According to Google trends searches for chocolate peak every December (plus that special day in February), and I assume that consumption of chocolate follows the same pattern. For this month’s They go really well together event (TGRWT #13) Erik Fooladi over at Fooducation has chosen to pair chocolate with caraway. So if you plan to cook or bake with chocolate (or cocoa) in December – why not add some caraway and see how it turns out? It’s time to spice up your Christmas desserts! Surprise your guests and let us all know how it worked out.
If you can’t figure out what to make, try the chocolate sauerkraut cake I blogged about last year. It was quite successful and I figured out that one possible reason for the success was the fact that sauerkraut contains caraway which goes well with chocolate (and cognac).
More information about how to participate can be found in Erik’s announcement post of TGRWT #13.
Sounds fun.
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 🙂
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 🙂
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…)
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.
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 😀
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.
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.