Like this one, from a well known local musician and author...
"If chocolate were music, yours would be the darkest, deepest Mozart."
Or this one, from another local, Laura Chenel, of goat cheese fame...
"We had some last night, just after we finished a small amount of high-end chocolate we had been
enjoying. Yours blew the other one out of the water! After tasting yours,
the other one tasted flat, dull, lifeless, boring. It is really intense and
intensely "fruity". The taste and the impression lingered for a long time. Absolutely stunning. Off the planet."
Keli preparing cayenne from our garden
We had been a little surprised at the depth and complexity of the flavor. We weren't sure why this batch was so different. Then today I made some cacao butter out of beans that are so bitter I don't use them to make chocolate. I tasted the cacao butter and made a discovery - when these beans are turned into cacao butter, you can still taste the bitterness but it is transformed. It is as though the clarity and purity of the cacao butter is transmitted to the quality of bitterness - it becomes transparent to all the other flavors and enriches them without obscuring.
This home-made cacao butter is the same stuff we used for the fifty-fifty batch. I guess that is what made the difference.
So tomorrow I am going to make more of the fifty-fifty but with evaporated cane juice from Whole Foods instead of our own farm sugar. Keli is going to add fresh coconut cream and crystallized ginger. Last week we did a small experiment with the coconut and ginger and the results were impressive.
Latest update:
We made another small batch with fresh coconut cream and crystallized ginger. The coconut cream is prepared by running the meat of a coconut through a Champion juicer. A rich cream comes out of the strainer and coconut flakes come out the end. We mix a little bit of the flakes into the cream, freeze it and then pour chocolate over the coconut mixed with crystallized ginger. No added sugar in the coconut cream. The results are sublime...
