Hot for chocolate
Feed your senses — and your soul — with this timeless treat
By Kathy English
"All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt!" — Lucy, Peanuts
Is there any food on earth that evokes our passion the way chocolate does? That rich, seductive flavour, the melt-in-your-mouth texture, the intoxicating aroma — together they create the sublime pleasure that we chocoholics crave. As the web site Famous Chocolate Quotes tells me, “Other things are just food. But chocolate’s chocolate.”
Since before its discovery in the New World by Christopher Columbus and its subsequent introduction into the Spanish courts, chocolate has been one of the world’s great epicurean delicacies. Derived from the seeds of the cacao tree, chocolate was originally consumed as a bitter beverage by the Maya and Aztecs.
The business of chocolate
Today, chocolate is a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. With an increasing amount of research indicating that a moderate amount of dark chocolate is good for our health because it contains antioxidants called flavonoids (the same beneficial compounds found in tea and red wine), the market for high-quality dark chocolate is growing throughout North America.
“Chocolate is the new wine,” says Vancouver chocolatier Pam Williams, founder of Ecole Chocolat, an intensive three-month online course in the art of professional chocolate-making. “People are now learning to appreciate fine chocolate in the same way they appreciate wine and other good food.”
Crazy for cocoa
In 1981, the California-born Williams opened au Chocolat, a gourmet chocolate shop she sold 10 years later. She also wrote and self-published a cookbook called Oh Truffles by au Chocolat (now out of print). Naturally, she’s a chocolate lover; she eats dark chocolate “pretty well every day” and describes her passion as “a product that can reduce a grown man or woman to tears of joy.”
Williams regards the Internet as the best way to share her chocolate knowledge, allowing her to connect with chocolate lovers around the globe. For chocoholics, the web is choc-full of information and access to the world’s best chocolate.
Everything chocolate
Virtual chocolate bills itself an online chocoholic’s heaven. The site includes downloadable photos of mouthwatering chocolate to use as a computer screen saver. It also offers chocolate-motif e-cards and provides free membership to a virtual chocoholics club.
For more chocolate all the time, check out the Complete Chocolate and Confectionery Site, the candy industry site that includes information for chocolate “hobbyists.” If your passion for chocolate sparks an interest in chocolate lore from around the world, check out the Worldwide Gourmet’s chocolate section.
Cocoa concoctions
For recipe lovers, the web has long been a giant, searchable cookbook. There are hundreds of thousands of free chocolate recipes online, says Williams, with many of the best ones offered on the web sites of the world’s great chocolatiers.
Enter the words of the dish you want to concoct and the word recipe into a search engine such as Bing. Check out the Related Searches column of Bing as well — you might get inspired by the alternative suggestions. A search for chocolate bark, for example, returned related results for white chocolate peppermint bark, cranberry ginger chocolate bark and peppermint bark.
Be sure to bookmark recipe sites devoted to your addiction, such as Best Chocolate Recipes and Chocoholic.com, which provides you with an opportunity to participate in an online, collaborative chocolate cookbook of favourite chocolate recipes.
Click here for chocolatier Pam Williams’s handmade chocolate truffle centre recipe.
Confection selection
Like wine, fine chocolate offers subtle nuances in flavour, depending on the chocolatier and the type of cocoa beans used, says Williams. Devout chocolate lovers should sample chocolate from many renowned chocolate makers to learn what variety they love most. Many of them sell their delicacies online, but it’s wise to confirm whether they deliver to your area. To find a variety of chocolate makers, head to Chocolate.com.
High-quality Canadian chocolate houses include Purdy’s Chocolates, established in 1907, Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut and Chocolate Arts, which offers chocolate made from moulds designed in First Nations-style by artist Robert Davidson.
Sweet exploration
For true chocolate lovers, a vacation built around chocolate is heaven, indeed. In Canada, no Maritime vacation is complete without a visit to The Chocolate Museum in St. Stephen, N.B., which bills itself as Canada’s Chocolate Town. But of course the mecca of chocolate is Hershey, Pa., a whole town built on the chocolate industry, much to the delight of tourists who flock to Hershey’s Chocolate World.
