Rocher chocolate

My local grocery store is hit or miss. The vegetables are often wilted and the milk products are often sold past their expiration date, but the chocolates aisle is poppin’. Each week, a fun, new variety seems to appear, catering to customers looking to the sweet stuff to help satisfy one level or another of their personal Four of my colleagues and I dug deep into several boxes of chocolates to discover how some of the most popular—those we grew up with and the ones we pick up at the grocery or drugstore every Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day—compare with some of the newest and buzziest entrants on the scene. We ate so much chocolate I feared I might no longer be able to stomach any more of the stuff. (But that fear was unfounded; I had a peanut butter cup this morning.) What we found surprised us. Some old faves, when really considered, weren’t as good as we thought they were. Brands we thought were stellar stank, and others we’d never heard of knocked our socks off. Our selfless search was all in service of truth so that, whether gifting to someone else or to yourself, your future chocolate purchases won’t disappoint. If you’re considering dark chocolate, we recently tested nearly 30 For a chef or a cook, a true sign of success is taking a flavor your audience is known not to love and convincing them that they’ve been missing out this whole time. And this In fact, the lack of flavor legend led a couple of us to see a flavor we’d previously avoided in a new light, thanks to...