Chocolate map by Bill Yosses; photographs by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Ah, the sweet taste of Ghana. It reminds me of a freshly roasted cup of coffee. But I usually prefer Venezuela: it tastes deeply earthy with some acidity to give my tastebuds a kick. Sao Tome is too harsh; it makes me pucker.

Can you actually “taste” countries? Yes, if we’re talking about fine chocolate! As mentioned in my Michel Cluizel chocolate review, the origin of the cacao beans can greatly affect the taste of chocolate. The type of soil, humidity, sunlight and even the phases of the moon combine to make make “terroir,” the growing conditions that affect food’s taste.

The New York Times even ran an article about the possibility and absurdity of identifying single-origin chocolate by country:

“We pondered the snappy break and acidic finish of chocolate from the African island of São Tomé and discussed how growing cacao trees in the soil of a former mango grove might result in chocolate with a faint flash of the fruit. We contemplated the raisiny ways of a bar from Papua New Guinea, which [Michel Cluizel chocolate expert Conrad] Miller suggested would go well with port. …

But when it comes down to it, can he really discern Ghana from Grenada? Ecuador from Colombia?

‘Regions I can tell. Continents, at least,’ he said. ‘I’m still working on the countries.’

If our chocolate sommelier can’t understand it all, is there hope for the rest of us?”

Taste is subjective, but a good place to start is The Nibble’s guide to regional variations in chocolate. I’m not able to identify a chocolate’s origin in a blind taste test, but the guide explains why I love El Rey chocolate and like Michel Cluizel’s Los Ancones bar more than his other ones. Both of those chocolates only contain Venezuelan beans, which are known for being highly aromatic, intense and earthy. There is also a slight acidity, reminds me that I’m dealing with “dangerous” stuff.

I also noticed that Jacques Torres’ 60% house blend has notes of coffee but tastes too neutral for my liking. It’s no wonder, since he said in a chocolate demo that he gets most of his beans from Ghana. The Nibble’s guide said that Ghana cacao commonly tastes like coffee and is “soothing and gentle.”

During my Michel Cluizel taste-test, I liked his Sao Tome chocolate, Tamarina, the least. Their cacao is forastero, the harshest tasting variety that Hershey’s also uses. (Hershey’s cacao comes from the Ivory Coast, a warring country that allegedly uses child labor. No wonder their chocolate tastes so bad; they have terrible terroir.) The Nibble says that Sao Tome cacao “can be tart and aggressive, full-forward on the senses, and offers little in the way of delicacy.”

Of course, there’s a caveat in choosing chocolate based only on country. Chocolate is also affected by how the beans are processed through drying, roasting and conching. Through careful handling, Michel Cluizel is able to coax the flavor out of those Sao Tome beans, so the chocolate doesn’t taste completely awful.

For more tips on how to taste chocolate, I highly recommend The Chocolate Connoisseur, a short but jam-packed book. Author Chloe Doutre-Roussel (who eats a pound of chocolate a day!) gives you the confidence to make tasting notes and choose a chocolate based on your mood.

According to an online quiz, my ideal pets are rocks and hermit crabs. Pet rocks are nice because they live forever and never have to be fed or cleaned. Believe it or not, there are more unusual pets to be had, such as wild yeast. Yeast is in bread of course, but it also floats throughout the air. Before modern days, bread bakers could not go to the supermarket and pick up packets of yeast. They had to cultivate wild yeast in a sourdough starter, which was made by letting flour and water sit out for for several days at room temperature. The idea is for the starter to go “bad” and attract natural yeast in the air. This time-honored tradition makes crusty artisan breads, such as baguettes, taste so good.

There are several ways to ferment flour. Nancy Silverton’s Breads from La Brea Bakery uses grapes, while others insist that rye flour is easiest to work with. See The Fresh Loaf and The Amateur Gourmet’s chronicles for more info. To build a starter, it needs to be fed with flour every day for about a week. With all the fuss, you can easily run into problems.

In Kitchen Confidential, chef Anthony Bourdain described getting a late-night phone call from his baker, who insisted that Bourdain “Feed the b—-, or else she’ll die.” The baker was referring to a beloved 250-pound batch of sourdough that he kept in his apartment. For one reason or another, the baker was away, and Bourdain had to brave his way into the apartment to save his restaurant’s bread.

If I weren’t a baker, I’d much rather keep a pet bird or better yet, a rock. But as a recipe tester for Peter Reinhart’s new whole-grain bread book (due out in 2007), I had to keep pet bacteria. The problem with sourdough is that it inevitably involves waste. Every time you feed the yeast, you end up with a bigger blob that can potentially take over your kitchen. You’re supposed to throw away some starter or flush it down the toilet, but I don’t like wasting anything.

