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Rarely do green dreams go down so pleasurably. Walk into the new store and you'll see the dream in a single refrigerator case. Inside is what looks like a thousand two-ounce lidded take-out cups. Inside each is a single chocolate truffle. Each cup bears a computer-generated label: 85 percent espresso, 73.5 percent classic Champagne, 41 percent pistachio, and so forth. These percentages each refer to the amount of cocoa mass, the part that isn't butter, cream, or sugar, in the chocolate shell of the truffle.

The 85 percent chocolates, then, are nearly devoid of cream and butter and are sharp and clear, bearing the deep, midnight wine resonance of a bat's cry in the dark. The 41 percent are Legacy Chocolates' version of milk chocolate, and taste light with lactic acid, the way sour cream tastes light. The 73 percent are winelike and focused, but have enough sugar that you can distinguish different notes of, say, mustard and tea tannin. The 58.5 percent ones taste like high-class candy. You can learn everything you want to know about what these percentages mean by lining up a row of ascending chocolates.

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This filling is about 60 percent pure chocolate, and tastes like some kind of elegant nighttime heaven, rolling across the tongue in dizzying crescendos of deep and deeper. The truffles labeled "classic" are those covered, on the very outside, with cocoa powder, the most traditional way of making a chocolate truffle...

If you get a classic 85 percent then, let it come to room temperature, and when you eat it you will really be off on a roller coaster of sensation. First, the bitter powder of the cocoa covering, then the Sangiovese-like chocolate with its tea, raspberry, coffee, sour cherry, and tannic notes. Then the explosive deep silk of the truffle center melting on your tongue. And then the long, long, half-hour finish of the chocolate...

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I think I'll be stopping by. Perhaps tomorrow after work. Perhaps before work.

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Legacy Chocolates also sells a few, a very few, other things: They have a marvelous packaged cocoa, which they blend with organic evaporated cane juice sugar, which gives it a richer, broader taste than refined sugar. It's spicy and deep in just the right way.

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Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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are sharp and clear, bearing the deep, midnight wine resonance of a bat's cry in the dark.

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I would never in a million years think to describe ANY food taste that way.

That said, it sounds divine.

Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003  |  IP: Logged |