Comments on: TGRWT #13: Caraway and chocolate

By: Martin Lersch

Martin Lersch — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:30:37 +0000

Paul: I think I’ll leave this one to Erik who is hosting this month’s round of TGRWT. He’s also an organic chemist and quite used to perform searches like this using SciFinder.

By: Chef Paul

Chef Paul — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 08:30:17 +0000

I was interested as to why this combo would be tasty from a chemical point of view. I started googling/ wikipedia-ing chocolate and caraway and could not find like compounds in there makeup. But when I started looking at the main volatile oils in caraway I realized that they both have strong citrus flavor, the main one limonene is very ( you guessed it) lemony tasting and is also extracted from leftover orange peels from mass juice making to form citrus cleansers. Now it makes sense seeing as chocolate and oranges is a classic combo. Instead of like compounds the chocolates rich bitterness gets cut with a sharp citrus note. Nice.

By: Alessio

Alessio — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:20:04 +0000

Russ: If I remember well, the combination Whiskey-Chocolate is quite in vogue at the moment In effect I think the experiments to date were only of gustatory kind but probably somewhere researchers have already analysed the compounds found in whiskey (for other purpose than gastronomy perhaps ) Would be nice to get the hands on those records

By: Gfron1

Gfron1 — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:44:07 +0000

I did a quick steeping of toasted caraway into water, then made a water based ganache, which I then turned into truffles. Despite a long, long steep, the taste was not perceptible. My next attempt will be an oil based infusion.

By: Russ

Russ — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:53:07 +0000

I ate a piece of chocolate while drinking Scotch the other night, and found the combination to be surprisingly good. I suggest further controlled experiments to determine whether this has to do more with gastronomy, or just my particular state of mind at the time (which, let’s just say, involved more Scotch than chocolate…)

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:17:47 +0000

Is that because they don’t like it? I can imagine that one can easily be overwhelmed by the caraway aroma. But a careful addition to chocolate might still work

By: Alessio

Alessio — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:44:30 +0000

This sounds quite interesting! I will try to include a recipe with this combination in my Christmas-eve dinner menu the only problem is that here in germany is quite easy to find people who cannot tolerate caraway (overexposure at young age?…) Let’s see

By: Larry P.

Larry P. — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:23:00 +0000

Sounds fun.