For a while, I used the excess starter for crumpets (thanks to The Baking Sheet for the tip), but I grew tired of them. After some googling, I found that sourdough can also be used to leaven muffins. This recipe from Sourdough Home makes the closest thing to cake for breakfast without inducing guilt. A tip: if you’re using whole-wheat starter, use white flour for the main dough, or else your muffins will be extra wheaty and coarse.

How else can do you use excess starter? How do you convert regular quick bread recipes to incorporate sourdough?

Resources to tide you over until Reinhart’s new book comes out:

Reinhart’s excellent recipe for NY-style bagels

Free sourdough starter (with SASE) if you’re too lazy to make your own.

How fine fat is! The same ingredient that makes dessert delicious goes straight to the pooch beneath my wannabe six-pack. I want to make my cake and eat it too, so I experiment with ways to make dessert healthier.

The oldest trick in low-fat baking is to replace half of the butter or oil with applesauce. Besides being moist, applesauce contains sugar, which tenderizes dough. Applesauce works beautifully in quick breads and spice cakes but not so well in pound cakes and pie crusts, where butter is crucial to the flavor or flakiness. Applesauce also doesn’t fare as well in cookies. It contains too much moisture, so cookies get cakey, and you lose the crisp edges.

There are a couple ways to get around the applesauce conundrum. For cookies, you can omit up to half the butter because they’re so rich already. I usually leave out 1/3 or 1/4 just to be safe. Or, you can use a different fat substitute to mimic the texture you want.

Other cultures have long known that pureed beans are sumptuously smooth. Good Israeli hummus, for example, is as rich as butter. I’d take The Hummus Place’s signature dish over foie gras any day. The Chinese and Japanese add sugar to pureed beans, nestling it inside pastries.

As seen in the black-eyed susan cake, pureed beans are actually a pretty good fat substitute. If you don’t believe me, scientific experiments have shown that pureed white beans can replace up to half the fat (by weight) in cookies and brownies. To take advantage of the beans’ smooth texture, I used them in a fudgy brownie recipe.

Brownies come in several varieties: fudgy, cakey and chewy. I generally prefer them chewy, because they most closely resemble the boxed mixes I grew up on. Alice Medrich has a divine, low-fat, chewy brownie recipe in Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts and Cookies and Brownies. Chewy brownies use cocoa powder, which has great flavor, but they’re missing cocoa butter: that magical ingredient that melts in your mouth.

If I’m feeling decadent, I switch my loyalty to fudgy brownies, which are chocolate in “cake” form. Purists insist that real brownies have no baking powder or soda, just plenty of chocolate, eggs for leavening, and enough flour to hold it all together.

My favorite fudgy recipe has a whopping 12 ounces of chocolate, three sticks of butter, three cups of sugar, six eggs and just over a cup of flour. If there ever was a poster child to use bean puree as a fat substitute, this was it. In this adapted recipe from The Farm of Beverly Hills, melt the chocolate and one and a half sticks of butter over a double boiler. Then, whisk in six ounces of white bean puree and the eggs. Add the cake flour, cocoa powder, sugar and salt and bake. The recipe says it yields 20 brownies, but I got 36 small but very rich brownies.

The end result was very moist, smooth and delicate. It was so delicate, in fact, that you could probably get away with using all-purpose flour. They did not taste beany or like they were reduced fat. I noticed less buttery flavor, but only because I had eaten the regular brownies before. Anyone else would not be able to detect the secret ingredient.

How to Make White Bean Puree:

If starting from scratch, soak dry cannellini, great northern, or white kidney beans with water by at least two inches. Cover and let stand for up to 24 hours; refrigerate if the kitchen is very warm. Soaking is optional, but it can save anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour of cooking time. To cook the beans, drain them and cover with water to cover by two inches. Bring to a boil over high heat. Skim off the foam that rises to the surface. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally until they are very soft. Unsoaked cannellinis take about 30 minutes; great northerns and white kidney beans take one to 1 1/2 hours. Dry beans will swell to about three times their original size.

Measure out six ounces, or about 1 1/3 cup of cooked beans. If you are using canned beans, rinse them thoroughly to get rid of excess salt. Puree in a blender or food processor until smooth. You should have 3/4 cup of puree.

Notes/tips:

• The salt is very important in this recipe to give off that buttery flavor.
• Whisk the eggs in just to combine. Do not beat them, as the extra air will make the brownies cakey (which is fine if you like cakey brownies, but there are lower calorie recipes for that!).
• To make one cup of cake flour, subtract 2 Tbsp from one cup of all-purpose flour. Then add 2 Tbsp of cornstarch. Some say that cornstarch makes baked goods taste chalky, but I can’t detect it in such small quanities. If you despise cornstarch, just subtract the 2 Tbsp of all-purpose flour and don’t add anything else. In this recipe, you can get away with not doing any substitutions, if you like.
• To set the crust and leave the interior creamy, Alice Medrich developed the “Steve ritual.” After baking the brownies, immediately dunk the pan in an ice bath. Do not attempt with a glass pan; the sudden drop it in temperature will cause it to crack.
• These brownies will only be as good as the chocolate you use. Save your chocolate chips for cookies, and do not under any circumstances use Hershey’s. I’m not saying you have to go all out with Valrhona, but I used a mid-range chocolate from Jacques Torres.
• Silicone pans are stick resistant but not non-stick. Be sure to grease them.

