/ck/ - Food & Cooking

[Anonymous No.6469780]

Can /ck/ help me fill this out?

[Anonymous No.6469821]

I personally prefer 85% and up for dark chocolate because anything under that feels like candy to me. As far as milk goes a frozen snicker is totally kick-ass.

[Anonymous No.6469829]

>Cheap candybars aren't high quality chocolate

NO
FUCKING
WAY
BRO

[Anonymous No.6469847]

I buy this stuff from Aldi, it's pretty good

[Anonymous No.6469865]

>>6469780
Lindt goes in low tier. Ok tier would be stuff like Santander or Dagoba. High tier would be Valrhona, Cluizel, or Amadei. Ambrosia tier would be Vosges or Askinosie.

[Anonymous No.6469877]

[Anonymous No.6469880]

>>6469877
>mayan superfood

I kekked

[Anonymous No.6469893]

>>6469880
It's more or less an honest chart. I couldn't figure a good way to represent plain "chocolate liquor". I agree though, the marketing is tiresome.

[Anonymous No.6469898]

>>6469877
>He falls for the organic/free range/gluten free propaganda

[Anonymous No.6469902]

>>6469898
Oh, I forgot where I was for a moment and didn't tack on a disclaimer / explanation to justify myself.

No, Anon, you don't know me. You don't know what drives me. You don't know why I've come to do what I do, and you don't know what I think or believe. You're seeing you. It's all just you.

[Anonymous No.6469905]

>>6469902
Not that guy, but I can infer that you don't know much about chocolate if you think raw cacao is the same as, or in some way "better than" dark chocolate, unless you are into new-age hippie bullshit. And this is coming from someone who shops at whole foods on a regular basis, so I have a pretty high tolerance threshold for said bullshit.

[Anonymous No.6469941]

>>6469905
You put too much faith in your heuristics. They need refinement, I recommend you do that. I also don't really want to hear about your inferences.

Anyway. You can't point out anywhere I said or implied anything was "better", so I won't ask. We'll just silently drop that angle from now on because it stems primarily from you, not me.

Chocolate is more a drug than a food product to me. Chocolate liquor, and powdered cacao solids or powdered whole nibs, actually is different than dark chocolate in that it's just pressed beans, with nothing else. You have roughly equal ratio of solids and butter. The anadamide tends to get trapped more in the butter component. The solids have most of the magnesium and methylxanthines, so having each balanced can be useful as a base to work from.

Dark chocolate tends to be 60-80% cacao, but a good deal more of that tends to be cocoa butter. The actual pharmacological angle naturally follows, you have different ratios of psychoactive components and they're bound up and absorbed differently and at different rates than just eating a paste or a dried powder. The rest is typically sweetener and vanilla or soybean, the latter being a lazy and subjectively unnecessary emulsifier that makes the chocolate crumble and behave differently when heated.

I could talk about chocolate all day. Anon, the point really is, don't be a dick. My choices more or less reflect what I'm capable of eating with various allergies. The only reason Equal Exchange is in the "okay" tier is because they typically have trace peanut in them, and I do feel that even though I indulge occasionally. Enjoy Life uses evaporated cane juice which is nutrient devoid and just coats my teeth and has a more pronounced blood sugar curve, so it's just okay. Powdered cacao, even when it isn't just the solids, tends to work differently. Even if I add sugar it just isn't the same, why, I don't know.

Don't shop at Whole Foods. It is overpriced.

[Anonymous No.6469944]

>>6469941
>I'm not a new-age hippie
>but I use chocolate as a "drug"
>also I am allergic to gluten and raw onions and cilantro is yucky and sugar is poison
You just can't make this stuff up

[Anonymous No.6469953]

>>6469944
It's all you.

[Anonymous No.6469967]

>>6469941
>
So can.i just eat a spoonful of Hershey's Special Dark Cocao and trip out?

[Anonymous No.6469971]

>>6469967
Probably a woman. Women sincerely seem to think that chocolate is the best legal alternative to ayahuasca or some shit. I think it's sort of an extension of the whole "guilt" vs "guilt-free" lexical disease that infects food discussion when women are involved; they can't admit that they like the taste of something that's commonly used as a dessert, so they make up a bunch of bullshit instead of just saying "chocolate is delicious"

[Anonymous No.6469979]

>>6469865
Amedei is far superior to vosges. All they do is flavored bars. Cluizel and valrhona are certainly also higher quality in my opinion. Askinosie Ive only had 2 or three bars from which were pretty good.

