Friday, April 04, 2008

un-chocolate?

I am really curious how you can have a "chocolate" flavor of something that tastes absolutely nothing like actual chocolate. This is something I haven't experienced in my life until tonight. Like...

a brownie that tastes nothing like chocolate.
hot fudge that tastes 2% like chocolate.
chocolate ice cream that tastes nothing, but nothing, like chocolate.

See, tonight I went to Maggie Mudd for an enormous banana split brownie sundae with caramel and hot fudge. I shared it with a friend. We got three flavors of ice cream-espresso, pecan praline (which come to think of it had no nuts, hmm) and chocolate. The chocolate was incredibly dark, more the color of chocolate sorbet than actual ice cream. All the ice creams were in general entirely too sweet, which I'd suspected they might be from what I'd had there before. What baffled me most about the whole experience was the utter lack of chocolate flavor of any kind. When I asked the scooper kids what was in the chocolate flavor, they said it was "some kind of chocolate chips and cocoa powder." I'm gonna try to find out, cause it was completely bizarre. Since they do a lot of dairy-free products I'm wondering if they don't use actual chocolate at all in any of their products.

Enough complaining. In the morning one of my best friends ever comes to town. I am going to take her to the farmer's market, because she is a farmer, and I am really curious to hear what her take will be on the FPFM.

5 comments:

Sean Boocock said...

Dairy free would have nothing to do with it. Cocoa powder, cocoa butter, cocoa nibs, and nearly all dark chocolate are entirely dairy free. If they were really using cocoa powder and bits of chocolate in the base, I suspect either their cocoa powder was very old (or just bad) or the sweetness was so overwhelming as to completely dominate what might have been a more subtle chocolate taste.

Anonymous said...

Cocoa powder...
That's why it was so dark. And cocoa powder doesn't really taste like chocolate, and bad cocoa powder doesn't really taste like anything.

Anonymous said...

that'll teach you to sample vegan ice cream.... :)

From their website, the ingredients for something called Chocococo are: Coconut milk, natural process cocoa, semi-sweet chocolate (unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter, sugar, soy lecithin an emulsifier, vanilla), beet sugar, corn syrup, coconut flakes...

Sean Boocock said...

Try Temptation Vegan Ice Cream (http://www.welovesoy.com/) or Soy Delicious for that matter before you dismiss vegan ice cream wholesale. As for chocolate in general, almost anything that claims to be dark chocolate is vegan save Hersheys.

so much cake so little time said...

Aaron and Sean, I've had really good chocolate ice cream made with cocoa powder. And this ice cream wasn't vegan...it just wasn't delicious. I'm guessing the chocolate they use isn't of that great quality but I'm really curious to know if there was any dairy in the chocolate flavor I had (chocolate factory, it's called) and how, really, it could taste like nothing. Because even crappy hot chocolate tastes like chocolate.