Pan-fired Chinese green tea, steeped at 175ºF for 2 minutes, all the same chocolates as the previous post, and this time THE WINNER IS...
Chocolove Ginger Crystallized in Dark Chocolate!!!
• The Ginger and (not so very) Dark Chocolate enhanced both the tea and the chocolate — each was transformed, so I didn't taste them separately, but rather as some magical blend, full of delicate flower and spice. Such a pleasure! And such a contrast with yesterday, when this chocolate made the Assam tea taste simply dreadful!
• With the Vosges Super Dark Coconut Ash & Banana, the coconut came to the fore, much more so than with the Assam yesterday, but the tea was lost. The "browner" warm flavors of the tea activated the warm receptors, which in turn expanded the coconut effect, so my ability to sense the "greener" cool flower flavors typical of the tea was inhibited,
• Confession time: I don't like white chocolate — too sweet and too vanilla-y.** I didn't like it any better with this tea. Worth noting: I brewed the tea for a relatively short time, so there was not much bitterness (it takes time for EGCG to come out of the leaf), so there wasn't much to counteract the excessive sweetness of the chocolate.
• Finally, the Ghirardelli 100% cacao, which I love by itself — sad to say, the tea tasted like so much hot water...so different from yesterday, when even the little bit of Assam I had left complemented the chocolate very nicely.
**More confession time: I had my DNA tested, and looked up info about sensitivity to sweetness. Turns out that I have the DNA variants that program for high sensitivity to sweet. Also to bitter, but I do like 100% cacao chocolate...go figure!
• The Ginger and (not so very) Dark Chocolate enhanced both the tea and the chocolate — each was transformed, so I didn't taste them separately, but rather as some magical blend, full of delicate flower and spice. Such a pleasure! And such a contrast with yesterday, when this chocolate made the Assam tea taste simply dreadful!
• With the Vosges Super Dark Coconut Ash & Banana, the coconut came to the fore, much more so than with the Assam yesterday, but the tea was lost. The "browner" warm flavors of the tea activated the warm receptors, which in turn expanded the coconut effect, so my ability to sense the "greener" cool flower flavors typical of the tea was inhibited,
• Confession time: I don't like white chocolate — too sweet and too vanilla-y.** I didn't like it any better with this tea. Worth noting: I brewed the tea for a relatively short time, so there was not much bitterness (it takes time for EGCG to come out of the leaf), so there wasn't much to counteract the excessive sweetness of the chocolate.
• Finally, the Ghirardelli 100% cacao, which I love by itself — sad to say, the tea tasted like so much hot water...so different from yesterday, when even the little bit of Assam I had left complemented the chocolate very nicely.
**More confession time: I had my DNA tested, and looked up info about sensitivity to sweetness. Turns out that I have the DNA variants that program for high sensitivity to sweet. Also to bitter, but I do like 100% cacao chocolate...go figure!
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