at Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:58:22 GMT in <2itod.133745$HA.82392@attbi_s01>,
(Karstens Rage) wrote :

>What is the deal with this chocolate? I just got some for my birthday
>and its got all the textural qualities of very good chocolate. It is
>also excellent in flavor and blows me away with its intensity and
>bitterness. But is this just very high quality baking chocolate with 1%
>sugar (whatever that means) and that is the difference between edible
>and non-edible?

No, that's the difference between good and bad chocolate. If an unsweetened
baking chocolate tastes inedible, that means it *is* inedible, in other
words, you shouldn't use it for baking, much less eating. Part of the
problem is that a lot of peoples' familiarity with "baking" chocolate is
limited to Baker's Chocolate (the brand) which is quite simply abominable
chocolate in every way. As I've said earlier, I wouldn't feed Baker's
chocolate to my worst enemy's dog. It's that bad.

Good-quality unsweetened chocolates are all good if, as you imply,
challenging eaten straight, and there are several others besides Noir
Infini. Domori makes 2: 100% and Puro: I think the 100% is slightly better.
Bonnat and Slitti also make good unsweetened chocolates. And in addition to
those, most of the big quality chocolate manufacturers also make pretty
good 100% chocolates: Valrhona, Ghirardelli, Callebaut, etc. I've listed
the chocolates roughly in order of quality, first to last. I personally
think Noir Infini is indeed easily the best, but again, the others are good
and offer stylistic choices if you want to experiment. You can use Noir
Infini for baking and in fact I recommend it as the chocolate of choice for
the times when you need to create the very best chocolate desserts. It's
rather expensive for general-purpose use, however: in that application
Callebaut and Ghirardelli are more economical and practical.

--
Alex Rast

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