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Stories filed under: "cacao"
DailyDirt: Eating More Chocolate
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Plenty of folks like chocolate, so it makes some sense to try to make chocolate ever so slightly more healthy (as long as the taste isn’t horribly affected). If you’re going to binge on chocolate in the near future, you might want to check out a few of these links to help rationalize your chocolate consumption.
- Scientists have figured out some simple processing steps that help maximize the naturally-occurring antioxidants in chocolate. Storing cacao pods for a week and roasting them at lower temperatures seem to help make slightly healthier chocolate — as if anyone needed another excuse to eat chocolate. [url]
- Watch how 12 pounds of chocolate is formed into an enormous Easter egg. Then watch some cacao farmers from the Ivory Coast eat chocolate for the first time. [url]
- The global demand for chocolate is increasing, but the supply hasn’t caught up. The price of chocolate might be going up unless farmers figure out how to grow more cacao to feed the world’s hunger for delicious chocolate bars. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: antioxidants, cacao, candy, chocolate, food, health
DailyDirt: No More Pure Chocolate
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Most folks like chocolate, but there are a few weirdos out there who don’t. Sometimes, chocolate is used to mask the flavor of stuff that’s good for you (like vitamins or minerals), but for the most part, chocolate lovers want to keep their chocolate free of adulterants. The supply of chocolate might have a hard time keeping up with the growing demand for it, so it could be difficult to preserve the exact same recipes for chocolate that we have now — and there could be “vintage chocolates” on the market, sold like fine wines, someday. Here are just a few chocolate tidbits for the choco-philes/chocoholics out there.
- The cacao tree is susceptible to a variety of diseases and environmental threats, but there are different varieties of cacao that are more disease resistant, drought tolerant and productive. However, the flavor of the resulting chocolates could suffer, but consumers might not notice the gradual change in the taste of their favorite chocolates. [url]
- Would you eat chocolate with an anti-aging antioxidant ingredient that claimed to make your skin younger? A $54 box of Esthechoc chocolate contains polyphenols and astaxanthin — ingredients that the chocolatier states have “clinically proven” benefits for your skin. Sounds like a great excuse to eat more chocolate, but it’s probably not as effective as the marketing material implies. Who wants “just the skin” of a 30yo, anyway? [url]
- Chocolates from the UK are a bit different than some chocolates made in the US — the first ingredient for many American chocolates is sugar, but it’s milk across the pond. Also, due to a settlement between Hersey’s and Let’s Buy British Imports, certain UK chocolate brands won’t make it to the US — and vice versa. (And someday, we’ll have more videos like this of people reacting to trying foreign foods.) [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: aging, antioxidants, astaxanthin, cacao, chocolate, esthechoc, flavor, food, gmo, taste
Companies: hershey