Photo: Christopher Norman Chocolates

Did you know? Christopher Norman Chocolates regularly hosts free tasting events in NYC! Thanks to Chocolate in Context for the tip.

As pulled from their website:
What will the theme be? We don’t know yet! We’ll sort it out soon and update the site with more information. What do we know? The date, for sure!Please join us at our store on Tuesday, September 19th From 6-7:30pm

60 New Street Between Beaver Street & Exchange Place New York, NY 10004

This event is free of charge and open to the public. No reservations are accepted, as we do our best to accomodate all of our guests. If you have any questions, or would like to be added to our email list to be informed of future events, please feel free to contact us via email at: Sales@ChristopherNormanChocolates.com

This date is subject to change, please check back with the website periodically to confirm.

About Christopher Norman:

Christopher Norman Chocolates is a company founded in 1994. John Down, the Chief Chocolate Officer, uses his distinguished background in painting and the arts, to create a unique artistic quality in the taste and feel of all his chocolates.

Distinctive boxed collections, hand painted & sculptural truffles, and innovative flavors are all essential elements in Christopher Norman Chocolates. It is our mission to create extraordinarily luscious and sensory-provoking confections that encompass the quintessentially classic flavors, as well as unique and fresh taste experiences. Only the finest all-natural ingredients are used in our truffles and chocolates. Each piece is made by hand, here at our New York City factory.

We invite you to stop by our Gallery Shop, a charming storefront at the head of our factory, where we can offer you our freshest chocolates made on the premises in addition to hand-pulled Espresso, Cappuccino, Hot Cocoa, and Coffee. You can look into the factory where the chocolate is being made, from a window to the street, although most of our visitors seem to prefer the view from inside of our tantalizing truffle case.
FYI, professional chocolate critic Clay Gordon will lead a chocolate tasting at Christopher Norman on Thursday, Sept. 21 as part of the monthly NY Metro Chocolate Meetup. You can hit Christopher Norman twice in one week! I previously went to the Chocolate Meetup’s tour of the Tumbador chocolate factory in Brooklyn, and I highly recommend their events! Clay is super nice and knowledgable. If you’re interested, register at Meetup.com.

Joe is driving East at 60 miles per hour. Andy is driving in the same direction at 70 miles per hour. If Andy started one hour after Joe, how long will it take for them to meet?

The only test that I failed in school was for word problems. Maybe it’s because I think too much and make them more complicated than they are. Or maybe it’s because I don’t see their practical application and don’t care about the question. Unless the question were, “How do I re-create my favorite chocolate sorbet?” then I could get serious.

As noted in my gelato post, Ciao Bella Gelato makes unbelievably rich chocolate sorbet. It is creamy and rich like ice cream, but there is no dairy, so it’s virtually fat-free.

In my quest to make this sorbet at home, I looked at the ingredient list/nutrition information and deduced a recipe.

Not only does the ingredient list tell you what to use, but it also tells you how much. Everything is listed in descending order by weight. For example, there is more water than rum extract.

Since it’s such a short list, the 31 grams of sugar listed is essentially granulated sugar. 31 grams x 4 servings = 124 grams for one batch. The dietary fiber gives a clue as to how much cocoa/chocolate is involved: one tablespoon of cocoa has 2 grams of fiber, according to Nutrition Data. There’s also corn syrup, vanilla, rum extract, but they’re listed at the bottom of the ingredients, so their presence is minute. I guessed how much there was based on other sorbet recipes I’ve seen. The chocolate liquor (unsweetened chocolate) gave me some trouble, because there’s no way the sorbet could be low-fat if there were more chocolate than cocoa powder. I made an estimated guess, then subtracted the weight of the ingredients from the total weight to yield the amount of water. I came up with this preliminary recipe:

Boy, was this CHOCOLATE sorbet. The flavor was very intense, and it didn’t freeze solid. It melted as quickly as Frosty the Snowman in the Mojave dessert. I used too much sugar and liquor, which keeps frozen desserts soft. Part of the problem is that the supermarket’s “light corn syrup” actually contains high-fructose corn syrup, which is sweeter.

Rather than tweak my recipe (guessing the amount of cocoa liquor gave me a headache!), I tried an Ultimate Ice Cream Book recipe for my second attempt. Here is the recipe, courtesy of Recipe Link. It had a better flavor but was still a little icy. (I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I froze the mixture in ice cube trays and broke it up in a food processor.)

For my third attempt, I just bought a pint at Whole Foods. It was the best $4 I spent.

Resources:

The Ultimate Ice Cream Book: Over 500 Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, Drinks, And More