www-tech.mit.edu By Marissa A. Cheng

“Sugar and Spice” is a new column (debuted last week as “Yummy Yummy”) that we hope will transform you, the average MIT student, into an afficionado of all things food and food-like.

The first thing I notice about my bag of $30 worth of chocolate is the aroma that literally fills the room when the bag is opened. Luckily, my backpack, which carried it back from the supermarket, smells like it too.

Unlike Hershey’s, or even Ghirardelli, which is generally the most expensive chocolate I’m willing to pay to bake with, this chocolate smells like no other chocolate I’ve ever had -- it has a warm, rich aroma that stays with you, rather than dissipating. It’s beautiful.

I am about to embark upon my quest to find out whether or not the chocolate you bake with really matters. I bought six brands of chocolate -- Baker’s semisweet and unsweetened from the United States, Callebaut unsweetened (97 percent cacao) from Belgium, Valrhona Pur Caraibe (66 percent cacao) from France, El Rey Bucare-Mijao (58-61 percent cacao) from Venezuela, Ghirardelli Bittersweet from San Francisco, and Scharffen Berger Bittersweet (70 percent cacao) from California.

The plan: make one baked and one unbaked dessert with chocolate -- chocolate mousse and molten chocolate cakes. I’ll taste it myself, as well as have other people taste, and see what I come up with.

Chocolate began as an unsweetened drink termed “food of the gods” by the Maya and the Aztecs. Though Christopher Columbus brought cocoa beans to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492, chocolate didn’t catch on until it was introduced to Spain as both a drink (now with sugar and vanilla added to it) and an opportunity for a lot of money.

Chocolate was so popular in Spain that Pope Pius V, in 1569, declared that drinking chocolate on Fridays wouldn’t break the fast. In Germany, chocolate became so popular that a permit was required in order to buy it or eat it.

Chocolate is a mix of cocoa beans, cocoa butter, sugar, and vanilla. Milk chocolate includes condensed milk as well, and white chocolate contains cocoa butter, but no cocoa beans. Cocoa trees grow in tropical regions in South America and Africa, and yield football-shaped seed pods about the size of a lemon. After being harvested, they are fermented and dried, then bought by chocolate manufacturers. At the factory, the beans are cleaned, roasted to develop their flavor further, and have their outer shells removed. The remaining part of the bean, called the nib, is blended with other nibs according to the manufacturer’s secret recipe, and then crushed into a paste called chocolate liquor (though it contains no alcohol). Chocolate liquor can be poured off into molds and cooled as unsweetened chocolate, have cocoa butter and sugar added to it to make chocolate, or have most of the cocoa butter pressed out to produce cocoa.

Back to the tasting. After finding that it is somewhat trying to make mousse six times in a row on a Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m., I am finally through at 11 a.m. I’m kind of miffed that it took that long. And I still have the molten chocolate cakes to go.

The long and short of it is that I put most but not all possible care into the molten chocolate cakes. Some are a bit soupy in the middle (not baked long enough) and some are too cakey (baked too long). I hope it won’t be too noticeable. It takes a long time to chop chocolate, so by now it’s 2 p.m., time for people to start tasting what I’ve made as I think guiltily about the problem set and the 12-page paper due Monday.

Each of my eight-person tasting team (including me) samples the mousses and cakes and ranks them by their numbers. Nobody really liked El Rey at all -- it placed in the top three of a taster’s preferences just once, with a rather off flavor that was reminiscent of bad coffee. Scharffen Berger was also a no go, with a weak, underdeveloped taste. The Valrhona incited a love-it-or-hate-it phenomenon, which was especially apparent with the mousse.

Not surprisingly, given the size of the testing pool, results were fairly scattered, but it was clear that the most-liked chocolate for the mousse was a tie between the Callebaut and the Ghirardelli. More than one person termed the Callebaut mousse as tasting “very different,” and in my opinion, it had the richest and most complex flavor. The Callebaut didn’t fare so well in the cakes; instead, it resulted in a tie between not the expensive chocolates, but between the Ghirardelli and Baker’s chocolate. So much for the much-vaunted prestige of premier chocolates.

