It only underlines that your alleged indifference regarding white chocolate is in fact pure anti-white chocolate intolerance. But let me be the better man and reach out to you: you might not like white chocolate-but others do; and there's nothing wrong with that. http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/11/11171f7d4544f49d5a107816ed46788ebf47bb6eb2a94f9da131d9d78fcc1d97.jpg And now I'm off eating a white Snickers...
I had to Google that to see if it was a true thing. I don't actually like Snickers bars at all, but a white Snickers sounds pretty bizarre. Does it taste good? White chocolate like/dislike aside, I think it would taste weird!
I adore white chocolate, though I actually like it its pure form, rather than wrapped around "summer coating." The good stuff has a subtle taste, with a good mouth feel. Am I the only one who is struck by the irony of the fact that all of the chocolate made in Switzerland has to be imported from elsewhere, unless there is a large swath of tropical Switzerland that I don't know about?
now I'm imagining that in the, um, Baltic Sea area the tv adverts for Snickers don't say "Snickers satisfies", they say "Snickers is filling!"
but cocoa beans pretty much have to be imported to almost everywhere that chocolate is made. They don't import chocolate to Switzerland to be sold as Swiss chocolate, they import the ingredients and make the chocolate. So I don't get the irony?
Beside Chlidonias forgoing answer there is indeed a source of cocoa in Switzerland: The Masoala hall at Zoo Zurich. Together with a chocolate factory they have produced in the past (and probably will again in future) a pure Swiss chocolate. All ingredients (sugar, vanilla, cocoa etc.) came from Switzerland. Those special edition has had the shape of a cocoa bean (if I remember correctly) and was sold once a year for a high price while the profit was spent for a conservation project at Madagascar.
@Chlidonias: I was talking with the two leading man in this project but can't remember if they said it was from the hall or from somewhere else in Switzerland, but at least it was vanilla from our country.
Anything that doesn't melt in the mouth can't be chocolate. The chemical feature that makes cocoa butter virtually unique among animal and vegetable fats and oils is that it is mainly composed of a single triglyceride, which has the old-fashioned name of palmito-, oleo-, stearin (it does have a modern systematic name, but it's so long that you might fall asleep before you finished reading it or I might fall asleep before I finished typing it). This means that cocoa butter has a relatively sharp melting point, unlike all the other fats and oils which are mixtures of many triglyceride molecules, so they slowly get softer if the temperature rises, like butter, or throw down solids if the temperature drops, like olive oil. Moreover, cocoa butter melts a little below 37°C (blood temperature): so it melts in your mouth, but not on your skin, which is rather cooler. Confectioners aim to mix cocoa butter with cheaper fats to reduce the cost of a chocolate bar, without adding so much that the chocolate softens at too low a temperature. The taste of the chocolate comes from traces of other chemicals in the cocoa butter. The added fats are virtually tasteless, so the flavour is boosted by adding cocoa powder, which is basically the residue of the cocoa beans after the cocoa butter is extracted. I think that white chocolate stays white and has a milder flavour because no cocoa powder is added to it. Sugar is also usually added, along with other flavourings, milk powder etc. These components are melted together, mixed thoroughly and then cooled slowly ('tempered') to prevent them crystallising separately as the chocolate solidifies. Very simple science really Alan
And that’s why you don’t challenge a Swiss in regard to chocolate Swiss identity smells like chocolate: Social identity shapes olfactory judgments : Scientific Reports
