| Thursday, November 1, 2007 |
02:23 - Those who can't cook, bring chocolate
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This was my contribution to the Halloween potluck at work on Wednesday:
Hey, it was this or Dixie cups.
For the past several months, largely as a side effect of this whole weight-loss thing, I've found myself at the mercy of an odd compulsion to pay really, psychotically close attention to the flavors of certain kinds of food. (It's what happens when your portion sizes shrink, I guess.) And since I'm not one to go in for the usual subjects of taste snobbery, such as wine or beer or single-malt scotch, I perhaps inevitably found myself staring at one dark chocolate bar after another, tasting them square by square until I felt I could tell them apart blindfolded, like the author of the by-now-infamous Noka Chocolate exposé. Or, at the very least, to gain enough familiarity with the ins and outs of the discipline that I could tell an Ecuadoran Arriba from a Venezuelan or Madagascar Criollo or an industrial Forastero, the way I've always sort of doubted you could even distinguish a red wine from a white by taste alone.
This informal tasting at the potluck was as much for my benefit as anyone else's in attendance; after all, I'm not about to buy a whole boxful of chocolate from Chocosphere just to nibble at a corner of a bar every day until finally six months later I start to run dry. No, most of the bars here I hadn't even tried until Wednesday. But I think by now that while I can't tell them all apart at a taste, there are certainly a few that I'm quite sure I could identify blindfolded with no trouble at all: the dull and ungainly Hachez Cocoa d'Arriba, the richly exotic Valrhona Ampamakia, the sour-like-a-lemon Domori Sambirano. And there are several others in the list that I feel I know pretty well, like the goofily candyish Villlars, the rich and bold Valrhona Palmira, the supremely melty Lindt Excellence 70%, and the round-tinned Chocolate Traveler from Trader Joe's, which I can best describe as "friendly"—it tastes like chocolate ice cream, all malty and nutty and all-around pleasant.
I use the reviews at seventypercent.comas a yardstick, but I don't always agree with their reviewers' findings; some chocolates they think are middling I find fantastic, whereas some of my very favorites barely score an "ehh" from them. I don't know if that's just because I'm unschooled in the art, or if maybe they're falling all over themselves comparing these chocolates to some Platonic ideal I'm just not familiar with, while I'm just calling things by how well they happen to tickle my particular taste buds. But I also think they get a bit too caught up with trying to put names on all the intricacies of flavors in each bar, to the point where it becomes self-parodic—I mean, come on: "...the chocolate immediately surges forward with a powerful blueberry, which then gives way to softer strawberry and cherry cordial components - clear criollo indications. Next, a brooding molasses component darkens the scene, which then in turn exits to reveal a smooth grape and hazelnut finish"? Seriously? To me, what these reviewers perceive as things like "blueberry" and "molasses" are just convenient but misleading names for unique aspects of chocolate itself—tastes you just aren't going to get anywhere else. And I'm not decrying this practice, either: I don't know a better way to do it. (Some of the chocolates on that air-hockey table taste to me like wine, Circus Peanuts, or suntan lotion.) I just think sometimes in the pursuit of language that conveys the flavor to someone who's never tasted the bar in question before, it's possible to overstep the bounds of usefulness and start describing something that's entirely unconnected with reality, subjective or objective.
If there's any interest, I could post some of my own reviews and opinions of chocolate bars I've known and continue to discover. I'd try to keep things brief and sane—no rhapsodizing about how many different breeds of nuts or berries it can be imagined to remind one of, but rather a succinct description of how I think it tastes, plus a general thumbs-up/down based on nothing but my own amateur opinion.
Or, if not, well—it's not like there's any shortage of opinion on the web about this stuff already. I guess I just think, hey, what's one more unaccountable personality quirk?
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Brian Tiemann
