[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Chocolate Search

[Sharon Hayes]

Ali:
I'm going to sound like a broken record for this one, but I'll repeat
it. Good US chocolates can rival good European chocolates, though the
former is a rather rare breed - example: Scharfenberger. Also, places
like Max Brenner and Jacques Torres, both in New York City, conches
chocolate in-house, and despite certain facts, like that Jacques
Torres is clearly French, it remains that this is all US-made stuff -
much of the cacao beans are still foreign, though I think some do come
from Hawaii.
Sharon:
There are also some excellent chocolatiers in the French Quarter in New Orleans who make divine chocolate and pralines -- oh, and one that makes the ebst chocolate fudge. Sorry I can't remember the names of them though.  Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

________________________________
From: HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com [mailto:HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of P. Alexis Nguyen
Sent: Tuesday, 15 January 2008 8:32 AM
To: HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Chocolate Search


Magpie:
> I'm pretty sure this is literally true. I can't remember where I was
> reading this recently--I'll try to look it up. It wasn't the
> ingredients, but something about the process of actually making the
> stuff. Basically, there's a process for making chocolate out of the
> beans or whatever, and there were different ways that people tried to
> do it. Hershey was I believe the person who got it to work in the US,
> but his method is different--and inferior--to whatever was discovered
> elsewhere. And that's why US chocolate has a sort of waxiness that's
> inferior to the way chocolate tastes outside of the US.

You're talking about the history of industrializing the chocolate
industry. Before Milton Hershey, chocolate was a very boutique,
small-scale production item, making it mostly unavailable to the
masses. Hershey did perfect, though I don't know that he invented it,
the chocolate mass production process, and thus chocolate was given to
the masses (like fire from Prometheus ^_^).

I'm going to sound like a broken record for this one, but I'll repeat
it. Good US chocolates can rival good European chocolates, though the
former is a rather rare breed - example: Scharfenberger. Also, places
like Max Brenner and Jacques Torres, both in New York City, conches
chocolate in-house, and despite certain facts, like that Jacques
Torres is clearly French, it remains that this is all US-made stuff -
much of the cacao beans are still foreign, though I think some do come
from Hawaii.

~Ali, who does not make/eat chocolates for a living




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