Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Sunday, December 2, 2007
16:58 - Chocolate Reviews: C�te d'Or Exp�riences Noir 86% and Lindt Excellence 85%	(top)
C�te d'Or 86%: Great wall stucco, lousy chocolate. Lindt 85%: Awesome. The hype is all true. Scharffen Berger 82%: Complicated, showoffy, and sour, without enough focus on tasting good. I think maybe the way I should handle these reviews is by tying each one to the previous one somehow. It's difficult to review a single chocolate bar in isolation; without anything to compare it to in the tasting, your taste buds can play tricks on you. Case in point: the C�te d'Or 86% I'm looking at here tasted pretty good to me when I first opened it up a few weeks ago; but after tasting it next to a few other 80%-class chocolates, it's become clear that to spare any breath on it for any reason other than to laugh at it is to waste precious carbon dioxide that could otherwise be going to keeping our poor planet warm. So in the tradition that I've just made up of linking each review thematically to the (or a) previous one, for readers' benefit as much as for my own (so you can follow along in a grand tasting adventure if you like, with a common sequential storyline running through from episode to episode until the inevitable conclusion where we confront the Chocolate Dark Lord and end the season on an infuriating cliffhanger while the theme music plays over the end credits), I'll refer back to the last review and pit the Scharffen Berger 82% blend against the C�te d'Or 86%, available in some Safeways, and the Lindt Excellence 85%, available even more widely. The C�te d'Or comes in a big black 100g package with gold lettering and an elephant logo that the Belgian company seems very proud of: Discover the true power of roasted cocoa beans. Delight in the intense flavor! Symbolic of the African Gold Coast, the C�te d'Or elephant is the seal of quality for the intense, authentic chocolate experience, perfected by our Belgian chocolatiers. Interesting. Usually chocolate makers don't want to draw attention to their cacao's West African origins unless they're certified Fair Trade (which means no child slavery in its production), and this one isn't. I guess that must mean they really believe in the power and intensity of their product, huh? For an 86% bar, especially one from West Africa, the color is pretty light, especially compared to the pitch-black Lindt: And there's that elephant again. Let's see how this thing tastes. <crunch> Hmm. <crunch crunch crunch> I said, let's see how this thing tastes. ....I'm not tasting anything. Wait... wait, I think I'm getting something. �No, no, my mistake. That was my other senses playing tricks on me, such as my sense of touch, which raised a klaxon upon feeling the clatter of this bar crumbling into hard little fragments in my mouth. But that wasn't taste. It wasn't even smell. This is just... nothin'. Not particularly unpleasant, just... flavorless. There are some hints of something interesting in there, but as soon as you get a grip on it it dissolves away, leaving you with only vague impressions of doctor's offices and natural gas leaks. The chocolate doesn't really melt, it sort of collapses like a Jenga tower into a heap of rubble on the tongue, which you then have to sweep out of the way like the ruins of a decrepit Vegas casino redolent of pipe smoke and loveless sex. Needless to say, there's no finish and no aftertaste to enjoy. Just a mouthful of wreckage that you're eventually glad is gone, and a cloud of something gray and gassy, indistinct and vaguely sinister, floating over the whole scene, looking towards the West, only to be dissipated by a firm breeze from over the Sea (or maybe a gulp of Diet Coke). So then we turn to the Lindt Excellence 85%, the highest-rated 85%-class bar at seventypercent.com. I've had this one before, and I remember it being pretty awesome. Let's see how it stacks up next to the C�te d'Or's Real Ultimate Power. Immediately the texture difference leaps out: it's chewier, which is to say it doesn't shatter into a million pieces like the C�te d'Or does. And the flavor is also apparent right off the bat; this one is a much deeper, richer, more luxuriant set of sensations, filling your mind with images of hot fudge sundaes and giant vats of melted chocolate being stirred and poured into molds. Indeed, there's hardly a single note in this bar's flavor profile that doesn't say chocolate to me loudly and firmly: no "forest fruits", no earthy or floral tones, no clangy Arriba, no herbal Madagascar�nothin' but net, which is interesting, because this bar has vanilla in it, an ingredient missing from the C�te d'Or. Yet the melt turns thick and bulky on the tongue, coating everything in sight, making you feel like you've got a mouthful of something much more substantial than the little 10g square you started with. It's not as pervasive a mouth-coating as you get from Lindt's own 70% (one of my very favorites), but it's definitely got lots of presence. When you let this one sit and melt for a while, it's going to be with you for a long time. So it's only after a good long palate-cleansing break that I turn back to the Scharffen Berger 82% from the last review. This one seems like a return almost to the texture of the C�te d'Or at first, a lot more brittle and crunchy than the Lindt; but it's nowhere near as bad as that first bar. It's somewhere in the middle, and its flavor comes rushing in a lot more quickly than either one. Unfortunately it's not as pleasant a flavor as the Lindt's, with a sharp tang that I noticed last time and is all the more apparent now, coming so soon after the sublime richness of the Lindt. The Scharffen Berger brings to mind all those weird images of fruits and herbs that are missing from the Lindt�citrus, tobacco, lots of acidity in general�and it's a challenge to get them all sorted out and hold the sourness in check as it melts at the back of the throat, disappearing a lot more quickly than the Lindt but lingering far longer than the pallid C�te d'Or. It's not a bad chocolate, to be sure, and if what you're in the mood for is something with a lot of interesting melodies playing at once, it does the job admirably. I'm just not saying they know how to harmonize. Between these three, it's the Lindt by a length or two, followed by the Scharffen Berger tossing its head and showboating for the crowd and not keeping its eye on the finish line; but it need not even breathe hard to get there ahead of the C�te d'Or, which arrives lumbering and wheezing and sweating hours after the spectators have all gone home. I guess that's what you get when you bring an elephant to a thoroughbred horse race. By the way, just in case anyone suspects (as would be completely natural) that I'm letting my preconceptions of brand names and prior reviews and packaging quirks color my experience and make me subconsciously rate these chocolates according to how I'd intended to before even tasting them, just like those wine critics who thought white wine with red dye in it tasted just like red wine, and that cheap wine tasted better when it came in a fancy bottle... I had a little chunk of Lindt 70% here on my desk just now, with the intent to eat it after these 85%-class chocolates. But I forgot about it, and ended up with it plus the last square of the C�te d'Or that I sighingly resigned myself to finishing off. Because I'd broken all three of these bars down a few times, I absently mistook the chunk of Lindt for the last bit of C�te d'Or, and popped it in my mouth. Immediately, expecting the clattering crunch and pallid flavor of that bar, I was overwhelmed instead by the thick, nutty richness of the Lindt, and I instantly realized my error. If these chocolates really were as interchangeable as those wines apparently were, I'd never have known the difference. But in this case the game was up at first bite. Next time I think I'll compare both these Lindt strengths against each other, or perhaps against some other Swiss varieties like Villars... and then after that we'll need to confront the Arriba monster head-on.