What's the BEST Chocolate?

[masraum]

So, I was bouncing around the 'net reading about chocolate and found some interesting stuff.

This was an interesting link
Chocolate Types - All About Different Types of Chocolate

that led me to this...

Couverture chocolate: Used primarily by professional bakers or confectioners, this chocolate contains a very high percent (at least 30%) of cocoa butter, as well as a high percentage of chocolate liquor. This high ratio makes it expensive, but it also means that the resulting chocolate is smooth and melts quickly and evenly. Couverture chocolate is the preferred chocolate for tempering and enrobing candies. It comes in dark, milk, and white varieties, and can be purchased online or at well-stocked cake decorating stores.

which piqued my curiousity, and led to this

Couverture Chocolate
excerpt

Couverture (French for coating or covering) chocolate is the basis of all chocolate, as grapes are the basis of wine. It is professional-quality chocolate that is used for tempering and making bonbons, truffles and chocolate bars, or enrobing other confections (chocolate-covered pretzels and marshmallows, e.g.). If you are a serious student of chocolate and want to understand why you prefer one brand over another, you need to learn your couvertures—and the companies that make them.

Couverture chocolate is made with better beans. It is ground to a finer particle size and has a higher cocoa butter content than most chocolate bars for eating.

The article above ends with a link to
Tour of some of the World’s Greatest Chocolate Houses
excerpt

To be selected for our worldwide tour, a company must be a “chocolate house”—a producer that purchases raw cacao beans to roast and process into chocolate, from which it creates:

Chocolate bars for consumer consumption
Commercial blocks of couverture chocolate from which pastries, bonbons and all other consumer chocolates are made.


Fine chocolate today is a world of single origin bars, where the beans from one plantation in Venezuela are as unique and revered as the grapes of Chateau d’Yquem. It is a world where chocolate houses, like Burgundian vintners, make their house blends, their premier crus, and their single origin products. And as with great wines, the experts can sniff and taste and deduce with studied accuracy not only the kind of bean the bar is made from, but the part of the world, country, and even the plantation the beans call home.

So, join chocolate expert Peter Rot as he tours the greatest chocolate houses in the world—those that produce the finest chocolate barsą money can buy and palates can savor. This “tour” is a substantial education on chocolate, and the only publicly-available article we know of that has undertaken such an in-depth articulation of the differences among the great chocolate producers.

A short way into the article I clicked a link that led to heaven!
Chocosphere - Fine Chocolates

I thought that some of you might find some of the info in the articles above interesting, and some of the products at "Chocosphere" appealing.

[aways]

ice cubes! from the fathaland...

[Laneco]

Dagoba makes a dark not-too-sweet chocolate with bits of chili in it!

You get a very rich chocolate taste with a little bit of kick. NICE!

angela

[Normy]

Well...

---I---

LIVED IN BELGIUM for a year!

There is ONE country for chocolate, and it is....you guessed it.... BELGIQUE!

Land of King Albert, the drunk. And Prince Laurant, who outran the Belgian Riechswacht in his Porsche 993...and was arrested in the royal palace!

[It was worked out, apparently....]

In any case, La Belge is the PLACE for chocolate. And Neuhaus it the best from what I can see. Godiva likes to sell Belgian culture in the United States, with their August Horta-influenced stores in malls, but "Godiva" products in this country is actually owned by the Campbell soup corporation.

Tomato soup and dark chocolate?

N!

[LeeH]

Check out John & Kira's, if you want to try something different:
Flavors

My wife loves these:
Chocolate Figs 6pc - John and Kira's Chocolates

I'm a fan of Ghirardelli. Their chips may killer cookies!

[dan88911]

TCHO.com check it out.

[techweenie]

Kron.