Bad News For Chocolate Lovers

Dark chocolate, the touted healthy chocolate is often just plain chocolate, darkened according to an article in the "Lancet" medical journal.

Candy makers usually take out the healthy "flavanols" out of chocolate and then darken the resulting compound to look like a chocolate that has the original healthy products in it to make "dark chocolate".

Therefore much dark chocolate isn't really any better than regular chocolate which a Lancet report notes has too much fat and sugar in it.

Read BBC report "Dark chocolate 'not so healthy' ".

Of course, looking at the facts that overweight people live longer than perfect or too light people, and that distance running (and possiblyl other heavy training) can damage the heart, I think we should stop declaring just what is and is not healthy for a while, until science is clearer on the subject.  

That's my opinion as I take another bite of fudge, guaranteed not to pretend to be anything but a piece of the best candy in the world, made by loving family hands. 

Personally, my new years resolution is to try to make a batch a month for the whole year (though my loving hands aren't as good as my daughters' or even my wife's at). 

Some suspect, but I don't think it's the fact that, if I screw up a batch  I get to eat the whole thing, that causes me to have a lot of 'failures'.  I'm just a fudge clutz.  Even too hard or soft or grainy though, it's still the best treat in the world.

I bought some chocolate labeled "whole bean chocolate" at a close-out store,  I personally found it a very refreshing change from regular chocolate whether labeled dark or light.  I agree with the assessment that most dark chocolate isn't like that.  I'm not much of a candy eater, but like with fudge, I will make exception for something like the whole bean chocolate bars I bought that day.  

I went to flickr to get a picture of fudge14, but found mostly pics of store bought stuff.  I then dragged out the camera and went in search of the last of our fudge to use, but, not only were all the pretty star shape molded ones gone, but the last piece which was round because my daughter ran out of star molded muffin pan space she was using, had been put in a plastic bag and someone had mashed the bag down on it (I swear it wasn't me).  I'd still eat it, but it's not picture quality.  I should have taken a picture earlier.  The mostly star shaped fudges had white frosting on top sprinkled with finely broken candy cane and then a gummy cane top and center.  Maybe I'll try to replicate that before New Years. There is actually a lot of homemade frosting leftover.

One more thing.  The Cacao tree does not produce "beans".  Just looking at the fruit as I remember doing in the past, I was pretty sure that it should be called something else, and indeed it is a member of the mallow family and not the legume family, therefore most likely not techically a "bean".  A "bean" pod only breaks on two sides.  

You can see a picture of a cacao pod here.  Notice that the pods have more than two indentations.  Each of those indents show where the outer fruit likely breaks apart when dry, so the cacao fruit is most likely a "capsule" which would be like much of the rest of the mallow family.* (Also, Coffee comes from the same family as the gardenia and IIRC the fruit of that family mostly resemble capsules as well, and so do not produce "beans" either.)

tags: chocolate  dark chocolate  fudge  flavanols  

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