The Art of Tasting Chocolate

Ferry Building Marketplace, Slow Food and The Art of Tasting Chocolate

The fifth annual “FOOD FROM THE HEART” at the FERRY BUILDING MARKETPLACE kicks off on Friday, February 8th, with a benefit for Slow Food from 5:00-8:00 p.m. The public is invited to stroll through the candlelit Grand Nave where the merchants and restaurateurs of the Marketplace will offer seasonal hors d’oeuvres ($2 - $4 per taste) and Slow Food volunteers will pour wine from several wine bars ($6 per glass). There will also be music by Golden Gate Hot Club and Classical Revolution, tango dancing, and a chocolate tasting led by Karletta Moniz of this website, The Art of Tasting Chocolate and CULINARY MUSE . Scharffen Berger has kindly donated chocolate. Proceeds from wine bar and hors d’oeuvres purchases benefit Slow Food San Francisco. The entire Marketplace will be open until 8:00 p.m. for Valentine shopping. Inspired by the season of love, the Epicurean revelry and delights carry on through Saturday, as the Marketplace and the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market will be brimming with heartfelt foods and local chefs will offer cooking demonstrations on how to prepare seasonal, romantic meals.
Slow Food San Francisco seeks to promote the pleasures of farm to table gastronomic culture through taste education and community involvement. In addition to their efforts to protect the pleasures of the table, Slow Food raises funds to support a variety of organizations with similar goals. The proceeds of the FOOD FROM THE HEART event will be directed towards the Sanchez School Garden Program and will sponsor a Ferry Plaza Farmers Market food artisan, producer or farmer to Terra Madre, a world forum for those who are also engaged in the ideals of sustainable, local and human food production.

ABOUT TASTING

There is tasting and then there is TASTING.

Small cap chocolate tasting is the tasting that I do throughout the day of the chocolates I know and love. The bon bons, the handful of chocolate chips mid-morning, the cup of hot chocolate in the afternoon. You get the idea.

Large cap TASTING is the tasting that I do when I am approaching a new chocolate that I am not familiar with. Or the tasting that I get to do with my winemaker friend, DB, who possesses the most prosaic palate I know. To taste with him is to spend an evening with a storyteller. I pull out my entire chocolate stash, good and bad, when he is in town. He will try a chocolate and might agree with me that it tastes cheap and burnt. Then he will stop, close his eyes, and say, ‘Burnt nuts. Yes, burnt nuts that have been ground into the rubber gaskets in the machinery and have gone rancid. Burnt cashews. Bits of burnt cashew in a roasting machine that has not been cleaned properly for at least six months.’ Or he will take a small bite of chocolate and say ‘Soy, why soy?’ and then I get to tell him all about emulsifiers and soy lecithin in particular and on we go for an entire evening. Lucky us.

I bring up this point now about tasting because I have spent a lot of time evaluating new chocolate products in the past few months as well as being a judge for the International Chocolate Salon this past July. It is always a pleasure to taste something new. And it is always an honor to spend the time getting to know and trying to understand what the chocolatier and/or the confectioner had in mind as they created their product.

What I am finding as I taste my way through dozens of chocolates is that I have yet to taste something produced by an artisan (vs large manufacturer) that is truly vile. I may find the chocolate/confection ill-conceived or dull or boring. But I don’t usually run from the room looking for a spit bucket. Unfortunately, there are many chocolates from the large, corporate chocolate makers that must be spit out immediately. I am sorry for this. They suffer from too large a scale of production. There is a lack of quality control. Profit is not only the bottom line but also the driving force. Okay, so what else is new? But what I am most offended by is the way in which their marketing and advertising departments have hijacked the vernacular of the artisan. How dare they? The words and phrases like ‘single estate’ and ‘single variety’ are becoming meaningless in the world of chocolate because their meaning is being diluted. These words are being slapped on fancy new envelope-style packages of chocolate bars. Silk purses made out of sow’s ears? Mutton dressed as lamb? Worse. These folks are suffering from delusions of grandeur. They are responsible for mistreating cacao beans. The beans are not allowed to ferment long enough to develop flavor, are dried too quickly and roasted too dark in an effort to mask the off-flavors. And then they try to call it something that it is not: fine chocolate.

I deem it an honor to be asked to taste and evaluate. And an honor to bear witness to someone’s creative endeavor. I try to only call out what I think is fine. I only include the finest in my tastings because my students deserve to know how high the bar can go. And to learn to never settle for less. Chocolate is a divine indulgence. We don’t need it for our bodies to survive but I will argue that we need it for our souls.