A Battle to Save Chocolate | Hacker News Reader

A Battle to Save Chocolate

nytimes.com

30 pointsfern1219 comments

BTW, as a European, I was surprised to find why Hershey's Kisses taste like vomit and it looks like I'm not the only one to see it this way:

http://elitedaily.com/news/hersheys-chocolate-chemical-in-vo...

Such pseudoscience.

Water is also found in both vomit and chocolate.

They didn't provide any quote suggesting butyrate tastes like vomit, or gives vomit its distinctive flavor - just that it provides a tang, like /all acids do/. You wouldn't say that sour butter or Parmesan taste like vomit, but those were also listed as containing butyrate.

Actually I think parmesan does taste a bit like vomit. I think it's pretty well known - if you google "parmesan tastes" the first autocomplete is "like vomit"

I also think Hershey chocolate tastes a bit like vomit. Parmesan cheese too. I wonder if it is a genetic thing that only some can taste, like the bitterness in Brussel sprouts.

It's not like all vomit tastes the same either, but that's something that people somehow fail to take into account unless they've been on a couple of benders.

Butyric acid is one of the main "notes" of butter. Especially when being melted.

This whole article is absolutely ridiculous.

And wine and chocolate have thiols, which is the main source of skunk smell. http://winefolly.com/review/where-wine-flavors-come-from/

However, if you remove them, the wine/chocolate lack their rich flavor.

Coffee too I believe.

Coffee smells just like skunk mixed with burning rubber to me. Tastes horrible, of course, I can't stand the stuff.

Huh, ever since I was a child and smelled my first skunk I associated it with coffee, no one I ever shared the association with agreed with me. So this thread really puts some childhood questions to rest.

I'm American, born in Chicago, and always thought Hershey's Kisses were gross too.

I expect that Mondelez will start selling empty wrappers soon so cacao availability won't matter.

One thing I wonder when looking at chocolate "how it's made" documentaries is just how much extremely cheap space and labor is needed to produce cacao.

being a fan of Michel Cluizel chocolates, which include many single source chocolates, I wonder how they perceive these engineered varieties. I was disappointed in the article because they only concerned it with the big producers and not the impact on or desires of the old school artisans. With regard to the chocolates, each does have a distinct taste based on where it is from and it is fun to see which appeals to whom and why.

Now I don't know where it is grown in Asia but if there is an explosion of popularity surely there are places in China and India that have good climates.

They mention Dandelion in there as having a blended bar with the hybrids - if they can replicate criollo, then hopefully the terroir subtleties will come out more in the final product.

There are so many variables at the moment, and due to small sizes and wild differences from batch-to-batch, artisans struggle to maintain consistency as it is. [0]

Vietnam is good for cacao in Asia. Try Marou.

[0] Source: amateur chocolatier and bean-to-bar experimenter.

I've heard that bananas also genetically show very little variety.

All commercially distributed bananas are practically clones. Scientists are tying to engineer new varieties to avoid the risk of massive crop losses in case of diseases. http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2008/09/the-sterile-bana...

We're actually on banana 2.0 (Cavendish banana) - banana 1.0 ('Big Mike') got wiped out by Panama disease[1], which very well might happen again. The joys of monoculture!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease

Not just mono culuture, but all bananas grown are clones as bananas plants grow from sucks that shoot out from the roots of the established plant. There is no genetic diversity at all as they evolved* to be become seedless

*maybe selected, not sure of the correct term

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