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Cocoa Buff

By Matthew Halverson

Angela Raines sounds pretty relaxed right now. In fact, she’s downright placid. You wouldn’t really say that she’s high—not in the patchouli-scented sense of the word, anyway—and it’s not that she’s in that stereotypical blissed-out, post-fix coma, but she is floating a little. She’s had a taste of her drug of choice—that would be chocolate, in its darkest and least Hershey-like of forms—which is harmless, but the way she consumed it is about as close to mainlining as you can get with a nonpsychotropic substance: “I’ve started buying cacao ‘nibs.’” In other words, she’s eating the pure, unadulterated raw product—kind of like a crackhead snorting a coca leaf. “It’s not sweet at all,” Raines explains. “I just want the M-F-in’ chocolate.”

Raines wasn’t always like this. There was a time in her younger days when you might have found her with garden-variety milk chocolate smeared on her hands and face, but those days are long gone. She eats chocolate so dark you might mistake it for a bar of pressed carbon, and, frankly, if you want a “true chocolate experience,” she says, you will, too. “You have to go for the chocolate that’s low in sugar and has a high percentage of chocolate, like 70 percent,” she explains. “Don’t get the frou-frou nuts and crap in it, though. Just get the plain bar chocolate.” Of course, 70 percent is just for beginners; Raines goes as high as 85 percent: “the stuff that’s just used for baking purposes.” Lindt and Ghirardelli will do just fine, she says.

Even Valrhona, a French variety considered by many the best in the world, doesn’t cut it for Raines—still too sweet. “That’s not what I’m looking for—it’s the depth and the heat and the smoothness that I’m after,” she says. In fact, it’s the source of an international cocoa rift of sorts between Raines and her mother: The younger Raines says that for all their self-proclaimed supremacy on the subject—and despite her mother’s undying love for the stuff—the French and their confections can’t hold a flaming truffle to the chocolates of Belgium or Switzerland. “It’s a constant fight,” she says, although she admits to the hair-splitting, to-each-her-own nature of the argument. “It’s kind of like how she thinks Mozart is fantastic and I insist on Beethoven.”

For the truly adventurous—among whom you can safely count Raines, particularly when it comes to matters of taste—it may be time to do as the Mayans did: experiment with savory options for a new chocolate experience. She actually started a while ago, putting cayenne pepper in hot chocolate—a little trick her grandma picked up from the movie Chocolat—but she’s getting ready to move beyond that to strictly nontraditional (for America, anyway) presentations. “I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it,” Raines says, “but a chicken dish with chocolate as a seasoning ...”

Given the fact that she’s a young woman of limited means, extravagance isn’t always possible, but she’s also quick to point out that money is no object in certain situations. “If someone were to say, ‘You are going to put this in your mouth and it’s going to be the most orgasmically chocolate experience you’ve ever had,’ how can you put a price on that?”

And there it is—she’s opened the door. With all of her passionate opinions about chocolate, her borderline-erotic descriptions of its texture and heat, is it safe to say that she ranks chocolate above sex? “Given the choice between great chocolate and great sex, I would go for great sex,” she says, “but given the choice between great chocolate and mediocre sex, I would totally go for the chocolate.”

Raines’ Picks for Death by Chocolate

Hank’s Ibarra Mexican Chocolate Cheesecake: “It’s superdark chocolate, so it satisfies the chocolate craving, but it has other accoutrements, like cinnamon and ground almonds. It puts chocolate in a slightly new light—and it’s Hank’s cheesecake, so come on.”

Chocolate truffles made by Matthew Rice, the pastry chef at Niche: “Good chocolate truffles are hard to come by around here, but I had one of Matt’s, and it was phenomenal. It’s not on the menu, but at Veruca [the restaurant’s late-night Friday dessert bar] he’ll do a three-course chef’s tasting of desserts, and sometimes they’re one of the choices.”

Plain 70 percent chocolate bar from Lindt: “I like Lindt because, unlike French chocolate, there seems to be more depth to it; I like the depth-to-sweetness ratio more. It’s not supersweet. For something that’s accessible and that you can get at the grocery store, it’s consistently smooth and delicious.”

Wild Oats’ Ecuadorian chocolate-covered cacao nibs: “These are really cool because you get the benefit of the most intense, pure chocolate experience from the beans themselves, but the little bit of sweet chocolate on the outside makes it more accessible. It’s kind of a double whammy.”

Nutella: “For the sheer fun factor. If you want ‘playing hooky from work and watching a movie and being fat and fabulous’ fun, just get a jar—but don’t use a spoon.”