three bowls

Friday night, my friends Carolyn and Will (hosts of last year's apple tasting) and I went back to school.  Specifically, we headed to the Mechanical Engineering building on the University of Washington campus to attend a chocolate tasting with Bill Fredricks, aka The Chocolate Man.

As an article on his website explains, he is an "oceanographer by day, chocolatier at night."  His day job is at UW, but he also imports and sells bulk chocolate and makes candy. 

Bill puts on these tastings through the University's Experimental College.  This event had an introductory lecture by Bill, and then, of course, a pretty extensive tasting, almost 40 different chocolates in all, including bittersweet, semi-sweet, unsweetened, milk, white and grocery store chocolate chips vs. professional-quality.  But more on that in a sec.

Bill started us off by explaining the wheres and hows of cacao production.  He has a wealth of knowledge of everything related to chocolate production, from the agricultural challenges of actually growing the pods to the socio-economic factors involved in chocolate production.

(Bill's lecture set-up)

He had so much great info, but here were some of the most interesting highlights for me:

• Apparently cacao trees cannot be grafted or fiddled with the way, say, an apple tree might.  Additionally, the flowers from which the pods grow cannot be artifically pollinated on any kind of large scale, if at all. Basically it's tough for humans to do anything about how much an individual tree produces, leaving the overall cacao yield very variable and volatile.

(Bill's freeze-dried cacao pods)

• Chocolate prices just went up about 30% from some of the suppliers that sell to Bill, like Callebaut.  30%!!  Wheat and rice prices have also been skyrocketing; this is not a good time to be a carb-lover.

The information in his lecture was fascinating.  I had a momentary flicker of panic when I arrived in the classroom for the event. Looking at the blackboard, I flashed back to painful years of sitting dead bored in classrooms, but I worried for naught.  I apparently seem to have an exponentially larger attention span when it comes to learning where our food comes from, and especially when the info is being delivered by someone so knowledgeable about all of the interconnected factors. 

Carolyn and Will enjoyed Bill and his lecture as well.  I told them that what they liked about it and him is part of why I love working at the cooking school; not only is the information that these experts have interesting, it's also wonderful to meet these individuals - who are usually cheek-pinchingly-adorably idiosyncratic - who have this kind of passion for and encyclopedic knowledge about very specific topics.

And then to the tasting! 

A chocolate tasting might seem the height of decadence, but it felt the opposite to me.  In order to be able to try each of the - again, nearly 40 varieties - you have to take only the smallest bit of each in order to not become sickened by all the sweetness. 

Additionally, because you are comparing flavors, the simple sweetness - the thing you want when eating that 3pm candy bar - is the last thing you are paying attention to.  Instead, it's the subtle and sometimes not-subtle differences in flavor notes like citrus, cherry, smoke, caramel, etc.

And lastly, the act of paying such close attention to your food means you are eating mindfully.  That is ipso facto wholly opposite the kind of mindless eating that I associate with over-indulgence.  I found I was concentrating so hard on trying to discern the different qualities that I couldn't listen or even look around me very much; I had to narrow all of my attention to my taste buds.  So I think I missed some additional helpful info but maybe I'll just have to take the class again...

He included some common grocery store chocolates in the mix, in addition to the boutique and premium ones and a couple of the single-sourced (like the one from Cuba, which, unfortunately, he won't be able to get any longer).  The grocery store ones tasted pretty much as blunt and plastic-y as you would expect in comparison to the others.  The Hershey's bar was a joke; I'm not saying I wouldn't eat one in the future, just that stacked up against the others, it seemed to have nothing to do with the flavor of chocolate.

My favorites in the Dark category were the Guittard Oro, Callebaut 811 and Felchlin Maracaibo.  In the Milk, the Guittard Highland was yummy, and a hit with several people.  The Carma Des Alpes was very lovely, and another Guittard, Soleil d'Or was also quite nice. 

The best part about such a tasting is specifically to taste them all next to each other in a short period of time so all of your impressions of each individual chocolate are fresh in your mind and ready for comparison.  Some of the pricier brands I just didn't enjoy at all, or at least didn't enjoy compared to the next one I tried in the same category. (Unfortunately for me, this was true in the Unsweetened category, where I did not like a certain brand compared with the Cacao Berry Caraque.  However, the brand I didn't care for as much is the one I just paid $10 for a small block of unsweetened a little while ago.  Harrumph.  Well now I know better.)

(Chocolate nibs - very tasty!)

Carolyn and Will - who are both knowledgeable and curious about food and so are fun to do these things with - and I have been planning to do a chocolate tasting of our own with friends, and we now definitely in good position to do so. 

We are also now under deadline: a friend of theirs is due to have her baby in June, so Carolyn wants to do the tasting before that so that a) she can eat chocolate with abandon and b) science has proven that moms who eat chocolate while pregnant have happier babies (!).  So we have to get it together ASAP.

If you are in the Seattle area, I would highly recommend checking Bill's tastings out.  They are reasonably priced for a fun evening and I think you learn so much by being able to taste something in so many variations all at the same time.  If you're not in the area, it's still a fun thing to do, and once we put on our own scaled-down at-home version, if I have any tips for sourcing or planning, I'll let you know.