chocolate

Well, I'm a little behind in posting to the blog, and I won't have a chance to catch up until we get back from Maui in January, but in the mean time you might be interested in checking out this long but excellent article about the Noka chocolate company. My friend Jose sent it to me and I just finished reading it over lunch. It reveals that Noka are quite deceptive about how they actually make their chocolate. The fact that they are ridiculously overpriced is obvious, but I think some people would be surprised to learn that they essentially just buy French chocolate, melt it down, pour it into molds and mark it up 2500% (853/pound NOKA price, 34.3/pound RETAIL for a Bonnat bar -- wholesale would be much less).

Bonnat is based in Voiron and is a short train or car ride from Grenoble and it was in Grenoble that I first learned of single-origin chocolates. I have tasted at least five different varieties from both Valrhona (based near Lyon) and Bonnat and loved all of them.