The 92%

It's been a while. I wish I had a better excuse but the fact is that I couldn't find my password. It took me 9 years os searching and guess where it was! In my jacket pocket! No, I'm kidding. It fell down the 1/8" gap between range and the counter in the kitchen. The other day I cracked an egg and rather than making it into the pan, followed the same path as my password did 9 years ago. I went to clean the egg up, there it was, old and battered but it still worked. So here I am, 9 years better. 

My plan is to use this platform mainly for chocolatalk. I should probably start a new blog dedicated only to that effort but I have to give credit to everything I have done before because that has lead me to where I am. Chocolate is a design problem as much as a kid's chair or a furry van is.  It is all creative problem solving and that is essentially what I am blogging on about. Chocolate is now my main problem.

Take dark chocolate, for example.  Make that very dark chocolate. 100% cacao is about as dark as it gets and there are a lot of them out there. Some are really good and a lot are tough to eat. The problem is that the less sugar you add, the fewer places you have to hide. As you get closer and closer to 100%, the more the cocoa bean itself and the skills of the chocolate maker are revealed. If you choose the wrong cacao, if you goof up the roast, If you don't sufficiently aerate the chocolate, you may well be responsible for an astringent, harsh mouth mess, unworthy and regretful. Nobody wants that. 

WRONG! There is definitely a group of 100% chocolate lovers that has a bit of a cultish air to it. They eat 100% like someone who eats ghost peppers. They don't do it for flavor, they do it because it separates them from everyone else. I am pretty sure that if Woodblock Chocolate made a 100% bar, there would be a devoted clan that would eat it and praise it only because it is 100%. To me that is like wearing a badge of honor for something of questionable honor. It feels disingenuous. That is fine but I am driven by flavor and if the experience of eating chocolate is less than amazing, I don't want to have any part of it, even if I could sell the hell out of it. Integrity is a costly burden, right up there with ambition.

The truth is that I would love to make a great 100% bar but I haven't been able to make something that meets my standard. I did make a chocolate a few years ago that was 98% cacao and I added 2% whole milk powder. That little bit of milk added an amazing amount of creaminess and sweetness for its tiny presence. It was The Darkest of Milk. The darkest milk chocolate bar in all of the land.  

Alas, many super dark chocolate eaters are also very anti-milk so it wasn't viable.

I have been chipping away at the sugar content and although I am not yet at 100%, I am very happy with a new chocolate bar I am calling The 92%! It is a blend of cacao from Tanzania and the Dominican Republic and it is sublime. It is fruity and bright but without too much acid. Its sweetness comes from the cacao as much as from the sugar. The melt is magical with the thin format allowing the chocolate to reveal its flavor with the bawdy fluency of a burlesque dancer. It is truly a thing that you want on your tongue. The 92 %! Its the darkest chocolate we make.