Originally published at: This salted dark chocolate is really fantastic | Boing Boing
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Funny, I just got some of this last week and really liked it. I’m always trying different kinds. Thanks for the reminder.
These bars are kind of stupid expensive though. They sell bags of “Gems” that are hexagonal chunks, and they’re almost 60% less expensive. (I don’t eat two squares at a time unfortunately…)
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“Paleo”? So the fictional cave people upon whom that fad diet is based had chocolate, which was invented (in the solid milk-based form shown here) in 1847?
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Coconut sugar is the tropical equivalent of maple sugar. That is tree sap boiled down until the sugars crystalize out. It’s 70% cocoa so as healthy as any other equivalent chocolate. I find the labeling disingenuous but I like chocolate.
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Salted chocolate is good indeed, perhaps contrary to the expectations of some.
Obviously paleo mayans ancestors
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The varieties with cashew, hazelnut, and almond butter are all very nice, too. I don’t do dairy, and this eat a lot of dark chocolate, much of which seems to tout itself as bitter for bitter’s sake. These bars have a nice creaminess, sweetness, and complexity of flavor. They’re also hella-overpriced, though.
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Wait a while. They might wind up on sale at a Grocery Warehouse.
I still don’t understand why people accept “Sea Salt” as a legitimate ingredient in food. I mean, if I gave you the choice between a glass of “Sea Water” and a glass of filtered water, which would you pick? “Sea Salt” has all the impurities and pollution in it that a glass of “Sea Water” would from wherever that garbage was harvested. Yuck! I’ll take plain old table salt any time.
Keeping my electrolytes in balance is really important, as I do not enjoy ‘screaming in pain’ muscle cramps. Salt does play a role. I do not eat chocolate for electrolytes but…
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If salt is just salt then why rage about sea salt?
Sea salt usually has a different texture than rock salt. That is all. And as goes table salt, fine salt of any sort isn’t staying solid in a chocolate bar.
Whether the table salt in any given place is sea salt or rock salt, depends entirely on location.
And as rock salt was originally sea salt. That’s also loaded with impurities from where ever that garbage was located. Rock salt can have uranium in it. We have, you know, food safety laws to prevent dangerous shit from making it out there. The sea salt you’re mad at typically comes from water you’d be perfectly comfortable swimming it, or eating fish from.
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That’s not how salt production works. Ever flown into San Francisco? If so, you can see huge flat multicoloured pools divided up, all around the area. Those are salt farms. It’s not open ocean. The water is evaporated off of these carefully controlled pools (which are low-lying salt flats with natural water ingress from below), and the salt is collected. From there it goes through a cleaning process just like salt from mines does. Much of the world’s salt has been obtained this way since humans first started harvesting it.
All the health benefits and such of sea salt are imaginary and it has a good marketing department, but there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s probably net-worse health-wise, since it isn’t iodized and most people don’t have a regular source of iodine in their diets. However the effects clearly aren’t serious because there hasn’t been an epidemic of goiters since the hipsters decided sea salt was better.
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Quite a lot of sea salt doesn’t go for a cleaning process. But that’s coming out of shores and pools that aren’t vivid blue and red, clean enough for consumption straight. That’s kind of the default in a lot of developing areas where the climate is right for salt to form/crystalize naturally from evaporation.
And there are sea salts that are made from open water, water is collected and boiled off or force evaporated. Those tend to be pricey cause it’s a bit of a cockamamie process. But boiling/evaporating salt is a pretty old process as well, it’s just preferred to collect water from areas with very naturally high salinity. Either artificial or natural pools, salt marshes that sort of thing. If memory serves this is how Malden is made. High salinity water from a salt marsh is banked up in artificial pools, where it evaporates a bit to concentrate further. The concentrated brine is boiled in tanks to crystalize the salt.
But I got a bag of salt somewhere my mom brought back from somewhere in the Caribbean. Out back of the restaurant they were eating in there was a beach or marsh with natural salt pools. The owner would make all the salt she used out there. Basically just scoop up the crystalizing salt, let it dry on mesh screens in the sun by the shore. Basically the same way you saw Gandhi doing the thing in that movie that time.
Japan has a style of sea salt that’s produced by hauling seaweed out of the water and letting it dry in the sun. Then you just shake and collect the crystals, including a fair amount of crystalized MSG.
That’s why the whole “sea salt bad! Impurities!” thing is extra bonkers. Anything cooked is more pure than straight rock salt. Your can of table salt has a decent chance of containing both. And there’s so many ways of making sea salt you can’t generalize.
The advantage to bigger chunks of salt is in baking things like cookies, where the flavors mix on the tongue, and not right away in the batter. Other than that, bupkes.
Hu?
They’d better hope there is not an incoming cease and desist trademark letter from these guys. If Mongolians say ‘cease and desist’ it may be wise to do so.
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