Theo Chocolate, Tasted on November 24, 2006 — I was recently hanging out with a fellow food blogger. We were stuck in a situation where we had to wait awhile and both had a craving for chocolate. When asked what they had gotten, the other food blogger sheepishly pulled out a fancy bar of milk chocolate. The look that followed basically said "yeah, I know it's looked down on as not real chocolate but it's a rare guilty pleasure." Now understanding the feeling that a poker player experiences when he has a winning hand versus what was thought to be an unbeatable set of cards, I pulled out my bar of white chocolate with hazelnuts and said: "oh yeah? How about this!"  You should have seen the horrified look I got.

For some time now I have known that in the world of chocolate snobbery while milk chocolate is the ugly stepsister, white chocolate is the uncle in prison. Nobody speaks of it. Alex and Lauren have insisted for years that it is in fact not chocolate at all. Call it whatever you want, but I enjoy it. According to the master chocolatier I met in Provence white chocolate is in fact chocolate. However according to Wikipedia "...white chocolate does not contain cocoa solids or cocoa mass, it does not meet the standards to be called chocolate in many countries." Semantic arguments aside, I enjoy it. That said I also enjoy regular chocolate and milk chocolate as well. And I'm not embarrassed by any of it.

In the last couple of decades chocolate has started to approach wine status in terms of the level of discernment and discrimination that a core group of customers will apply to its consumption. Boutique chocolate makers are popping up everywhere. In some ways Hershey's purchase of Scharffen-Berger is the ultimate acknowledgement that these smaller chocolate producers are a force to be reckoned with.

I recently was purchasing some presents for folks and needed some chocolate. Kat had introduced me to a relatively recent addition to the local chocolate scene (which is surprisingly vibrant) - Theo Chocolate. I drove over to Theo the day after Thanksgiving to check out their retail operation.

Theo occupies a sprawling beautiful vintage brick building in the super hip Fremont area in north Seattle (home to Google and Adobe among others). Their manufacturing and retail operations are all housed in this "complex". If you're going to start a specialty chocolate manufacturer then I think these guys have done many things right. In no particular order:

• use natural and organic ingredients

• produce fair trade chocolate (especially appealing to local Seattleites)

• hire a great local illustrator with a distinctive style to make original graphics for your packaging

• offer "chocolate factory" tours (twice daily)

• have huge piles of broken chunks of chocolate available in your store for sampling (I would say they had the most generous free sample policy I've ever seen)

I tried a bunch of different chocolates. Despite my sacrilegious enjoyment of milk and white varieties, I also happen to enjoy pure dark chocolate. Past the 70% region I start to find that eating it on its own gets tougher given the lack of sweetness. But dark chocolate does make me happy. The different varieties I tried were all interesting.  I didn't love the pure Ghana bar (84%), but the Ghana, Panama, Ecuador mix (75%) I found quite enjoyable, almost citrusy. I also (happily) sampled one of their truffles, the Peanut Butter and Jelly. Since I've already lost all credibility among chocolate experts, I'll also add that I don't love most chocolate truffles. I find that there are very few things I like mixed with chocolate that aren't in the nut family. That said, despite the presence of Jelly I enjoyed this truffle. No pretense. It just tasted like high quality smooth peanut butter and jelly ensconced in high quality simple chocolate.

My palate is certainly not developed enough to make a definitive and comprehensive appraisal of Theo's chocolate one way or another other than the clear level of quality apparent in its manufacture. I will however keep tasting and forming a framework for how I feel about all the chocolate out there. Besides, nobody would listen to someone who admitted to liking white chocolate.