Hume also got at least one thing right:

A gloomy, hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself.

It's true that milk chocolate (at least of the type found in a Hershey bar) is barely chocolate, but this doesn't mean it's bad.

Milk chocolate can be extremely good; I would never deny that. A Hershey bar is not good.

ben is entirely correct. Milk chocolate can be nice, but there's nothing nice about Hershey's.

Normally I wouldn't care about this too much but I had a mini-Hershey Bar just last night, available at the bar I was at in little glasses of chocolates on the tables. It hit the spot.

I ate a Hershey's bar the other day and found it quite yummy. But then I was rather desperate.

I'm perfectly willing to grant that to one whose faculties have been distempered by drink or desperation, a Hershey bar might taste ok. But we judge these things with reference to competent tasters.

Nothing else appetizing handy on the floor?

Milk chocolate can be good, but rarely is. Many things that aren't chocolate are good, but none of them should be called chocolate.

8: Only one of PK's Lindt truffle eggs, and I am too good a mama to eat the last one.

I actually cleaned up the dining and living rooms today. Including the floor. So there.

10: I shouldn't throw stones, but that's fine, because I don't know how I'd find them under all the other crap on the floor.

Throwing stones can break things. What we do around here is build catapults out of plastic spoons and legos and then fling mini marshmallows.

Which yeah, makes a mess on the floor, but it's not like you can tell.

My dad went to Orlando on some IT conference, and brought back some chocolate bars, and they were prettty awful. We don't have that kind of crap here.

Get the good stuff: Valrhona milk chocolate is lovely. I buy it [and, of course, dark chocolate] in bulk from the restaurant supply store. Or at Whole Foods.

13: No more awful than Orlando generally.

He made Orlando sound like a nightmarish parody of certain type of US city. Or maybe they're all like that, I wouldn't know.

I did some research, and the Brits did succeed in easing EU rules seven years ago.. So the EU's rules are actually more lax for once.

Sweden's not on the side the presumed angels, though we only use vegelate stuff for cakes and the like, and the Swedish wikipedia says in no uncertain terms that more cocoa would be pointless for those kinds of products.

The 'same' chocolate bar tastes different depending on where you are - they are quite different between UK and Oz [and sometimes the same bar has a different names just to confuse you further e.g. the Marathon and whatever it's called elsewhere].
Same goes for cigarettes - not that I would know anything about that but (a friend told me) Kent taste quite different round our part of the world.

Yeah, but my thing is: if you're buying Valrhona, why waste your money on their milk chocolate when the real stuff is so good?

(I know, I'm a chocolate snob.)

Much of what is being said around here about chocolate would apply (mutatis mutandis) equally well to beer.

Perhaps we should write the FDA and demand truth-in-labeling on our fizzy alcoholic drinks as well?

20 was me.

A Reinheitsgebot for the US! Anheuser-Busch uses rice in their beermaking process. (Shudder.)

In Germany you can still buy the 'Schlager Süßtafel', the East German chocolate substitute. It is one of the vilest things I have ever tried. Personal experience has proven that it will not melt in a backpack, even on a 100-degree day.

22: So does Kirin Ichiban, and it's probably the most pleasant macrobrewed lager I've ever had. Which isn't too faint of praise, I swear.

Also, no Reinheitsgebot for the US, our lack of such laws is what has enabled the greatest proliferation of beer styles and breweries outside Belgium. Hooray!

The thing is, Hershey's Kisses have the best shape in the world. It totally makes the product. It's the perfect denomination of chocolate.

20,21: no need; all the mass produced stuff is trash, and the smaller local stuff pretty much always tells you what's in it, iirc.

24: so true. if they made them out of real (& dark) chocolate that would be amazing.

I'm astounded at all the new Hershey's Kisses flavors. There's a little basket of chocolates in our department office, and I swear they have a new kind of Hershey's Kisses in there every week. The cherry kind is especially gross.

Not gross, though, are the new Hershey's minis with the mr. goodbar and crackle kinds made with their dark chocolate. ('Special' dark chocolate.)

25: Funny, in Germany I've found it often to be the other way around. Pretty much every little dorf has a brewery, and they're usually not nearly as good as the big mass produced brands. (Particularly bad memories of Göttinger Pilsner, yech.)

Of course, if I had ever spent any time in Bavaria my experience might be just the opposite.

24: Special Dark Kisses and others

28: In the US, with a few exceptions, the mass produced stuff is a race to the bottom price wise (and it is really cheap, and a lot of it really nasty). Most of it isn't worth the 50c or whatever. On the other hand, there is a thriving `microbrew' industry. Even once you factor out the beer snob nonsense, there are a lot of pretty decent, decently priced beers. The way things are marketed though means you have to search around again every time you move regions.

