Chocolate

The chocolate market has become very complicated lately. Everyone and their brother makes chocolate from the countless large chocolate companies to the small artisanal chocolate shops. Chocolate is the new wine, with organized tastings and complex flavors and aromas. Chocolate connoisseurs will tell you that dark chocolate is the only way to go and the higher percentage of cocoa the better, but I will leave those decisions up to you. I have organized my recommendations into 4 categories:

Corner Store Quality

In this category I recommend Lindt. Lindt has a surprising good quality, taste, and consistency for such a low-price chocolate. You can even buy Lindt on the check-out line at the supermarket!


Great Quality

In this category I recommend Green & Black Chocolate and Dagoba Organic (owned by Hershey). Both brands are very good, have complicated flavors, and are reasonably priced. These brands can easily be purchased online, at a chocolate shop, or at organic/health food stores.

Gourmet Quality

I have two recommendations in this category and both are pretty much perfect. They exceed all expectations of chocolate and send your taste buds into nirvana. My choices are Scharffen Berger and Valrohna, both made in France.

The Best

Amedei made in Tuscany, Italy is my choice for the best chocolate in the world. It has won countless awards worldwide and is recognized as the quintessential chocolate.

The Amedei website describes the reason why this chocolate is so good:

"Alessio and Cecilia had a dream, which in the late eighties, urged by passion and enthusiasm,they started to make a reality; they took their first steps toward discovering the routes of cocoa.

Together they experimented with new ideas, to give life to an exclusive chocolate, and launched it worldwide. They broke the homology of tastes, and became the artificers of true and proper Renaissance taste.

Since 1990, Alessio and Cecilia have devoted and committed themselves to the search of perfect harmonious tastes, becoming reality in the form of a linear balanced bars or a napolitain shape, and a soft roundness of a praline.

The entire production process is followed by dedication and artisan skills such as the selection of the seeds of cocoa, personally done by Alessio in the countries of origin to the manufacturing of the chocolate conducted in the laboratory of Pontedera, under the attentive supervision of Cecilia, Amedei’s maitre chocolatier".