Color:	orangutang
Surface:	shaped into half-dollar sized disks or buttons
Temper:	polished; bright as headlights
Snap:	door slammer

cocoa-motion cutting thru quartz ‘n cream

Texture:	soft paste & powder
Melt:	mercifully fast but not quick enough

smooth but tough gradient... quartz -> ground dirt -> biting iron (the real taste-shifter) -> beef blood streaming w/ volatile uric acid + a nitrogen group of caffeine & theobromine called ‘purine’ (essentially pure + urine, or a purring cat’s piss) the burn-in to gin without tonic -> sour twist -> a lone almond -> latent chocolate in the after recesses

Only for the brave at heart & those who can chop whole bushels of onions without wincing, let alone crying, because grimacing is the natural reaction from the jump street on this stuff.

Thank God cocoa powder was added in; otherwise it’d be so imbalanced the acids would’ve just ripped the tongue out instead of merely stripping it.

Granted, this is baking chocolate, intended for cookies & brownies. So before that ‘popping brownies’ moment (i.e., hearing a ‘pop’ resulting from cacáo’s resident fat sizzling, & sticking the nose in to catch that ‘brownies’ whiff, which together signal the roast is probably done), Patric must’ve pulled the batch earlier, hence feels a little young & under-roasted at this point to allow for further baking on the home-front... falling somewhere along the continuum between Domori’s relatively unroasted Sambirano and Pralus’ warmer Le 100 – both unsweetened & from the same origin as this.

A clear window, however caustic, onto where this cacáo is from... & where it needs to go.

Reviewed Autumn 2009