My expert advice to you: stick with the Baker’s and the Ghirardelli. If you really want something different, go for the Callebaut, but as always, the secret ingredient to any recipe is love.

This story was published on Friday, April 18, 2003. Volume 123, Number 20

<a href=www.editorandpublisher.com>Editor & Publihser OnLine By Mark Fitzgerald APRIL 10, 2003

CHICAGO -- "Freedom of the press," journalist A.J. Liebling wrote back in 1960, "is guaranteed only to those who own one." But, in the face of a vigorous and critical press, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez has figured a way around that guarantee: Last month, he imposed currency controls that effectively deny newsprint for those hostile printing presses.

Because there are no domestic mills, Venezuela's newspapers must import all their newsprint -- which takes dollars. In the economic chaos of Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution," newspapers have been unable to buy newsprint since November. In January, the foreign-exchange market was closed and complex currency controls were imposed that permit businesses to convert their weakened bolivars only to buy some 6,000 "importable" items.

Newsprint doesn't make the list, although paper for book manufacturing does. At their current rate of consumption, newspapers nationwide will run out of newsprint by the end of this month, Miguel Otero, director of the daily El Nacional in Caracas, said two weeks ago.

Chavez survived a bitter national strike that began Dec. 2 and ended in February. Many papers enthusiastically supported the strike, and as a show of support refused to publish in its first days. Publishers say the currency controls are Chavez's revenge.

"President Hugo Chavez has said that such curbs are to be used as tools to reward and punish, that there will be no dollars authorized for 'coup-mongers' or for companies that joined a national strike, that import of newsprint is not a priority, and freedom of speech will be restricted," Andres Mata Osorio, editor of the daily El Universal in Caracas and regional vice president of the Inter American Press Association, said at IAPA's midyear meeting in El Salvador last month.

It isn't just newspapers that are alarmed at Chavez's siege tactics. A director of Venezuela's central bank, Domingo Maza Zavala, said as long ago as March 3 that "it would be irrational" to stop the importation of newsprint. "I think newspapers have the right to receive the material they need to function," the Latin American free-press group Institute for Press and Society quoted him as saying on Union Radio.

"Reading the daily press is a primary need for Venezuelans." Chavez's response on his own radio show: There will be "no dollars for coup d'etat collaborators."

None of this is a surprise to longtime Chavez watchers, who have seen the mercurial president -- once a leader of a failed coup of his own -- grow increasingly strident against the press. In his annual speech to the National Assembly Jan. 23, Chavez declared 2003 "the year of the media battle." So it's no wonder mob violence directed against newspaper reporters and offices from pro-Chavez "Bolivarian Circles" has become common. As IAPA declared at its midyear meeting, "Journalism has become a high-risk profession, and bulletproof vests and gas masks are now standard equipment."

Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P.

<a href=www.mediainfo.com>Editor & Publisher On Line APRIL 18, 2003 By Mark Fitzgerald

CHICAGO -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government recently added newsprint to the list of goods that can be imported by newspapers that have been rationing their dwindling supply since last November.

Newspapers had accused Chavez of taking revenge for their opposition to his rule by effectively banning newsprint imports through currency controls.

Even with newsprint on the "importable" list, the complex currency regulations are still stymieing newspapers' efforts to obtain dollars to pay for the commodity, Rafael Poleo, editor of the daily El Nuevo Pais told E&P Online. Venezuelan dailies are eliminating pages and are now as thin as they were during World War II, said Poleo, who indicated he has enough newsprint to last until about June.

To read more on this story, see the latest Americas Extra column.

Source: <a href=www.mediainfo.com>Editor & Publisher On Line

<a href=reuters.com>Reuters Fri April 18, 2003 05:15 PM ET

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan troops blocked streets around the Cuban embassy in Caracas on Friday to prevent opponents of President Hugo Chavez protesting against Cuba's recent crackdown on dissidents and its meddling in their domestic politics.

