By: Jordan Michelman
“Whether it’s “real” chocolate doesn’t matter (and for the record, it is). For chocolatiers, butchers, and creative home chefs, white chocolate is whatever you want it to be.”
“It’s not real chocolate” goes the refrain, one still commonly uttered by prominent chefs even today. You can find a long list of corroborating search returns, from stuffy academia to SEO-fueled Tasting Table and all points between. To me, this line of thinking echoes similar arguments—driven by a quest for aesthetic purity and the creation of in-groups and out-groups—decrying the likes of decaffeinated coffee, frozen vegetables, bouillon cubes, cow’s milk, dessert wines, and myriad other delicious things that, for a complicated set of cultural reasons, wear the scarlet letter of uncoolness.
I’m particularly fond of the union of white chocolate with ice cream, and I enjoyed two stirring, deeply different renditions while researching this particular Rabbit Hole column: a wonderfully plain, creamy, stratocumulus cloud version at Jory, a restaurant at The Allison Inn & Spa in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Back home, I began toying with the format, and I strongly encourage you to do the same; white chocolate really is such wonderfully agreeable, adaptable stuff, and it goes with whatever you happen to already like.
