Chocolate tasting evening

[stellar_muddle]

There was a lot of chocolate (photos behind cuts).
Five hours later and lots of doggie bags to the attendees, there is still a lot of chocolate. The milk chocolate will probably be taken into work on Mon and inflicted on any one around.
The setup:
5 milk chocolates: labelled anonymously A,B,C,D,E, with people ranking them best to worst. Yes, generally price did corelate with quality, however the cheaper Lindt was more popular than the more expensive Organic Green and Black. Dairy Milk and Whittikars just about tied behind those two and the Black and Gold milk cooking compound was far behind.


The milk chocolate lineup

Then there was the Dark chocolate tour, where we progressed through dark chocolates of increasing steps, going through 45% (Cadbury), 50% (mysterious Israeli), 70% (german, Cadbury, Richfields), 77% (Hachez german), 85% (Lindt), to 88% (Hachez german). Up to 70% was good, with Richfields being nicest - sort of smokey, but above 75% was just too strong and made your mouth dry up too much.


The dark chocolate lineup

Non- dairy ranged from not bad to wierd...


The non-dairy lineup under the TV with the flavoured ones to the side on the bookshelf.

And there were lots of wierd flavours - the merlot and pinot noir ones were very popular. Strawberry and pepper was just wierd, and geranium (thanks staranise) was either really liked or really loathed.


The entire lineup. They expand a lot when broken up.

There was also a chocolate fountain with flowing belgian chocolate.

The fruit and chips were definitely needed.

And unfortunately I have hit flickr download limits for the month, so no more pictures for a while.
Suprisingly, for the amount of chocolate I have eaten, I am quite tired. Time to bag a very large amount of chocolate and head off to bed I think.

Edits the following morning:
Next time less milk choc. We did 2 packets of each cause everyone would be trying it, but even with 20 people, we could have done with just a block of each.
Thumbs were quite sore from breaking, but despite that, next time break up finer. Especialy with the dark chocolates, you only wanted the tiny-ist quarter of a square. And after a while of chocolate, you just wanted a hint to establish the flavours and texture. It took 3 of us an hour and half to break them up as far as we did, and further breaking would have required a lot of knife work.
People were curious to try the different levels of dark choclate (definitely worth slowly stepping up in cocoa solid %), but did like the flavoured stuff the most.
Maybe next time a Schoc comparison evening... Smaller existing subset of people interested in the strange flavours but there are people interested. Not certain if can organise the purchase while over and then the evening in the next 2 weeks. May be a little busy then.

Comments

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

Discovered the Dark Ghana when over for Christmas and currently have some in a cupboard (brought over at Festival by nice chocolate pushers) :). That one was a lttle too nice to sacrifice, especially given how many 70%s we already had. The Richfields was most highly thought of, of the 70%s there, but 70% does seem to be a really nice cocoa balance.

I didn't manage to post the debri photo - lots of little plastic baggies full or partially full of chocolate...

I think real hot chocolate may be a project for later, but the large amounts of milk chocolate will donated to the tea rooms at work.