> From there, Toth suggests placing a square of chocolate into your mouth, breaking it into small pieces with your teeth, and letting it melt. No chewing.
This is some 'shaken but not stirred' nonsense. How do you break something into small pieces with your teeth without chewing?
It's not that hard. This isn't something invented by Toth but is rather just a standard part of chocolate tasting.
You don't need a $300 or even $10 chocolate bar to benefit from this technique - it brings out the flavors of a $3 Trader Joe's 85% cacao Colombian bar just as nicely.
Ours is 1.70 or so. Trader Joe's has a bad record for suddenly ceasing production of stuff I like, so I buy a few dozen bars at a time. There's a noticeable difference between the first bar of a purchase batch and the last a few months later -- less fruity glossy snap, but I also find it more "cocoa"ish.
It's impressive quality for the price. Lindt 90% is also good if you can get it for ~$2, noticeably more cocoa forward if you're into that.
You know what, I think I was recalling the price of a different bar they introduced more recently. The 85% Dark Chocolate Lover's Bar is still $2 here.
Yeah we're on the whole low carb thing and it's relatively low carb while being cheap and delicious, couple that with living a distance from TJs, we tend to stock up and then our lack of will power comes into play...
A buddy of mine has a theory that every great product needs a gimmick. It needs something that makes it seem like it stands apart from similar products.
Going to sell a pen? No! Sell a pen that appeals to someone's sense of a adventure, even if it (and the person buying it) will spend its entire life sitting on the desk at the office.
Chewing means mashing it up repeatedly until it becomes a fine paste. The guy means just break it up into large chunks and let them sit on your tongue until they dissolve, without further maceration.
Yeah, I don’t get the problem. He’s just trying to get across the point of chewing just a small amount, instead of mashing it into paste.
If you don’t think this makes a difference… even if you’re right, you’re wrong. As Serious Eats points out with their articles on Mexicoke[1] and eggs[2], our enjoyment of food is inextricably linked with our emotional perspective on where the food came from and how we’re eating it. The simple act of caring about how you chew a bar of chocolate actually increases your subjective enjoyment of it, even if a hypothetical double-blind experiment would show no discernible difference.
You could immediately follow that tasting with another bar for which you give exactly opposite instructions: macerate quickly, trying to expose as much of the chocolate’s surface area as possible in order to maximize the evaporation of volatile oils. I would wager heavily that the explicit difference in instruction and focus on a different aspect of the experience would heighten the taster’s appreciation of both bars.
This is some 'shaken but not stirred' nonsense. How do you break something into small pieces with your teeth without chewing?