wren001

I thought I'd wrap up my ranting about chocolate with some basic comments on regular, or slightly better than regular eating chocolate.

First of all, my tastes are definitely snobby. I like really good dark chocolate and I feel like milk or white chocolate is an inferior breed. However, when ice cream or brownies is the matter, all bets are off.

1. Favorite chocolate bar brands:

Most favorite:
Valrhona Chocolate
This company is a very old, independent chocolate maker that puts out some fantastic products (bars, truffles, cocoa powder). Everything they make is good, especially the dark chocolate with ground hazlenuts.

Also, Michel Cluizel makes excellent bars.
Michel Cluizel has a lot of distinctive tasting single-estate chocolates. Their chocolate which is above 70% has such complex and long tastes that I can only eat a little bit at a time.

And two other Belgian brands:
Cafe Tasse makes artisnal chcolates, some of which are with bits of orange, tea, coffee, or hazlenuts. I like the orange.

Finally, a brand which prides itself on its flavor combinations: Dolfin.
Their chocolates are good quality and come with a wide variety of added ingredients such as pieces of ginger, garam masala, pink peppercorns, anise seed, and my favorite, early grey tea. Any of them are great, and they come in great tobacco-like pouches.

There's also Scharffen Berger and Green and Black's, which are pretty good. I'm probably leaving something out and of course there are better hand-made chocolates around, but these are relatively easy to find, especially on the internet.

And next time I promise an end to chocolate with my list of places in NY, Paris, and London to buy chocolates.