Last summer, on a trip to research a food story in Portland, Oregon (did you know that it’s a city that makes your jeans shrink? ) one of my stops was at Cacao, where I learned the proper way to taste chocolate.
Just as you don’t chug down wine to properly taste it, you also don’t devour chocolate. (I know that sounds crazy.) You don’t chew the chocolate, rather, you let it melt slowly on your tongue. There’s a whole lot of instruction on how to properly taste chocolate here.
I would now like to apply my knowledge of chocolate tasting in Spain, thanks to this lovely piece by Alejandra Garcia from NPR’s Kitchen Window. In Spain, seems possible to taste chocolate in all its many forms –from hot chocolate to chocolate in a hot dog bun –24 hours a day, but of all that she describes, the thing I most want to taste is toasted bread dabbed with bittersweet chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt and olive oil.
Very Curious Mind 