A few years ago, my dad
decided he wanted to bike the 20 miles to work instead of driving. When I
pointed out that he’d been driving to work since before I was born, he told me,
“When I get tired of trying new things, I think I’ll be ready to die.” I’ve taken
this to heart. Here’s a list of new things I have tried in the past year:
- Indian food (2 out of 5 stars because it didn't taste like Italian food)
- Actually answering my phone when someone calls (This only lasted for 27 minutes, until someone called me)
- Being assertive (Sorry to the sales associate at the AT&T store, I didn’t realize that you could be assertive WITHOUT talking at the same volume as a whale yelling into a megaphone)
Clearly I am dare devil
when it comes to trying new things. So when a local chocolate shop was having a
chocolate tasting, my friends, Emmie and Maddy, and I decided to go. I signed up
not really sure what a chocolate tasting entailed, but assumed there would a
pool full of bubbling chocolate with people wearing crowns made out of Kit Kat
bars and trained monkeys who wore chocolate aprons and served the finest
chocolates from all over the world.
We arrived and sat down at
our table, where each place setting had a plate with nine bite-sized pieces of
chocolate on it. Judging from the size of each piece, I calculated that the tasting would either be done in 17 seconds, or this was merely an appetizer.
I then wondered if perhaps I had walked into the wrong building, and it was a
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum featuring the smallest chocolate pieces. I tried
to portray these feelings to the man in charge who stood in the front, but he
started the class without informing me that yes, the chocolate serving monkeys
were just waiting in the back room. Instead, the guy in charge started yelling.
I looked around to see if there was a robber in the streets, or perhaps someone
had used the incorrect spelling of ‘their’ on a store sign, but eventually
realized he was yelling about chocolate because he was obsessed. There he was,
standing in the front of the room, spewing off facts about French chocolatiers
(Side note: pretty sure ‘chocolatier’ is a fake job. Why would there be
accountants in the world if chocolatier was actually a real job?) and cacao,
which is different from cocoa. (Every time he said ‘cacao’ it made him sound
ultra-sophisticated in the chocolate world, but all I could think about is
birds making a ‘caCAW!’ noise, and cows making a ‘caCAO!’ noise.) Spoiler
alert: I was not able to ask the chocolate-crazed man why he gets to call it
cacao, but I have to call it cocoa like an uncivilized moron. (In reality, this guy was seriously the coolest. He knew tons about chocolate and EATS CHOCOLATE FOR A LIVING.)
After giving his
background on big fancy cacao words and using them cacao whenever he cacao
wanted to, he told us that chocolate tasting is an art. He told us that before we
even tasted the chocolate, we needed to rub our finger frantically across the
chocolate and then inhale the chocolate before tasting. Super cool and
sophisticated and cacao and all that, right? WRONG. This chocolatier had
everyone classily rubbing their chocolate and wafting in the aroma, but there I was with chocolate ALL OVER MY HANDS. So with half the piece of chocolate melted
all over my hands, I stuck the rest of the piece into my mouth. The king
chocolatier guy continued yelling instructions: Soak in the chocolate!!! Become
intoxicated by its fumes! Let it simmer on the roof of your mouth!! After tasting the piece of chocolate, we had to
write down our own chocolate tasting
journeys: what did it look like, smell like, and taste like? The sophisticated chocolate tasters around me
wrote descriptions beautifully telling the plot of their chocolate tasting: A scent of raspberry and lavender wafted
into my nostrils as I breathed in the rich, birchwood colored chocolate. The
bitter taste of raspberries tingled my taste buds as I let the chocolate simmer
on my tongue, with a strong aftertaste of generosity. After much thought
and deliberation, I wrote down exactly what I thought it tasted like.
Each piece of
chocolate went exactly like that. Rub it, smell it, taste it. I learned that
not all chocolates taste the same. I made sure to note on my card that the
Chocolate Naïve Porcini, which was made with mushrooms, tasted exactly like the
mushroom spaghetti sauce I used the night before, and Friis Holm Rugoso tasted
exactly like eating a park bench. Someone
in the class asked the man how he felt about Hershey’s, to which he informed us
that Hershey’s was offensive to him. He then got on his Hershey’s soap box,
where every other word was “FRAUD!!” or “Offensive!” (Side note: this is when I
began to question whether this guy thought that fraud meant ‘tasty’ or
‘delicious’. After all, the chocolate tasting was really getting me in the mood
for a Kit Kat bar.) We did our special art of chocolate tasting on a Hershey’s
bar, and a group discussion followed where everyone hated on American chocolate
and how disgusting it is. (I stayed at my own American chocolate tasting table
and ate Reeses and reread the Declaration of Independence.)
Balsamic vinegar is great.
It’s great on my roommate’s salads. It’s great on my sister’s pizzas. It’s
great on Barack Obama’s chicken dinners. It is NOT great on any food that I
eat. Similar to bananas, balsamic vinegar is on my “only eat if you are
starving in the middle of nowhere” list. But since I was there, I decided I might as well become a
balsamic vinegartier. I waited patiently as he brought it around to each
person. Maddy said it would be perfect on bread, but as soon as the guy reached
our table there was no bread in his hands. “Hold out your snuff box, please,”
he said. He explained that your “snuff box” is the side of your hand that dips
down to the thumb. (I use the parentheses around “snuff box” because if you put
it into Google, the first thing that comes up is NOT a part of your hand, but a
tv show. He might as well have told me to pull out my "Parks and Recreation.") Literally he was just pouring this vinegar STRAIGHT INTO OUR HANDS.
He used lots of phrases like, “I do this all the time” and “When I was doing
this balsamic tasting in Europe…..” to make things sound legit, but inside I
bet he was laughing at us as he poured vinegar onto our “snuff boxes” and we
had to lick it off like cats. I vowed then and there that when I grow up and
have a famous bakery, I will make people taste my delicious treats off their
elbows. If he can pull off this “snuff box” charade, surely I could do that.
Once the entire tasting
event was over (not before a few more “FRAUD!!” cries and use of the word
‘cacao’, of course) Maddy, Emmie, and I classily departed the chic
establishment and headed off to our favorite upscale eatery: McDonald’s. Truly
the art of food tasting was not wasted on neither me, or the salty French
fries. I placed a fry on my snuff box, inhaled the aromas of the salt, greasy
food, and the sweaty high school football players sitting around us, and took a
mental note of my food journey. Truly this new experience will take me for many
wild rides to come. (And accidentally getting salt up my nose, but whatever.)