Scores of opponents of Chavez, a close ally and friend of Cuban President Fidel Castro, lined a street near the embassy where they traded insults with a small group of pro-Castro demonstrators waving Cuban flags.

A clutch of National Guard troops and police formed barricades between the rally and the embassy building.

"We don't want Venezuela to be turned into another Cuba and that is what we are heading for. We have to show solidarity with the repressed Cuban people," said Marielena Adrianza, a consulting firm employee joining the opposition protest.

Opponents of Chavez, a left-wing former paratrooper elected in 1998 on a populist platform, brand him a fledgling dictator and fear he will drive Venezuela toward Cuban-style communism. He scoffs at their claims.

Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage riled foes of Chavez over the weekend when he criticized Venezuelan opposition leaders during a conference in Caracas.

Friday's small demonstration came a day after Venezuela voted against a United Nations resolution urging Cuba to accept a visit by a human rights commission following the arrest of scores of Cuban dissidents.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution was approved by 24 to 20 votes with nine abstentions.

Venezuela was the only Latin American country to back Cuba.

The decision came after Havana handed out long jail terms to more than 70 dissidents in a move to stamp out opposition to Castro's one-party state on the Caribbean island.

Cuba also sparked international outcry last week when it executed three men who had hijacked a ferry with 50 people aboard and tried to sail to the United States.

Chavez, who says his own self-styled revolution aims to ease the plight of the poor, has been locked in a bitter political battle with opponents since last year, when he survived a brief military coup.

By ANITA SNOW <a href=www.heraldtribune.com>Herald tribune.com-Associated Press Writer

The U.N. Human Rights Commission's failure to condemn Cuba for its recent crackdown affirmed the island leadership's belief in the right to defend itself from attempts to subvert its system, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Friday. "The unquestionable majority vote is a clear signal from the Human Rights Commission that Cuba has the right to apply its own laws," Perez Roque told a news conference. "This was a resonant victory for Cuba, and we express our profound satisfaction." The top United Nations watchdog on Thursday rejected a proposed amendment criticizing Cuba's recent crackdown on opponents, instead approving a milder resolution calling for a U.N. rights monitor to visit the island. The 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission, which regularly criticizes Cuba on its rights record, voted 31-15 during its meeting in Geneva against condemning the communist state's monthlong drive against dissidents and other opponents. Cuban tribunals earlier this month sentenced 75 dissidents to prison terms ranging from 6 to 28 years on charges of being mercenaries who worked with the American government to harm the island's socialist system. The dissidents and the U.S. government deny the accusations. The rejected amendment expressed "deep concern about the recent detention, summary prosecution and harsh sentencing of numerous members of the political opposition" and called for them to be released. Governments and human rights groups around the world have condemned Cuba for jailing dozens of dissidents. The crackdown was followed by the April 11 executions of three men convicted of the hijacking nine days earlier of a ferry filled with passengers. Perez Roque accused the U.S. government of concocting the failed attempt to condemn the communist-run island and questioned the human rights records of those countries that backed the measure. In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday that despite the measure's defeat, the United States was pleased that the commission passed a Cuba resolution. "It sends a strong message of support for the courageous Cubans who struggle daily to defend their human rights and their fundamental freedoms," Boucher said. Although Perez Roque acknowledged that the final measure was not a condemnation of Cuba's, he said his country would not comply with it. The milder resolution, passed 24-20, urged the Caribbean nation to accept a visit by U.N. human rights investigator, French jurist Christine Chanet. There were nine abstentions. Cuba has previously refused to allow Chanet to visit, claiming such a visit could infringe on its sovereignty. Latin American countries voting in favor of the resolution that passed included Mexico - a longtime Cuban ally - as well as Paraguay, Chile, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Argentina and Brazil abstained on the resolution that was approved. Venezuela, a strong political ally of Cuba, voted against it. The commission also turned down a proposal 26-17, brought by Cuba itself, that criticized the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba.

Last modified: April 18. 2003 3:53PM