What Is Your Brand Of Chocolate Decadence ?

TCHO.

   I'm partial to Sharffen Berger, Lindt, Black and Green and all other brands. 

  The nice thing about a good chocolate bar is that you only need to snap off one little piece to satisfy.

:)

Dan

Callebaut or Ghirardelli or OHCF.

http://www.ohcf.us/

Dave

This is going to make sound really low rent, but I like Symphony by Hershy.

I've tried them all.  Living in Europe i have access to all the "good" brands - lindt, perugina, caffarel, black and green, sprungli, etc. etc. etc.  and in the States have tried ghirardelli and others.

Note that my favorite kind of chocolate is bittersweet or semisweet. 

The one that i find far superior to any other, even the fanciest brands, is one of the cheapest here

Novi 72% chocolate

It's the only one without any graininess, with a smooth waxy feel, a great snap and a really pure chocolatey taste,   Most of the others have a cardboardy taste to me, when they;re not mixed with milk or other stuff. 

Do you get this abroad?  Here it's one of the very cheapest.  I don;t need desert, i just snap off a piece of this at the end of my meal and am satisfied. 

If you have access to it, you should try it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by siduri 

 

Novi 72% chocolate

 

 

If you have access to it, you should try it.

  Will do!  thanks for the suggestion.

I am going to try it to Dan .

Has anyone had a Amedai Chuao ? just wondering......

There is a Chocolatier  by the name of Genevieve Grandbois who makes truffles here, awesome.

@ Foodpump: Whenever I get back to Vancouver , I would love to try your chocolates.

Petals.

Quote:

Originally Posted by petalsandcoco 

I am going to try it to Dan .

 

Has anyone had a Amedai Chuao ? just wondering......

 

There is a Chocolatier  by the name of Genevieve Grandbois who makes truffles here, awesome.

 

@ Foodpump: Whenever I get back to Vancouver , I would love to try your chocolates.

 

Petals.

  You're the one who inspired me to start eating chocolate in an elevated way :)  remmy word!ember that first 99% I had?  Upon first taste, my word!  But I found a way to appreciate it, in smaller parts of course.

All the best,

Dan

Yes Dan,

That was the point indeed. An experiment (don't recommend eating it all the time lol). Bitter to no end but it was the experience. Anything 70% I really enjoy. (good quality chocolate usually shines through in the taste.)

Petals.

Quote:

Originally Posted by margcata 

 

 

 

Firstly, there are several brands of chocolate that we enjoy. My younger daughter lives in the heart of Zürich, Switzerland, and thus, we always go over to Sprüngli, which owns Lindt.

 

Umm..not quite true. Spruengli was and is a pastry business that invested in Lindt waaay back in the late 1800's.  Lindt is Lindt, and has many branches in many countries, with each branch making some kind of a confection.  However ALL the chocolate  MUST come from Lindt, which is made either in Kilchberg (ZH) or in Bern.  I currently import 6-700 kg of Lindt per year.  It is good stuff.

Max Felchlin in kanton Schweiz (Switz)  makes some very, very good (and expensive) single origin chocolates.  El Rey in Venuzuala (sp?) makes some very good stuff too. Cluizel also has some very nice stuff too, and very expensive

There are some very good chocolates out there, but I have no real favorites, each one is unique

The thing I find kind of a little bit of a pain to navigate has been the explosion of mixed ingredient chocolates available commercially here in the states in the past 5 years or so.  While interesting in concept and good in their own right (with varying degrees of concept success), I tend to be a purist first, innovator second and my selection and style follows suit.  That's why I am very much aligned with what TCHO is doing.  In brewing beer it was a similar concept.  Use your ingredients to promote or emulate flavor profiles...for instance using particular yeast strain and ferment temperature to produce cherry or raspberry notes.  "How many pounds of Cherries did you use"? "None, it's from the yeast"....

Not sure if this is along the lines you're talking about, Zoebisch, but I'm pretty much a purist in chocolate eating.  I used to like all kinds of filled chocolates like baci perugina, or the mixtures like gianduiotti, and now i detest them.  I think mixing mashed filberts (hazelnuts) with chocolate (and always a lot of other things) is a very cheap way to make the chocolate go further.  And i'm not crazy about the taste or the mushy (they would say creamy) texture. 

Though my first preference is always 72%, I still like a fairly hard milk chocolate (not too creamy, it must have some bite) with raisins and almonds.  I hate filberts, i find them to be reminiscent of tree bark, while whole almonds are waxy like chocolate, but that's my personal taste. 

But try the Novi 72% only if you like chocolate with bite or snap, and not the creamy melt-in-your-mouth kind.  It's sweet enough (any more bitter and i would find it unpleasant),  And great for baking.  No pasty taste in it such as i found when i tried the much-revered ghirardelli or green and black  and better than venchi or lindt or other famous ones.  Ganache comes out clean and chocolate-flavored.  

And i started buying it because i was baking a lot of stuff and needed a cheap chocolate, and that was the cheapest!  what a surprise!

Maybe, of course, if you get it imported it will be more expensive, but i get it at the supermarket.  Lucky, eh?

Quote:

Originally Posted by siduri 

 I think mixing mashed filberts (hazelnuts) with chocolate (and always a lot of other things) is a very cheap way to make the chocolate go further.  And i'm not crazy about the taste or the mushy (they would say creamy) texture. 

 

Gotta disagree with that one. 

Not your taste, taste is personal and whatever you like or don't is just that. 

Hazelnuts, on the other hand go for about $14-16 per kg and good couverture, really good 70% couverture around $12/ kg.  Even with large mnfctrs buying in large quantities, hazelnuts are still much more expensive compared to chocolate, and processed hazelnut paste (shelled, roasted, ground) even more.  Of course you an cheapen the stuff by adding all sorts of garbage in there--various vegetable oils, more sugar.

Nah.. the Swiss, (I'm looking at YOU Henri Nestle..) figured out that by adding 1/3 milk powder to 1/3 cocoa masse and 1/3 sugar made chocolate "stretch out"--i.e: Milk  chocolate.

Food pump - I never did any professional work in this field and I have no memory for numbers but I would be willing to bet that here, at least, hazelnuts are far cheaper than chocolate. Consider also that a pound of hazelnuts is a lot more volume than a pound of couverture since hazelnuts are much lighter.  Maybe the cost of hazelnuts in the states is higher, that could be.  But hazelnuts are in everything here, and the hazelnut bushes are everywhere, and  loaded with the nuts, in the woods, on the side of the roads, everywhere,  and they even sell the shells compacted into clumps for fuel to heat the house.  All that;s needed is a machine to shell them and they;re useable, while chocolate beans are imported, and need all kinds of procedures to make them into chocolate.  It seems very unlikely it would cost less than the nuts to the major chocolate producers.

I remember hazelnuts, in the states, were kind of special, "continental", unlike the lowly walnut, but here it's the other way around.  I think that's why the european chocolate companies put them in so many kinds of chocolate - ground to a paste they extend chocolate like the milk does.  Also those little chocolate eggs they sell wrapped in foil - here they cost way more if you get them made of solid chocolate and they're really hard to find.  The filled ones are much cheaper and you can find them everywhere.  And what are they filled with?  almost always a hazelnut/chocolate paste. 

A propos of the Swiss, have you ever read Sandra Boynton's genial book Chocolate, The Consuming Passion?

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