How to Eat Chocolate

Now that's a crazy title, admittedly. After all, who needs help learning how to eat chocolate? Well, I have come to learn that we all could use a little advanced course in chocolate-eating. Back in my Hershey's days, my favorite method was chewing which turns out was probably a good idea because there is a lot of crap in Hershey's that we most likely don't want to savor. Once you begin to upscale your chocolate habit however, you are going to need to control that mastication habit in order to truly savor the differences and nuances of these finer chocolates. Sugar is a very addictive substance, on par with heroin and other such goodies. The more sugar a chocolate contains the more likely we are to suck with a frenzy, trying to absorb every last glucose/fructose molecule with reckless abandon. If this is happening to you, you need to increase your cacao content. Those little percentages that are turning up on the packages of chocolate bars these days are the actual percentage of pure cacao that the bar contains. The higher the percentage, the lower the sugar content. After all, something has to give in order to make room for more cacao. If you take out the cocoa butter, you end up with an unpalatable product, so it's the sugar that gets decreased. Do not despair. You can do this. You don't have to go cold-turkey, but you can wean yourself off some of that excess sugar. As a reference, your traditional Hershey's milk chocolate bar has only about 30% cacao content. What is the rest?? Dried milk and soy lethicin and SUGAR! What is soy lethicin? You really don't want to know.
Back to tasting: choose your new chocolate and place a square on your tongue. Close your mouth and just forget it is there for a few seconds. Try hard not to suck. Just let it melt and the flavor will actually come to you. What do you taste? You may feel you are tasting the best hot chocolate you ever experienced, or you may taste vanilla. Or caramel. It may be bright and acidic like a fruit, or rich and earthy like fine dark coffee. Each chocolate will be different, and sometimes you may get several of these sensations in the same bar!
I admit that sometimes I just want to chew and that isn't a crime. However, there is a lot going on in a good bar of chocolate and it takes patience to discover it all. Once you get into the dangerously high percentages of 80 and above, you will need this place-on-the-tongue-and-wait technique all that much more to truly receive the precious gift such chocolate has to offer.