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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, April 23, 2008 at 10:15 AM
I've been procrastinating a lot this month. There are two things that I do when I procrastinate: eat chocolate and fixate on stuff I find online. And that's how I found myself unwrapping about a dozen five-gram chocolate squares (each one with a funky cacao-pod design indented in it along with the words STARBUCKS CHOCOLATE) while watching a PR video.
The new Starbucks Chocolate line is old chocolate news by now: Cybele at Candy Blog rated everything in the lineup on a scale from one to ten, and Chocophiliac Clay Gordon tried to untangle the complicated corporate web that is Artisan Confections (that is, the confederacy of Hershey-owned subsidiaries Scharffen Berger, Joseph Schmidt, and Dagoba) to figure out who's actually making this stuff. But I wanted to conduct an in-depth analysis myself. So I poured myself a glass of water and cut up some crusty white bread (good palate cleansers) and sat down in front of my laptop with my Starbuck's samples.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, April 3, 2008 at 12:30 PM
This is a true story: when I was about five years old, I asked my mother how Moses and his friends had time to stop in the middle of the desert to dip their matzo in chocolate. Turns out I wasn't the only curious kid. This Passover season marks the 20th anniversary of Chuck Siegel's (the Charles of Charles Chocolates) matzo-dipping party. But the whole scene got started with apples—not dipped in honey, but in caramel. Chuck, then owner of Attivo Confections, was vacuum-sealing his candied Granny Smith apples with heavy-duty equipment. "The guy we bought the bags and the machines from was Jewish, and still is Jewish," Siegel said. "And he said, 'my daughter really wants to make some chocolate-covered matzo—can we come over and put some matzo through the enrobing line?'"
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, March 26, 2008 at 10:00 AM
I'm getting tired of people touting the health benefits of chocolate. I just saw a couple ladies about town ogling Dolfin's "dark chocolate with pink peppercorns from Brazil" bar. "It's dark chocolate," they said, "it's healthy." Uh, yeah, cacao is naturally high in flavanols, and most of the time dark chocolate is packed with more cacao and less sugar than milk chocolate. We all know that by now. But perhaps we have forgotten that pink peppercorns are mildly toxic—imports of the colorful little beads (not true peppercorns at all but the berries of a plant related to poison ivy) were suspended for a period of time in the 1980s by the FDA.
But just because something's bad for you doesn't mean you shouldn't eat it. I bought one of Dolfin's little 30-gram pink peppercorn bars for myself. It was good. It was, um, piquant. No adverse reactions. I'm sure there's not enough pink peppercorn in there to kill you. But I also know that there aren't enough flavanols to save you. It's just candy, people! So eat well, stop at the gym or the yoga studio from time to time, and then, by all means, treat yourself to a strangely seasoned chocolate bar on the way home. Just don't expect too much.
Emily Stone, a food writer and proprietor of Chocolate in Context, is a chocolate enthusiast, itinerant traveler, and a lover of literature who lives in Pittsburgh.
From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, March 13, 2008 at 10:15 AM
If you gave up something for Lent this year, chances are it was either carbon emissions or chocolate. And if you fall into the first category, I'd recommend that you celebrate the close of the Lenten season by supporting a business in the city that that put Mardi Gras on the map—New Orleans. Try Sucre on Magazine Street, the year-old business whose owners Tariq Hanna and Joel Dondis have been hailed by the New York Times as plugged-in post-Katrina entrepreneurs.
Their inspirations are mainly Parisian (their macarons are modeled on Ladurée's, and they pack gifts into pink paper purses à la Fauchon) mixed with sultry French Quarter signatures like the Meuniere bon bon (dark chocolate filled with a burnt-butter-and-almond white chocolate ganache).
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, March 5, 2008 at 11:00 AM
The staff at the Vancouver Four Seasons have been known stock VIP suites with chocolate-coated vanilla and smoked Hawaiian sea salt caramels and Earl Grey and blue cornflower bon bons from favorite local chocolatier Thomas Haas (the hotel's former pastry chef). Guests can also call down to the concierge to arrange an "Urban Bites" culinary tour of the Canadian city, which leads through the dim sum parlors of Chinatown and the local produce markets on Granville Island before making a final stop at Haas's headquarters in North Vancouver. Alternatively, industrious chocolate fiends can their own way around Vancouver, where the mild Pacific Coastal climate is incredibly inviting to chocolatiers.