[Anonymous No.6469994]

>>6469979
I figured someone would object to the vosges thing, but the way I see it, chocolate is already "impure" when it's fermented, roasted, sweetened, and so on, and all of these are important steps for developing the flavor unless you're some new age hippie faggot who thinks that eating "raw" (even though it actually isn't) cacao products from the hippie co-op is going to cure her autism.

So now that we agree that adding things and processing are good, why shouldn't we sometimes enjoy chocolate with salt or some such unconventional thing? And among those who do that kind of thing, vosges is among the very best.

Cluizel and valhrona are excellent if you are just going for plain chocolate, but they don't really do anything creative or interesting so I don't put them above askinosie or vosges.

Amadei I would like to rate higher but their whole "we're the best in the world" schtick rubs me the wrong way, yes it's irrational, whatever that is my opinion and I'm not going to change my mind.

[Anonymous No.6470016]

>>6469967
It's not really a "trip" and it depends on your physiology, but yes, with enough cocoa you will get high. Unprocessed works better, presence of sugar is also advantageous with whatever degree of dopamine release it spurs.

The following actions apply to cacao:
-Raises extracellular cAMP in the prefrontal cortex. The implication of this is differences in emotion and memory processing, as well as changes in reasoning / working memory.
-Anandamide makes you feel nice.
-I don't remember if 5-HT has viable transporters in the intestine and is capable of surviving digestion / crossing the blood brain barrier. You'll have to look into that yourself.
-Triggers release of histamine from mast cells. In the brain histamine works mainly as a regulator neurotransmitter. As a rule, histamine raises, dopamine secretion lowers. There's a chain reaction that occurs because of this and it pans out into 5-HT, norepi, etc, which is why I say "Depends on your physiology."
-Triggers widespread vasodilation via theobromine and nitric oxide as part of a breakdown chain.
-Marginal amounts of theophylline and caffeine do what they do, encompasses a bit too much to write and is probably ultimately more subtle.
-Suppresses vagus nerve activity, and lowers inflammation in the trigeminal nerve. This can be useful for a number of things, but is probably irrelevant for most people.
Etc.

Dosage depends on a lot. If you find yourself spinning like you drank too much alcohol, or incapable of maintaining a coherent train of thought, you can assume you did it wrong. Go slowly, and ignore anons like this >>6469971 . Their endeavors into understanding human behavior and psychology are admirable, but ultimately it's obvious they've never actually tried what they're attempting to figure out and define in others. Rendering it all kind of pointless.

First thing I notice is my vision will become bright and take on an extreme sense of contrast. Colors and lighting will appear warm.

[Anonymous No.6470023]

>>6469994
Im not at all for raw-food or anything like that, and I have only had a few of their bars, but the add ins were just so strong. The coconut ash one I enjoyed, the bacon one was completely dominated by smoky/salty flavor, and I could hardly taste the chocolate..

I will give you this, they're one of the best when it comes to flavored bars.

Amedei I agree are too cocky for their own good. Especially with their porcelana.

[Anonymous No.6470038]

>>6470023
I haven't had the bacon one although I think it is their most famous. Not that I have a problem with le epic bacon maymay, it just didn't look very good. The salt and caramel ones are great.

[Anonymous No.6470139]

>>6470016
How do i eat it doe? just add water or what? Milk?

[Anonymous No.6471557]

>>6470139
However you want, unless that includes heating above a certain temperature I've forgotten. It will cause the formation of oxalic acid, which is common enough, but why take it in if you don't have to.

You could try some of the candy bars I put on the chart, they all obviously work for me. Or just get whatever chocolate bar you like and verify it has a decent amount of cocoa bean solids (usually written as just "chocolate" or "cocoa" on a label. Don't get anything dutch process, don't get anything processed with alkali, it messes with pH and removes a lot of the polyphenols (flavan-3-ol)

Alternatively just buy the raw powder at a coop. Natural food stores are usually placed around rich neighborhoods and massive overpriced, so avoid those if you can, but they'd have it. Buying chocolate liquor tends to be an endeavor, you could likely just start with unprocessed power and mix it with sugar, tastes fine. However the hell you want really, as long as you're working from the right base.

[Anonymous No.6471893]