like the uber-rare Kirtland’s warbler, and like the family cicada.

Askonosie Chocolate’s Soconusco 75% dark chocolate bar is, as far as I know, the first single origin dark chocolate bar to treat Mexican chocolate seriously. This is an excellent dark chocolate in the French tradition. The flavors are a crazy rich combination of earthiness and dried fruits. In fact, why parse the tastes for you, when the bar is freely available. (We sell it online at The Meadow (atthemeadow.com), though Askinosie has also taken the annoying step (why must we square off against The Maker?) of selling it online themselves).

I will share the unfettered critiques of two of my most esteemed critics.

On Askinosie Chocolate the seven year old inveighs. “Dark, a little bit bitter. I think it tastes a little bit like seaweed. Except that it is a little bit stronger. Of the texture, he says, “it kind of has a crunch like ripe coconut.”The four year old, mouth contorted by outlandish phonics: “Askinosie tastes like every kind of treat in the whole wide word.” Later, after a second tablet, he adds, “I was sucking on it for a really, really long time, and it tasted kind of like an ice cream cone.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.21.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: 3 Comments »

Yes, Mike and I just hung out for the evening, exchanging witty observations about the trade. Tucked in a mellowly lit booth at the Heathman Hotel’s Tea Court, we sipped a vodka martini made with Okhotnichya — an old Soviet-era “hunter’s vodka” — that Mike had crafted himself from the mucilage of cacao pods and various findings at the Portland Farmer Market earlier that day ,and gifted to the bar keep in a beaker hand cut from a thrift store vase. Philippe Boulot, Executive Chef of the Heathman, plopped down in the booth beside us from time to time, soliciting our opinions of various amuses gueules involving foie gras, chocolate, fleur de sel de l’Ile de Noirmoutier, and grape must. We were later graced by the presence of Boulot’s lovely and talented pastry chef wife Susan Boulot, bearing miniature plates of her legendary Chocolate Gourmandise produced from the aquatic criollo beans she harvested on a scuba expedition to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan beneath the azure waves of lake Texcoco. The bouquet of flowers plucked by Florist/Sommelier/Wife Jennifer Turner Bitterman from our own, private, greenhouse-coddled cacao tree filled the room with its intoxicating aroma, attracting various non-native lepidopterous insects that glowed and chattered about our heads.

Actually, none of this happened.

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.14.2007 :: Chocolate Happenings, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »

Strolling the isles of the supermarket, what you do NOT find is unadorned nuance. One finds adornment meant to give the impression of nuance, but not nuance itself. Wine, and some of the more heavy duty cheese counters, are notable exceptions. But for sake of making grand, sweeping statements because they sound important and dramatic:

Nuance is not really on speaking terms with consumer culture.

It is the thing, THAT thing, whatever that thing is, that we want. The name of it suffices to give us the pleasure we experience: Champagne, BMW, Free Range–all terms we are fond of, but which we can lose, a sort of not seeing the forest for the trees in inverse.

So why get all philosophical when I really just want to write a note about a great chocolate bar?

Because I am BLOWN AWAY.

At a staff meeting yesterday we opened up a bar of one of the newest entries to the high end single origin dark chocolate bar makers: the Los Ríos 75% cacoa dark chocolate bar by República del Cacao. This proved to be quite a distraction from the rest of the things we were hoping to cover in the meeting, and launched us on five discussions at once, many of them critical of our own inclination toward summarizing things in grand sweeping gestures.

The Los Ríos chocolate bar is packed with a rambunctious family of baking spices, from cinnamon to nutmeg to allspice to ginger. Sliding the wax-paper wrapped bar from its box, you are accosted with all the thankful aroma of a pumpkin pie bake-off. Behind that, there is some fruit–maybe pear–though that flavor might be the result of associations drawn from the chocolate bar’s distinctly pear-like texture.

We talk about the flavor of an Ecuador chocolate all the time, about the nature of the Nacional Arriba cacao as manifest in such illustrious chocolate bars as the lovely Guittard Quevedo 65% Cacao bittersweet chocolate bar, the bright and well-executed Guaranda 71% single origin dark chocolate bar by Chocovic, and the super good Domori Arriba 70%. Doubtless, each of these bars is different (now is not the time to get into it, but maybe soon?), but how much of this difference derives from the cocoa maker and how much from the actual beans themselves? Is there a difference in the beans themselves? We can only speculate and opine.

But get this:

Republica del Cacao makes THREE (3) Ecuadorian Arriba Nacional dark chocolate bars, count them, three, tres, trois, chocolate bars from three different provinces in Ecuador’s vast and bountiful chocolate producing regions:

1. The Republica del Cacao Los Ríos Province 75% bar;
2. The Republica del Cacao El Oro Province 67% Dar Chocolate bar (very earthy, lightly spiced, silky, tannic, woodsy), and;
3. The Republica del Cacao Manabi Province 75% Dark Chocolate bar (fruit! almonds, more spice, milder and less complex than the others),

The bold differences and glimmering similarities between the three chocolate bars by Republica del Cacao makes for an extraordinary journey through the beautiful, and beautifully varied climes of Ecuador. On its own, the Los Ríos is a complex and potent (if slightly crazy) chocolate bar suitable for snacking on the go, for use in a nice calming cup of drinking chocolate, or for heavy partying.

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.11.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »