Dark Chocolate?

TASTING PANEL
We tasted chocolate - so you don't have to


The Times Tasting Panel met recently to evaluate chocolate -- with the aim of finding chocolate bars that would be great both for baking and eating. We picked up everything we could get our hands on (the one criterion was that the chocolate have 70% to 75% cacao content): stalwarts such as Valrhona and Scharffen Berger, organic chocolate such as Dagoba and Green & Black's, newer brands such as Chocovic and Theo, and supermarket stock such as Ghirardelli. Joining me on the panel were restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila, Food editor Leslie Brenner, columnist Russ Parsons and staff writers Amy Scattergood and Charles Perry.

In all, we tried 23 chocolate bars. Some have been excluded from the following list; if there were two different bars from the same chocolate maker (for example, Chocovic's "Ocumare" and "Guaranda"), the one that panelists preferred is listed. Prices are included, but they can vary widely from retailer to retailer.

I have to disagree with this review of dark chocolate. I am a big fan of chocolate from white to milk and even dark but this reviewer claimed that all 23 dark chocolate bars they tried were delightfully surprising. Meaning they enjoyed each and every one they tried. This I don’t agree with. I have tasted a few of the chocolate bars in their sample and I must say that some of them tasted like dirt. Although I did agree with some of their opinions, most of them seemed bogus because they chocolate bars they found surprisingly good I found disturbingly disgusting.