Chocolate Is Healthy

Despite being geared toward the Western U.S., we love reading Sunset for its food and decorating ideas.  In the January issue, they called out a number of healthy dark chocolate products, some of which were new to us.

Utah’s Amano Artisan Chocolate makes award-winning, single varietal handmade chocolate bars incorporate carefully sourced beans from Venezuela, Madagascar, Ecuador, Bali, Ghana and beyond.  They also sell hand roasted cocoa nibs and bulk chocolate.

Claudio Corallo cultivates a cacao plantation on the African island of Principe, a biologically-rich island with world-reknown cacao.  His offers complex bars, some with flavors like orange and ginger, as well as whole roasted cacao beans that have a delicious nutty texture.

We also learned about Portland, OR based Sip to Live, a shop with unique blends of organic teas based on ayurvedic principles.  Each blend helps to serve and refresh different areas of the body.  For example The Cool-Out, with its blend of chamomile, cherry bark and other herbs is made to soothe the nerves.

Ever wonder how to properly taste chocolate?  With so many types of chocolate available, it’s hard to know what to look for, let alone what to taste for.  While there’s always a matter of personal preference in chocolate tasting, this excellent guide from Nibble is a great way to begin exploring chocolate the way professional food tasters do.

The Tasting Chocolate Guide is broken out into sections so you’ll learn to judge chocolate’s aroma, appearance and taste.  Chocolate tasting is a great activity to do with friends, where you gather a small group and each person brings a different dark chocolate bar or two.  You take turns evaluating the different types of chocolate.  Which one seems more waxy than the others?  What region’s chocolate did folks enjoy the most?

The Nibble Tasting Chocolate Guide also suggests the assortment of chocolates to have at a chocolate tasting and the best sequence to enjoy them.  Check it out here.

Taste Chocolate.

While there is an increasing number of vegan and fair trade chocolatiers, there are fewer making raw chocolate bars.   It’s an expensive and labor intensive process that leads to very high price tags.

The Village Voice profiled two relatively new raw chocolate bars, both based in Brooklyn, New York.  One is “Bean to Bar” by Jacques Torres.  The other is the lesser-known Mast Brothers who make gorgeously-packaged from-scratch artisan chocolate bars.  We are delighted that attention is being given to the nuances as raw chocolate.  Just as there is tremendous variety within processed dark chocolate bars, raw chocolate bars can vary significantly in flavor and depth.

Here’s where the article netted out:

“Both bars, in other words, offered completely different experiences, and beauty that was very much in the eye of the beholder. The Masts and Torres are doing excellent work, so calling one better than the other based solely upon taste does a disservice both to them and to the highly subjective reactions that chocolate inspires. If you want a more bitter, idiosyncratic bar, you want the Masts. If you want a smoother, more comforting bar, then go for the Torres.”

Battle of the Dishes: Bean to Bar Chocolate Bars From Jacques Torres and Mast Brothers – New York Restaurants and Dining – Fork in the Road.

Glamour provides the Dos and Don’ts of how to eat chocolate, and how to maximize its health benefits.

One of the first rules of eating healthy chocolate is to look for dark chocolate that is 70% cacao.  However, the article raises a great point about dark chocolate and how it can be an acquired taste, particularly for people accustomed to very sweet milk chocolate.  Doctors make the following recommendation:

“Shara Aaron, M.S., R.D, and Monica Bearden, R.D., the coauthors of Chocolate—A Healthy Passion, have a helpful tip: “You can develop a palate for the dark stuff by gradually increasing the percentage of cocoa in your chocolates and can even find some milk chocolates with 50 percent cocoa or more.”

The Dos and Don’ts of Chocolate: Health & Fitness: glamour.com.