A few places to consider:
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, February 20, 2008 at 9:30 AM
Photograph courtesy of Peter Costantinidis
With about a dozen banquette seats sandwiched between flame-red walls, and with just as many hot chocolate flavors (American-style dark chocolate, Venezuelan chile spice, coconut curry, Chinese five-spice, passion fruit, raspberry, citrus, peanut butter, hazelnut, mint, mocha, and espresso), the new Christopher Elbow Artisanal Chocolate shop is open for business in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. Christopher Elbow flew in from his home base in Kansas City, Missouri, to open the doors just nine days before Valentine's Day, with a lineup featuring his signature Peanut Praline with Pop Rocks bon bon and a special-edition Absinthe Ganache candy, named for the restaurant across the street.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, February 13, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Cosmic Chocolate's Carly Baumann knows how to groove with the best of them. Her lips—and her chocolates—are always sparkling, and her candymaking goal, in her own words, is to "create luscious bites of elation and share with you our feelings of desire, expectancy, and satisfaction." So, no, Baumann didn't just pour melted chocolate into heart-shape molds, pop them out, and tie them up with red ribbons this Valentine's Day. Instead, she developed the Cosmic Bliss Heart Collection, whose flavors—Espresso Cognac, Lemon Basil, Black Current Violet, "Gianduya," Peanut Butter Honey, Passion Fruit, Red Hot Cinnamon, Sea Salt Caramel, and Strawberry Champagne—anticipate the full range of libidinous urges. The entire nine-piece collection costs $20.
And in case you want to experiment elsewhere, here are some bursting heart alternatives:
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, February 6, 2008 at 11:00 AM
The first time I saw a Guittard's Nocturne 91% Cacao Extra Dark Chocolate Bar (which quietly crept onto the market last July) was at the New York Chocolate Show. Guittard's director of sales Mark Spini handed one to me. And, just as quickly, he snatched it away. "You can't eat this now," he said. You see, I was hanging around the Guittard booth with Andrew Shotts of Garrison Confections (Guittard's former pastry chef) and Amy Rosenfield of the Mon Aimee Chocolat boutique in Pittsburgh (which keeps both Guittard and Garrison products in stock). And we were drinking a bottle of Zinfandel. Mark explained that I couldn't possibly taste his super-dark, super-complex bar with a wine as heavy as a Zin. He told me to pop a milk chocolate in my mouth instead. The Zin was not for the Nocturne.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, January 30, 2008 at 10:15 AM
Since 1903, there's been more going on in Hershey, PA, than in any of the surrounding towns in Pennsylvania dairy country. In the early part of the twentieth century, chocolate baron Milton Hershey built a park, a zoo, and an amusement park, in addition to an orphanage and a hospital. In 1973, the elaborate Hershey's Chocolate World opened for official tours, offering a window into the chocolate-making process. In 2006, the company updated the Chocolate Tour Ride so that the scenes of dairy farming in the US and cacao harvesting abroad now look a more like something from this century and less like attractions from the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago (which is, of course, where Mr. Hershey got his start).
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From Required Eating
Posted by Emily Stone, January 23, 2008 at 10:00 AM
As the chocolate industry becomes more like the wine industry, chocolate tourism is looking more like wine tourism, with trips to chocolate "regions" replacing factory tours. Here are two upcoming options in Central America, each with a few spaces left:
The Ecole Chocolat Master Chocolatier Tour of Costa Rica
April 6–11, 2008; $1,990–$2,390
Steve DeVries (the maverick Colorado chocolate-maker who made an appearance in Mort Rosenblum's book Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light) knows a lot more about Central America than most people in the business. On this trip he's teaming up with the online cooking school Ecole Chocolat and bringing a team of adventurers on a bean-buying excursion to Costa Rica. The trip includes meetings with individual cacao farmers as well as stopovers in Costa Rica's pristine national parks.
The Chocolate Lovers Travel Club in Belize
May 22–29, 2008; $2,177–$2,377
Discover Chocolate author Clay Gordon has an in at the Cotton Tree Lodge, whose chocolate-making classes were written up in the New York Times. The newly minted Chocolate Lovers Travel Club is behind the itinerary, which includes kayaking and hiking, as well as a visit tour of Green and Black's organic chocolate operations in Belize's Punta Gorda. The trip also coincides with the annual Toledo Cacao Festival.
Photographs courtesy of Earl De Berge.
About the author: Emily Stone, a food writer and proprietor of Chocolate in Context, is a chocolate enthusiast, itinerant traveler, and a lover of literature who lives in Pittsburgh.
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