Once again, I’ve had the chance to taste wonderful things for the Wall St. Journal; this time it was hot chocolates from some of the country’s top chocolatiers. They ranged from liquid ganache to wispy and aromatic, but every one of these had something far more wondeful than than cocoa of my childhood, which always seemed to be both painfully hot and totally disappointing on the cocoa front.
One thing i discovered during the research for this piece is that while i admire those hard core molten chocolate drinks in the Parisian chocolate chaud mode, (Askinosie’s drinking chocolate blew me away in flavor); as a beverage, I actually prefer a milkier chocolate drink. I either cut a drinking chocolate down with more milk, or go for a drinking chocolate with slightly less cacao content (saving the really intense stuff for eating). Blanxarts sweet Chocolate a la Taza bars are perfect for a lighter cocoa sensation.
What kind of cocoa do you love most?