Chocolate Lab

Chocolate.

How much chocolate is in that bar, and how much milk and sugar? These are the questions that move men’s minds, well, when they aren't thinking about boobs.

Really if you are going to cook with chocolate, eat it, or melt it and drizzle it all over the slowly building curvy under-edge of...well, never mind…you really need to know which chocolate is best to use for various applications.  Tom is here for you.  Tom took one for the team and taste-tested a whole array of chocolate bars.

There are more than just Hershey bars out there, and if this is news to you, we have some other things to break to you. For instance, there are at least 17 types of bra clasp and as many shapes of breast as there are wine glasses, coffee mugs, and melon analogies.  So open your eyes up!  There is a great deal of variety out there in the world and it seems you’ve been missing it.  We had to go out and buy the Chocolate Blanc, and the 100% chocolate. Aside from that, Tom had seven kinds of chocolate already in the cupboard.  If you count the fruit and spice flavored chocolates Tom had 12 varieties in the pantry.  Yeah, he’s an underachiever.

The photograph is really a very simple guideline, it only represents big jumps in percentages and ignores all the "other" ingredients nor does it look at where the beans are from, or the number of sources. 

Running the numbers:

White chocolate, is in fact…Not...Chocolate.  It is cocoa butter with milk and sugar.  Tom only put it on the cutting board so that we could tell you that.

The Hershey bar is good if you like that sort of thing.  To Tom’s taste it contains a little too much "other stuff” like milk, and not enough chocolate.

“World Famous” fund raiser chocolate had a bit more flavor but every bit as much “other stuff” in it and was very milky. So if you really are not looking for chocolate but more just something sweet to eat, it is okay.  Tom will be embarrassed for you, but it’s alright, Jim would probably eat it.

Bakers Simi-sweet Chocolate had a very hard texture which is fine in a baking product. Nice big chocolate taste and once it melted, it was nice and sweet as well.

The 34% chocolate bar's packaging didn't seem to want to tell us how much chocolate it had on board but it was nice to eat and had the distinctive milk chocolate flavor but was a bit too sweet for Tom’s palate.

Now the 54% chocolate bar was rich chocolaty deliciousness on the tongue, it melted into warm sweet goodness rapidly and was VERY chocolaty. Tom ended up eating most of this one, and letting the flavors mellow before he refreshed the palette with coffee. The milky taste was gone at this level of chocolate, replaced with a creamy smoothness to the flavor.

Now we jump to serious levels of chocolate and the dryness starts to come into play and with some brands, a bitterness creeps into the flavor.  Ghiradelli, however, is just a really big chocolate flavor.  Tom crunched this up a bit when ate the sample rather than letting it slowly melt.  Hey, we are guys after all, people to do, places to cook, and meat to broil.

Tom sank his teeth into the Godiva 85% chocolate and WHOOP, there it is.  Dry and a bit bitter, but in a spice way that he liked.  This level of chocolate is why Tom is the lab rat here.  Jim’s skull would have exploded out the back of his head like a sniper’s bullet.  Tom is a professional Chocophile.  Magna cum Laude.

The Ghiradelli 100% dark chocolate is not really for eating at all. Even for Tom.  It is very dry and bitter, all the while tasting INTENSELY of chocolate.  It really is too bitter to leave in your mouth unless you are super dedicated.

So we hope this run down of what the percentages of chocolates was helpful.  Tom just headed out to have his blood donated as a source of laboratory grade sucrose.