I am at home on a Saturday afternoon, post foody-market, and pre-Armadillo dinner. Grumpy and I have decided to give his friend Tart, visiting from Australia, a tour of the gastronomic delights of Hackney. Grumpy has just read the last sentence and made a knowing reference to the other delights that he and Tart will be sampling later, in the seedier arches of the darker railway bridges of this city.

A few weeks ago, Grumpy and I happened across a stall at the market which we had never seen before. On this stall was Cioccolato Puro ‘Peper Oncino’ – a chocolate bar made by a Sicilian company called CioMod. At only 45% cocoa, it is a lower percentage than I usually like. BUT it has no dairy products, and the only other two ingredients are cane sugar and chilli. The sugar has maintained its crunchiness through the manufacturing process, and as a result there are two separate consistencies – the smoothness of the chocolate and the crunch of the sugar.

But it is the two distinct tastes of the chocolate which give it its complexity. As Tart has pointed out, having just had another little morsel to be sure, ‘I get the bitterness of the chocolate first, and almost instantaneously, the sugar cuts through it, [or as Grumpy says, 'the sparkle of the sugar bursting through the cocoa'] so that they are almost simultaneous, despite the difference in texture. At first you query where the chilli is because you can’t taste it, and then (I am trying to take you through a journey here) when you swallow the chocolate, there is a pregnant pause, and then all of a sudden it just kicks in and builds to a piquant finale…. Ooh – it’s just done it to me there.’

(Another Grumpy interjection: ‘I think you should say that it’s handmade on virgin’s thighs… On second thoughts, there are no virgins in Sicilia, male or female.’)

Grumpy has asked me not to put a picture of the chocolate on the website, and said he will sulk if I cause a depletion of his stocks… I have had to remind him, though about how excited he was to have found a blog-worthy chocolate, and I have to say that he and Tart are two of the most fabulous chocolate researchers to work with. We have to stop eating now. Dinner is in an hour… Mmmmm…. Armadillo…

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 7:06 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.