By sugar I mean “added sugar”, as used to sweeten drinks. I have control over whether I put sugar on my coffee, but not on the sugar present in most other foods, including cakes, so it makes sense for me to deal with the two separately. If on a give day I eat cake but don’t add sugar to drinks, I would mark the ‘cake’ daily as a failure and the ‘sugar’ daily as a success.
As a cheaper alternative to 100% dark chocolate, I drink unsweetened* cocoa made as follows:
Fill kettle, start boiling water
Add 2 teaspoons cocoa powder to mug, stir in a small trickle of cold water to make a paste
Stir in boiling water, filling mug about 2/3rd full
Top up with cold milk (*milk contains sugars so this isn’t technically zero sugar. You could skip the milk if you think it matters, at the cost of worse taste).
Best tasting cocoa powder I’ve found in the UK is Cadbury Bournville. Some supposedly premium brands (eg. Green & Blacks) taste much worse, bland with a slight burnt taste. Color seems to be a good indication of taste—lighter color generally tastes better.
Isn’t this exactly how cocoa is normally made? Either like that or with hot milk instead of boiling water. What would anyone do differently with that sort of cocoa?
Have you always enjoyed 100% dark chocolate, or did you have to train yourself to do so, and if so how? I’m not particularly interested in eating less sugar, but somewhere around 95% it goes from tasting rich and bitter and fragrant and wonderful to tasting bitter in a way that just doesn’t register as food, and I want to know if there’s a way to overcome this. I have a similar situation with unsugared black tea, with a single exception that involved LSD.
I have a similar situation with unsugared black tea
You should brew tea properly. The bitterness in black tea comes from tannins and you can easily control their extraction during brewing.
For black tea:
Use good quality loose-leaf tea, preferably the orange pekoe cut. The tea dust in teabags oversteeps (and becomes bitter) very quickly.
Time the steeping of the tea leaves in boiling water. The usually recommended five minutes is often too long (if you’ll be drinking your tea without milk). Try three and a half minutes to start, then adjust as desired. The less time you steep, the less bitter will the tea be (while caffeine generally extracts in the first 30 seconds or so).
Once the tea has steeped for the proper time, pour the tea off the leaves into another teapot (or a cup, etc.). Do not let tea sit on the leaves.
Experiment with different teas as well. Tea from Assam (often sold as Irish Breakfast) is the most tannic. Tea from Darjeeling, for example, is much less so.
Good advice that I’m already following. I do enjoy Darjeeling with hardly any sugar, but it just doesn’t satisfy my “wake you up in the morning” desires the way Assam does. Even with Darjeeling, though, unless I add at least a small amount of sugar (maybe 1⁄4 of what I’d put in Assam) it’s just fragrant water and I don’t perceive it as having flavor.
No, I haven’t always enjoyed 100% dark chocolate. For a long time I ate chocolate with 85% concentration of cocoa, and then gradually moved upwards. I haven’t met many people who like pure chocolate, though, and there doesn’t seem to be a big market for it, judging from the difficulty of finding it. So my experience may be atypical.
More people, by several orders of magnitude, like unsweetened black tea than unsweetened chocolate. And probably another order of magnitude for coffee.
Does this mean that you should ask people about tea rather than chocolate? There are a lot more of them. And maybe it’s easier with tea. If it’s easier with tea, maybe you should do tea first. But if it’s easier, maybe the masses of people who do it did it without planning or introspection, while the hard task may be a better source of information.
I’ve asked more people about tea than about chocolate. But I haven’t asked anyone about coffee, because I don’t drink it, and I think that’s worth trying.
With tea, a few people like unsweetened black tea and have always experienced it as having flavor (though there’s still the usual acquired-taste aspect of bitter/tannic things). Others, like me, find that without sugar it’s just fragrant water that doesn’t get experienced as having taste, but they like it that way. I haven’t found anyone who’s actively learned to enjoy sugarless black tea in the way I would like to.
I enjoy sugarless black tea. I didn’t use to. I got into through green tea (which I admittedly still prefer in the general). I think drinking a lot of green tea and getting pretty into it (trying lots of different loose leaf types, learning about ideal steeping temperatures and times) got me used to the basic form of tea, after which it’s a lot easier to get into black tea.
By sugar I mean “added sugar”, as used to sweeten drinks. I have control over whether I put sugar on my coffee, but not on the sugar present in most other foods, including cakes, so it makes sense for me to deal with the two separately. If on a give day I eat cake but don’t add sugar to drinks, I would mark the ‘cake’ daily as a failure and the ‘sugar’ daily as a success.
