Today we went to Artisanal Goods by CAR, a chocolatier we had visited before, but had never posted about it. It seems like they expanded while we were doing other things. It used to be a very unknown chocolatier with a very small variety, but now it had huge lines of customers and a bunch of pastries. We had to wait about twenty minutes just to get in.
When we did, I went ahead to check the chocolate selection, so we didn't waste time ordering. To my disappointment, their choices remained miniscule, consisting of just one bar. Apparently, they were completely out of everything else, and they were restocking the following day. But the following day was Monday, and I have school, so that was out of the question.
What they did have, though, was a wide variety of baked goods and pastries, including a famous chocolate croissant that was rumored to be "better than the ones in France". They were all baked fresh on the premises, which was evident by the row of ovens a distance behind the counter. I got the single bar, and a chocolate croissant.
It was a 60% dark milk bar with full roasted hazelnuts in it. Not hazelnut pieces, whole hazelnuts right out of the shell. It was a strange mouthfeel, but it added a nice crunch and a nutty, toasty flavor. The chocolate itself had a slight hint of something floral, a bit like orange blossom, and a much more dominant flavor of some fruit that was kind of like strawberry, but more tropical.
The chocolate croissant was also really flaky, which immediately got me thinking about how those layers get formed, because the ingredients for standard flaky dough are the exact same for bread dough. In the case of the flaky dough, the layers are formed by more air. The three main ingredients are butter, water, and flour. The butter is kept cold and mixed in, but not combined, with the flour. If they mixed together completely, that would form regular dough. The water then helps the dough come together, and then when one rolls the dough out, the butter pockets in the flour are stretched thin. Then when it gets baked, the butter melts, leaving empty pockets inside the dough, which then get puffed up by steam from the evaporating water, which forms the flaky layers. Overall, the croissant was really well made, with that perfect ratio of chocolate to dough that is so hard to find these days. And so ended another great chocolate adventure.
Here I am in front of the shop. In the reflection of the window, you can see the extensive line that wraps all the way around the corner and continues for another good ten feet.
This is me with the bar and my Chocolate Journal, which I bring with me everywhere chocolate leads me. The bar is dark milk, which reminds me that a bar being dark chocolate or milk chocolate is not determined by cacao percentage. Simply put, if a bar has milk powder in it, it's milk chocolate. So theoretically, there could be a 100% bar, and it could be classified as milk chocolate.
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