So, for instance, you move to LA, you may spend a long time believing that nobody anywhere in that city actually drinks beer.

Yeah, but my thing is: if you're buying Valrhona, why waste your money on their milk chocolate when the real stuff is so good?

It's good that you admit to snobbery, mrh, because this convicts you of it beyond redemption. Milk chocolate is "real stuff", and is good! It is the mark of the true chocolate lover to recognize this; the mark of the snob to be obsessed with cocoa percentages.

I generally prefer very dark chocolate, but only a fool would deny that milk chocolate can sometimes be excellent.

33: Exactly. On the other hand, most milk chocolate is terrible. There is a lot less dark chocolate, but it is more likely to be decent. So given no other information, passing over milk chocolate is sensible --- passing over known good milk chocolate out of some erroneous snobbery is silly, though.

The recent introduction of "dark chocolate M & M's" makese it likely that the truth-value of 34 will degrade in the coming years.

Let's face it. I'm only in it for the trace quantities of that substance that makes you feel like you're in love. So, as long as they keep enough of that around, it can be carob and chicory for all I care. In fact, that would be kind of cool. Like the chocolate equivalent of having Red Bull instead of coffee.

If I'm eating good chocolate, I prefer dark to milk. But I love M&Ms with a passion that grows only stronger in grad school, so therefore, I conclude they must not be made out of chocolate but of magic.

makese

Mamase mamasa mamakusa.

they must not be made out of chocolate but of magic.

What's great is re-discovering the awesomeness. Like when I haven't had any in a while, and someone has a bowl out of peanut M&M's. Mmnn, peanut M&M's.

Hey I love M & M's too. But I don't pretend their flavor is objectively anything besides bad, bad, bad.

39: I hadn't had M&Ms in years, and then I had some, and now they're practically a necessity, even though they're really actively bad chocolate. They must put crack in.

41: For me, it's the little, splintered, sugared fragments of a once whole candy shell that make them so appealing. I do work in postmodern theory.

Because I have no class, judgement or tastebuds, I bought and consumed a Hershey bar this afternoon. They're definitely in the almost-exactly-but-not-quite-unlike-chocolate category, but there's something about the weird springiness of the chocolate that I really like.

More, I don't even particularly like dark chocolate for eating-by-itself purposes, unless it's sweeter than it usually is. For cooking, though, I use only food-snob approved fancy dark chocolate from the co-op.

I like to make a very simple imitation-ganache where you chop up a bunch of dark chocolate and heat up a bunch of heavy cream, combine, stir occasionally and then let them sit until ganache-ness occurs. It is alleged that one can whip the result into a glossy, lofty frosting but this has not been my experience. But it tastes pretty fancy on a cake.

Hershey bars: when you want the taste of vomit in the back of your throat, but are just too busy to vomit.

In Germany you can still buy the 'Schlager Süßtafel', the East German chocolate substitute.

One thing I do miss is the el cheapo 'chocolate-flavoured bars' that always seemed to end up in the Xmas stocking in the early 80s, courtesy of Poundstretcher. I believe the only comparable product these days is the carob stuff sold at a high markup in hippie-type shops, but even that doesn't have the baked mud-and-ashes je ne sais quoi, straight out of Orwell.

You snotty trendoids are all wrong. Mediocre milk chocolate is much better than mediocre dark, because the latter is simply bitter. Only very good dark chocolate is good (and yes, it *is* good). But very good milk chocolate is also very good.

I enjoy Carob, and Chocolatey diet bars. Futurism, ho! We will need to enjoy these synthetic foods when we join Dr. Hawking in space.

Speaking of futuristic food, ew:

In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

I enjoy Carob

Don't make me drive a chocolate stake through your heart.

China's taking over the world! Just as soon as they figure out the whole "clean drinking water for your citizens" and "don't make soy sauce from hair" stuff.

48: In the future, my heart will be made of neo-organic polymoid nanodevices, and will thus absorb and digest a chocolate stake as it would any other biological matter.

Viva, machine! Destroy all human!

How is making soy sauce from human hair cheaper than just using soybeans?

51: Human hair is, I should imagine, free from your local hairdresser, prison or army recruiting centre. Soy beans ain't.

I like to make a very simple imitation-ganache where you chop up a bunch of dark chocolate and heat up a bunch of heavy cream, combine, stir occasionally and then let them sit until ganache-ness occurs.

I thought this was real ganache. What else is real ganache if not chocolate melted in cream?

Real ganache isn't made in a combine, and consequently isn't full of chaff and grain particles.

You all can call me a snob all you want. I refuse to bow down to your lactonormativity!