When Good Chocolate Goes Bad
Never one to shy away from a pun ...
Warm weather shipping chocolate can be a real challenge, even in mid-May when things have not turned reliably too warm. Lessons to be learned shipping chocolate from Florida to NY
The chocolate in question was made from Camerounian beans, which often result in very warm, reddish-brown chocolate. This bar has that color – at least from what I can see between the bloom which I know affects my perception of it.
The chocolate maker is Hubert Masse whose work I know from visiting one of his shops in Paris when I was last there for the Salon du Chocolat in 2018. I will have to go visit the next time I am in Paris. Which I hope is sooner rather than later.
The aroma of the bar is still tantalizing and clear, and the taste, once I get past the texture of what amounts to untempered chocolate, is clear and round and deeply satisfying, with an aftertaste that lingers in the mouth for a very long time. Did I mention the lingering aftertaste? Even being completely out of temper and crumbly.
This has nothing to do with the initial quality of the chocolate itself, just that the bar was shipped in a box that was too small with insufficient insulation to protect it.
Despite the texture of the chocolate, the patterns of the cocoa butter bloom are mesmerizing. I have an iPhone 11 which has both wide and telephoto lenses and I have a set of lenses (from Shiftcam) that turns these into 10x and 20x macro lenses.
There are differences in the color of the images because the iPhone does an automatic white balance and even though I took these shots within moments of each other under daylight conditions the colors we’re seeing on-screen do not do full justice to the color of the chocolate itself. (I don’t have a color-corrected monitor to do the editing/viewing.)
Share your thoughts and comments about the beauty of cocoa butter bloom.