Davida,
I received this text a few days ago that might help. Only the first three
lines are useful. The rest is the entire thread. Manjo:

I offer El Rey dark, milk and white bars. Direct source from
Venezula. Excellent dark 73.5% cocoa. and the price is far less than
Valrona. www.treats.net I ship anywhere in the continental USA

(Alex Rast) wrote in message
...
at Fri, 17 Oct 2003 18:56:00 GMT in
, (Manjo)
wrote :

I Googled for bars and found very little available online.
My aged aunt loves chocolate bars and I want to send her a box of bars.
Is there a web site where I can order a box of 10 or 12 bars and have
them shipped directly to her (1,000 miles away)? Is Cadbury the best
and most easily available bar chocolate online?? TIA for any info,
tips, suggestions, comments.
--
Go to http://www.chocosphere.com. This is the best chocolate site on-line,
the handling is always great, their service is the best, and they have by
far the best selection of quality chocolate. The brands can be a bit
intimidating, so here's a quick synopsis of each of their characters:

Michel Cluizel : Perhaps the best all-around. Tends towards a somewhat
darker roast, less fruity character. The 50% milk chocolate of his is the
best milk chocolate in the world. The 72% is perhaps the second best
bittersweet.
Valrhona : Very good. Very fruity and bright. One of their signature
characteristics is the best texture in the industry - silky-smooth.
Guittard : They have perhaps the best single chocolate in the world,
Gourmet Bittersweet. The selection Etienne chocolates are outstanding.
Overall they tend towards a very neutral balance, but tend towards a
"generic" taste.
Slitti : Extremely delicate. Slitti has some of the mildest, least
aggressive chocolates at every percentage level. None of them are bitter
in
the slightest. I find them a little bland, but it's personal.
Max Brenner : Extremely uneven. The bars have an incredible variability.
They tend towards the fruity side, but often taste "wild".
Caffe-Tasse : Generally good. Leans towards a darker roast. They tend to
select beans with little specific character.
Cuba Venchi : Very, very dark roasters, typical of Italians. The chocolate
is OK, but it's the gianduja that's superb - easily the best in the world.
Dagoba : Tend toward the fruity side. Their chocolates always have a
complex flavour. I suspect they use a lot of Trinitario beans because
their
bars tend to have that woody/leather signature that the Trinitarios
usually
possess.
Cocoa Camino : They seem to focus on texture because although that's very
good, the flavour is extremely bitter for their dark, excessively mild for
the milk.
Green & Black's : Terrible. One of the most overrated chocolates. Somehow
they seem to think that the label "organic" should be enough. The
chocolate
displays all the weaknesses common in cheaper chocolate - cloying
sweetness, harsh bitterness, etc.
Cote D'Or : Mixed-bag. They have good and bad chocolates. While the
flavour
tends towards fruitiness, suggesting a light roast, some of them seem to
be
very heavily roasted. Trying them is often difficult because you don't
know
what to expect
El Rey : Always intense. They have found a nice balance of roasting, but
somehow the bars seem to lack the sophistication of some of the top Euro
or
American brands. It's not the fault of the beans - their Carenero Superior
bean is one of the truly great cocoa varietals.
Galler : Lean towards the nutty side of the spectrum. They have a nicely
balanced roast as well. Texture is always good. Excellent overall but
there
are a few companies (such as Cluizel) who are better.
Dolfin : They take dark roasting to an extreme. This is for the person who
likes black, black chocolate. As a result they have little specific
varietal character but are also minimally bitter, at most. In spite of the
aggressive roast, they are one of the best.
Callebaut : Fruity, but not so much as Valrhona. They're a big industrial
concern of good but not great quality. Their flavour profile is almost
identical with Ghirardelli, except Callebaut's milk chocolate which is
much
worse than Ghirardelli's.
Valor : Decidedly lacking in character. They seem to lean towards the
problems of cheap chocolate - sweet milk chocolate, bitter dark chocolate,
rough texture.
Grenada Chocolate Company : They have a very woody taste to them, not in
the unpleasant sense but rather in the sense of certain aromatic woods
like
teak. Good overall.
Lindt : We all know what they are usually like, but it's worth trying
their
85% if your aunt likes VERY strong chocolate. This is by far the best 85%
chocolate available. The rest are, well, Lindt.
Villars: Where's the chocolate? Not here. In common with many Swiss
manufacturers, their bars taste very mild. Even with the 70% it was hard
to
detect much chocolate in there.
Scharffen Berger : If Dolfin represented the dark-roast extreme, S-B
represents the extreme of light roasting. Thus, their chocolates taste
*ultra*-fruity. IMHO this makes them quite unbalanced and always bitter.
There's no denying that they're quality chocolate, but I'd stop short of
calling them excellent - a clear case where a company's reputation exceeds
its actual product.

I hope that based on that, you can take a stab at what your aunt would
like. Still confused? Send me a list of chocolate bars your aunt likes or
has liked a lot in the past. I will match her profile to some chocolates
and give you a recommendation.

--
Manjo
A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built
for. --William Shedd
Davida Chazan - The Chocolate Lady wrote in
message ...
NOTE: My Correct Address is in my signature (just remove the spaces).
On Sun, 19 Oct 2003 07:50:07 -0000,
(Alex Rast) wrote:

at Sat, 18 Oct 2003 07:10:47 GMT in 8jp1pv4jbr6s8ehnjlg80r6v1g6bsscndi@
4ax.com, (Davida Chazan) wrote :

Since I have a sister-in-law in Amsterdam, we often end up with having
a box of Droste chocolates from someone or another's visit there.

While the dark and milk chocolates aren't anything special (and a bit
too sweet for my taste), I have to say that their white chocolate is
one of the very few that actually TASTES like chocolate!

Have you ever tried El Rey? This is IMHO the best white chocolate, for
exactly the same reasons you mention for Droste. Now, El Rey's, AFAIK, is
the only one that uses non-deodourized cocoa butter, i.e. cocoa butter
that
hasn't had any flavour removed with a process similar to bleaching. It's
hardly a surprise that most white chocolate ends up tasting like wax
after
going through a procedure like that.

As for Droste, perhaps they have switched to non-deodourized?

Could be.

But not
TTBOMK.

Um... pardon?

Do try El Rey if you haven't already and see if you still prefer
Droste after that. I can tell you that the first time I tried El Rey's
white chocolate my thought was instant: "Well, this is clearly the best
white chocolate out there, without any question!"

Oh, great. Now I've got to figure out how I'm going to get my hands
on some El Rey's white chocolate.

--
Davida Chazan (The Chocolate Lady)
davida @ jdc . org . il
~*~*~*~*~*~
"What you see before you, my friend, is the result of a lifetime of
chocolate."
--Katharine Hepburn (May 12, 1907 - June 29, 2003)
~*~*~*~*~*~
Links to my published poetry - http://davidachazan.homestead.com/
~*~*~*~*~*~