Incidentally, I eat 100% dark chocolate, which doesn’t contain any sugar.
As a cheaper alternative to 100% dark chocolate, I drink unsweetened* cocoa made as follows:
Fill kettle, start boiling water
Add 2 teaspoons cocoa powder to mug, stir in a small trickle of cold water to make a paste
Stir in boiling water, filling mug about 2/3rd full
Top up with cold milk (*milk contains sugars so this isn’t technically zero sugar. You could skip the milk if you think it matters, at the cost of worse taste).
Best tasting cocoa powder I’ve found in the UK is Cadbury Bournville. Some supposedly premium brands (eg. Green & Blacks) taste much worse, bland with a slight burnt taste. Color seems to be a good indication of taste—lighter color generally tastes better.
I like drinking cocoa made as follows:
1 mug milk (heated in microwave
~1.75 spoons of unsweetened cocoa powder
1-2 dashes of cinnamon
(sometimes) cayenne powder
Isn’t this exactly how cocoa is normally made? Either like that or with hot milk instead of boiling water. What would anyone do differently with that sort of cocoa?
Have you always enjoyed 100% dark chocolate, or did you have to train yourself to do so, and if so how? I’m not particularly interested in eating less sugar, but somewhere around 95% it goes from tasting rich and bitter and fragrant and wonderful to tasting bitter in a way that just doesn’t register as food, and I want to know if there’s a way to overcome this. I have a similar situation with unsugared black tea, with a single exception that involved LSD.
You should brew tea properly. The bitterness in black tea comes from tannins and you can easily control their extraction during brewing.
For black tea:
Use good quality loose-leaf tea, preferably the orange pekoe cut. The tea dust in teabags oversteeps (and becomes bitter) very quickly.
Time the steeping of the tea leaves in boiling water. The usually recommended five minutes is often too long (if you’ll be drinking your tea without milk). Try three and a half minutes to start, then adjust as desired. The less time you steep, the less bitter will the tea be (while caffeine generally extracts in the first 30 seconds or so).
Once the tea has steeped for the proper time, pour the tea off the leaves into another teapot (or a cup, etc.). Do not let tea sit on the leaves.
Experiment with different teas as well. Tea from Assam (often sold as Irish Breakfast) is the most tannic. Tea from Darjeeling, for example, is much less so.
Good advice that I’m already following. I do enjoy Darjeeling with hardly any sugar, but it just doesn’t satisfy my “wake you up in the morning” desires the way Assam does. Even with Darjeeling, though, unless I add at least a small amount of sugar (maybe 1⁄4 of what I’d put in Assam) it’s just fragrant water and I don’t perceive it as having flavor.
No, I haven’t always enjoyed 100% dark chocolate. For a long time I ate chocolate with 85% concentration of cocoa, and then gradually moved upwards. I haven’t met many people who like pure chocolate, though, and there doesn’t seem to be a big market for it, judging from the difficulty of finding it. So my experience may be atypical.
I like it! But when I eat it, I want much less of it than I would eat of 80-90% in a sitting. (not necessarily a drawback)
More people, by several orders of magnitude, like unsweetened black tea than unsweetened chocolate. And probably another order of magnitude for coffee.
Does this mean that you should ask people about tea rather than chocolate? There are a lot more of them. And maybe it’s easier with tea. If it’s easier with tea, maybe you should do tea first. But if it’s easier, maybe the masses of people who do it did it without planning or introspection, while the hard task may be a better source of information.
I’ve asked more people about tea than about chocolate. But I haven’t asked anyone about coffee, because I don’t drink it, and I think that’s worth trying.
What is the outcome of asking people about tea? Do they say useful things? specific to tea, or things that might generalize to chocolate?
With tea, a few people like unsweetened black tea and have always experienced it as having flavor (though there’s still the usual acquired-taste aspect of bitter/tannic things). Others, like me, find that without sugar it’s just fragrant water that doesn’t get experienced as having taste, but they like it that way. I haven’t found anyone who’s actively learned to enjoy sugarless black tea in the way I would like to.
I enjoy sugarless black tea. I didn’t use to. I got into through green tea (which I admittedly still prefer in the general). I think drinking a lot of green tea and getting pretty into it (trying lots of different loose leaf types, learning about ideal steeping temperatures and times) got me used to the basic form of tea, after which it’s a lot easier to get into black tea.
Ah, makes sense! The chocolate sounds cool.