A detour from vinyl addiction, I'm recording my impressions of various dark chocolate bars, mainly so that I don't forget which I liked best, and to force me to do a little research.
First, some background on my interest in chocolate. I grew up just outside London, and at school ate a lot of sweets. I favoured sweets with some chocolate, and my mum gave me one or two bars a day as snacks. The choice varied: Kit Kats, Wispa, Double Decker, cereal bars. At the school tuck shop, I'd supplement by scrounging pennies to buy Yorkies, Dairy Milk, Fruit and Nut, and so forth. And I'd steal from my mum's pantry her Bourneville and Lindt. It was the pantry supply that gave me my first introduction to dark chocolate, something I'd associated with baking. I preferred milk for years. The turning point came in my late teen years. I'd visited Harrod's Food Hall, and the Leonidas, Godiva and other tables there. Leonidas remains some of the best value in Belgian handmade chocolates. Their dark chocolate covered crystalised orange rind was fantastic. I didn't drink coffee or tea, so around 16-18 got my cafeine buzz from increasingly darker chocolates. I also got heavily into connoiseurship and collecting as a lifestyle, whether chocolate, beer, wine, food, the arts (books, film, art, music), travel, etc.
Inter-railing around Europe at 16 for a month gave me access to lot's of great chocolate in Paris, Italy, and inexpensive options in Budapest. My diet was bread, chocolate, cheese and beer.
Later, in New York, I got tired of the Lindt, Suchard, Godiva, etc options, and started experimenting with the niche imports, and boutique American brands (Scharfenberger) that had begun to crop up in the mid-1990s.
I attended the first year of the Chocolate Fair in New York (1997?), and have been most years since. At this point, my interest had become rarified, to the point where I would only eat chocolate of a certain caliber. I favoured bars with higher cocoa content, although have since learned to disregard this as a crucial criteria. The anecdote about Hershey's having to rename their exports to Europe as 'chocolate substitute' as they didn't qualify with enough cocoa content by European standards, was something I often related to mystified Americans who were fine with any old chocolate.
My habit got out of hand a few years ago when I took a 100g bar or two to work every day. The Garden of Eden supermarket was en route to my agency in New York, and I stopped to pick up a stack of bars. The stockist was always on the lookout for new brands, and kept it interesting. Safe bets were Michel Cluizel, Valhrona, but I must have sampled at least two dozen brands, and different varieties of each.
In 2008, I'm back in London where chocolate is twice as expensive as New York. The selection is comparable, and there are a few interesting local artisans:
Rococo, and dull, omnipresent options clogging up the shelves like Green and Black.
I've cut back my chocolate habit somewhat, but upped the cafeine through tea and coffee, and pursued connoiseurship in those areas.
A seminal article for me was in
the Guardian in 2007, interviewing
Chloe Doutre-Roussel author of the Chocolate Connoisseur, a French woman. She disdained product marketed as organic, Swiss, or fair trade for its often poor quality. She didn't eat perfumed, blended, truffled or any sort of chocolate apart from plain bars. Her interest was in the origin of the cocoa, the roasting process, the blending, with everything focused on revealing the qualities of the bean. The purity of her outlook was refreshing and gave me a new sense of focus.
My latest experiment has been on my first visit to Whole Foods on High Street Kensington, which has a fantastic selection of chocolate bars. I picked up five that were new to me:
1.
Vintage Plantations 65%, Ecuador, Rancho San Jacinto plantation
Long, nutty, powerful, clean. £2.39 100g
2.
Organic Seed & Bean Company, 72% by Nurture Foods, Derbyshire
60 g, £1.49
3.
Andre Deberdt, 70%, organic, Le Pontet, France from Ecuador, Sao Tome, Vanatau producers, no plantation listed. £1.89 100g. Burnt, roasted, coffee, long nutty, astringent
4.
Prestat 63%, (est. 1902 in London)
5.
Pralus, Tanzanie, 75% Forastero, 100g £3.69. Roasted in Roanne, France.
Spicy, woody, floral, long
Just as Michel Cluizel provides an excellent way to
sample chocolate originated at different plantations from around the world, I've really been enjoying the
Palais Du Thes introduction to the cultures of the world boxed set. Part of the appeal of the single origin cocoa plantations is the vicarious sense of travelling to exotic places. Another fixation of mine is collecting travel destinations (see my
Facebook TravBuddy.com widget where I've covered 27% of the world's countries). The same appeal works with tea and the remote destinations: Tibet, Iran, Morocco, Argentina, Japan (all covered in teas that they present in aluminium test tubes in the box).
