Closer to fine
For years we’ve ordered two or three Cocoa Rhapsody 85% Ebony chocolate bars a week in our Fair Food box – but in all this time I’ve never noticed that Floyd and Patricia, Cocoa Rhapsody’s owners, don’t call it chocolate but rich dark couverture?
Couverture, I discover, contains a higher percentage of cocoa butter and is ground to a finer texture. It’s the chocolate chefs use in baking because it has the beautiful shine, deep flavour, and snaps when you break or bite it.
I find the next most popular web search on this topic is – Can I eat couverture chocolate? To which I’d like to shout from the rooftops a resounding YES! not only can you eat it, but you should eat it!
Back in 2004 Floyd Millar, a five star pastry chef, felt the same way about couverture. Obsessed by fine chocolate he wanted to bring a super smooth organic Swiss style chocolate to Melbourne – which in those days was something of a chocolate desert.
Teaming up with wife Patricia, who would take care of business, they went and found organic cacao in the Dominican Republic, paid the farmers above market prices plus a 2% royalty on all sales and got to work making chocolate from their home in Thornbury.
For Floyd conching, or grinding the beans, is the most decisive part of the process – the longer beans are in the conch the finer and finer the particles become and thus the smoother the chocolate.
Floyd found the optimum time for conching their cacao in the rollers of their medieval-looking conching machine was 72 hours – three full days of grinding!
The chocolate and its texture has always been the focus, Cocoa Rhapsody’s understated wrapper with its 90’s home printer vibe underpromises, while the hand-folded golden paper inner has an old-school Wonka Bar feel you won’t see anywhere else.
Another popular search in my couverture deep dive is… Can I eat too much dark chocolate?
The comforting advice is that a normal person can eat 60 grams a day or two thirds of a 85% Ebony bar. I immediately consider upping my order to four bars per week.
Chocolate lovers know very dark varieties are a source of antioxidants, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and flavanols, which can lower blood pressure, improve cholesterol, and enhance cognitive function, but only recently has it been proved that chocolate actually makes us feel better.
In a randomized controlled trial published in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, 85% dark chocolate was found to restructure subjects’ gut microbiomes resulting in an improved emotional state.
With this knowledge I offer a row or two of Cocoa Rhapsody 85% Ebony to anyone who comes to our house for more than ten minutes.
Invariably this unassuming bar creeps up on people who find themselves stopping mid-sentence to smile and say, “Geez this is really good chocolate”.
This week you can find our range of Floyd and Patricia’s chocolate on special here.
Pick my park
You may remember back in 2018 six hundred people voted in the Pick My Project Competition helping win $200,000 to build a playground at CERES.
After consultations with kids focus groups and input from a volunteer team of amazing playground designers we created a recycled junk wonderland ruled over by a giant millipede as long a city tram.
Right now, the Victorian Government is doing it again, asking the community to Pick My Park and nominate improvements you’d like to see at your local park.
With your vote, we can build onto what you started seven years ago in the CERES playground by adding more equipment, BBQ and seating areas, sculptures, garden nooks, performance spaces, whatever you feel would make CERES a more welcoming, inspiring place.
You can nominate CERES here (it takes 2 minutes) – please share it with friends and family!
If we make it onto the shortlist we’ll go into a final public voting round and be in the running for $250,000 of improvements and upgrades.
Have a great week
Chris
