Chocolate!!

After passing the chocolate factory on my way up from supervision, and in my research looking for the proper factory online, I found that Scharfen Berger (a damn good dark chocolate maker) offers public tours of their factory for free. So I set one up and Marty and I went today.

They have a tiny little factory. Well, tiny in comparison, I'll bet, to Hershey's or the like. But they put out 2.4 million pounds of chocolate a year. Wow. Actually, speaking of Hershey's, they bought Scharfen Berger but did not attach their name to it and let Scharfen Berger retain the way they make their chocolate. Our tour guide said it this way, "Folks who eat Scharfen Berger's chocolate are probably doing so because they don't want to eat Hershey's." And she's right. I haven't had a dark chocolate from any major chocolate company that I liked. And I'm not counting folks like Ghiradelli and the like as a major company although I guess they might count as being that big.

We learned all about the cacao tree and where and how it grows. I learned quite a bit that I didn't know about chocolate. We got to taste samples, which is always a good thing. She was describing their bars has having certain flavors to the bean and at first Marty and I thought that meant they added flavor into the chocolate but then she explained further. Apparently inside the big pod where all the cacao beans are, they are covered with a gooey fruit like substance. This fruit can be eaten but in chocolate making, the entire bean, fruit and all, are packed into bins to ferment. The fruit itself has these different flavors that she was talking about: berry, plum, wine, etc, and I assume she means "like" these not that they are so strong in these flavors. When fermenting, the flavors enter into the bean and thusly into the chocolate. Okay, that's pretty cool. And you could taste some vague flavors beyond "chocolate".

I love dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is a sin upon chocolate and never should have been invented. Bleh. Oh and let's not even talk about white chocolate which will ensure the creator's place in hell. Dark chocolate is what sweet chocolate should taste like... chocolate. None of this milk or extra cocoa butter bullshit added in.

We then ate at the little cafe but didn't have desert surprisingly enough. I think the samples were enough since it's so rich. And then off to home.

And then when I got home, Marty helped me take the adopted chair from work out of the back of the truck and into the house and while I pushing the thing into my room (it was on wheels, so really I don't know what happened), something tweaked in my hip and I was on the floor later in the night just crying. Wow, it really hurt. But then eventually calmed down but was still sore.

I would like to mail order a new body, please?