Tea is such a pleasant experience to refine. I love my Bodum glass and cafetiere. I use the cafetiere not just for coffee, but once well cleaned, for loose tea. The clear glass allows me to see the leaves seeping. In New York, I sourced my tea from
McNulty's in Greenwich Village, and a couple of stores in Chinatown. And from Garden of Eden, where they stocked Marriages Freres, Taylors of Harrowgate, Republic of Tea, etc. In London, I've been shopping at Fortnum and Masons and tried their two most expensive first flush Darjeelings, and regular Darjeeling, chai, and most of the line. Not too impressed. And on trips to Paris, I REALLY liked the Castleton first flush Darjeeling prepared in
Marriage Freres original store on Rue Bourg-Tibourg. In fact, we stayed across the street. I've been sampling various teas from their line. The Marco Polo flavor is pleasant, and works well in black and Roobois teas. The Darjeeling Master and Imperial blends seem fine. In fact, I've worked my way through many of the 60-something Darjeelings. I'm drawn to the arcane detail of different harvests, various Darjeeling plantations. The draw is similar to the attraction of Bordeaux or Rhone wines, and learning the terroire and the pedigree of various vineyards.
[That's all for now. I hope to come back to this post, decorate with some photos, and write on what drives my connoisseurship in various areas, and how that all ties back to vinyl and my comfort zone between headphones listening to vinyl, with either a glass of wine, or chocolate and tea. I say 'comfort zone', but what characterises it is challenging myself with new sounds, flavours, so a mix of the familiar comforts, and broadening my horizons.]
Cheese.
That's another fantastic food to become expert in. What a journey that's been. As I speak, I'm eating unpasteurised goat's milk cheese from Whole Foods, St Tola's Log NYD (£35/kg) and Sainte Maure de Touraine Mons (£5 for a 3" log). The St Tola doesn't distinguish itself. Too fresh and bland for my palette, which has been spoilt by local dairy's in Collobriere in Provence where I get to pick the age of chevre. Moyen age (somewhere between fresh and dried into a little puck) works for me, and the small producers have more flavourful cheese, more goaty, less homogenised. That said, these chevres are working fine on Carr's Table Water crackers and Cotes du Rhone Villages Reserve 2006 selected by Tesco (£4), a syrah, grenache blend that is great value. Described as 'intense, warm, fruity, full bodied with spicey noets', I don't agree. Not particularly fruity, intense, barely spicey, certainly warm, the grenache gives a flinty note, the syrah a tangy astringency.
To compliment the food and wine, I've switched from Radio 2's interview with Katie Melua, to John Lennon's Shaved Fish, the recent Japanese mini-LP CD which is the first un-mastered version of this album since the original vinyl. Untampered with by Yoko Ono, unlike all but one other of the reissues. And it sounds FANTASTIC.
Speaking of Carr's, I tried fancy crackers. There's an Austrlian brand of water wheels that has a
provencal cracker that is light and delicious. At Raoul's, they stock super expensive crackers with all manner of seeds, flavours and so on. But I've come to the conclusion that Carr's blandness is its strength. The cheese's qualities can shine without distraction by flavoured crackers.
It is the blank page upon which the dairy farmer writes his cheese's story.
As an aside, I got fired from House and Garden in 1997 for fact-checking Jay McInerney, and questioning his description of a Gruner Veltliner as acidic (asking the wine producer whether the wine had a particularly high acid content). This offended the subjectivist writer, clearly insecure in his amateur approach to writing about wine. On the one hand, that gig was the most lucrative and cushy in New York. Shame. On the other, the anecdote about the pompous McInerney has provided a great story, and left me fascinated by Gruner Veltliner, compelled to become expert in this wine. Looking back, something good has always come of getting fired. I ought to do it more often.
And now, I've got the Fromagerie down the road in Marylebone, Raoul's, Neal's Yard Dairy, Borough Market. London is great for cheese, and not necessarily more expensive, perhaps since it all comes from France, Italy, etc. That said, I didn't realise how much I missed Monterey Jack cheese from America until I tasted a gourmet version from Whole Foods. Bland, but delicious all the same. And it comes in a Edam-style red wax rind, adding a European charm.
