Category Archives: News

Chocolate Squared

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View from our Workshop window

“Seattle’s Historic Heart”. Pioneer Square is a cool place. It’s an area of town layered with activity, personality, and history. For some it’s a destination to visit, for others it is home. Look around and you’ll start to read things like “my beloved Pioneer Square”, and “one of my favorite places in the World”. Those are some heavy endorsements, and we feel lucky to be part of this special community.

Share the Square. Such a historic neighborhood should have a website and publication of it’s very own, and it does! Writer for www.pioneersquare.org, Hien Dang, recently spent a little time with Aaron at Intrigue Chocolate Co.’s workshop. In a piece called Share the Square with Aaron Barthel you will get an informed perspective of Intrigue’s shop at Pioneer Square. Take a vicarious visit to where the chocolate magic happens.

Chocolate Artisan’s Workshop. Impressed with the avant-garde atmosphere of Intrigue Chocolatier’s personal workspace, Hien loved the way Aaron spends time with customers, giving them the chocolate tasting tour of a lifetime. We would love to have you come visit us when you make it to Seattle. Drop in and prepare to have some great samples!

Dark Chocolate vs. Milk Chocolate: What are they?

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There are many different kinds of chocolate but they can all be broken down into two main categories: dark chocolate and milk chocolate. Dark chocolate is chocolate that has considerably less milk than milk chocolate, sometimes none at all. In the US there is not an official definition of dark chocolate, but in Europe rules state that dark chocolate has to contain at least 35% cocoa. Milk chocolate is chocolate that has more milk in it than dark chocolate which gives it a lighter color, much sweeter taste and much softer texture than dark chocolate. In the US milk chocolate must contain at least 10% of chocolate liquor, Europe states that milk chocolate must contain at least 25% of cocoa solids.

Some subcategories of chocolate are: Hershey process, Couverture chocolate, white chocolate, unsweetened chocolate and compound chocolate.

  • Hershey process chocolate is more cheaply produced because it’s less sensitive to freshness of the milk. Experts believe that this is due to the fact that the milk is partially lipolyzed, creating butyric acid which keeps the milk from fermenting. It gives the chocolate a noticeably sour taste, something that the American public has become accustomed to. Some companies simply add butyric acid to their chocolate.
  • Couverture chocolate is chocolate that contains high percentage of cocoa butter and a high percentage of cocoa. Examples of some couverture chocolate brands are: Valrhona, Lindt & Sprungli, Felchin, Cacao Barry, Guittard, Scharffen Berger and Callebaut.
  • White chocolate is a chocolate that is made out of sugar, milk, and and cocoa butter with the cocoa solids removed.
  • Unsweetened chocolate is pure chocolate liquor that has been mixed with some kind of fat to create a solid substance. Often referred to as “baking chocolate”, “bitter chocolate” and “cooking chocolate”, this chocolate does not contain any sugar which is why it is used for cooking.
  • Compound chocolate is a confection that is made by combining cocoa with lots of sugar and vegetable fat instead of cocoa butter, which produces a waxy, sweet and hard chocolate. Some countries do not allow it to be called chocolate, due to the fact that the vegetable fat is used in the place of cocoa butter.


Here at Intrigue Chocolates we make only the absolute best dark chocolate.

Coffee Tasting and Zoka

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High quality coffee. At Intrigue Chocolates we use Zoka Coffee in our Zoka Moka Latte Truffle. In 1996 Jeff Babcock founded Zoka Coffee Roaster and Tea Company in Seattle, Washington. Their coffee is roasted in small batches, and the homemade baked foods keep their coffee shops packed from open to close.

Your taste buds are special. Our tongues do not have a specific taste bud lay out, it is different for each person. When we taste things the flavor is a combination of different stimuli being activated at the same time, which can actually create brand new flavors. You can even train your tongue to determine your own relationship between stimuli and taste perception. How strongly you experience tastes is due to our genetic predispositions. If you are a supertaster then coffee will taste bitter to you, but generally not if you are a nontaster or a medium taster.

Tasting coffee for a living? Coffee tasters (yes, coffee tasters are real) start their tasting assessment with their noses, right as the coffee begins to brew and its fragrance is released. They move on to slurp the coffee and swirl it around so they can get the full flavor and feeling all around their mouths. The care and attention that goes into determining coffee tasting reflects the level of intensity we put into determining flavor combinations for Intrigue truffles.

Intrigue Featured in Book

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Intrigue Chocolates is featured in a book by culinary professional, Jennifer Lewis. Published in 2010, this little number tells how to turn your food passions into a money-making venture. Starting a Part-time Food Business: Everything You Need to Know to Turn Your Love for Food Into a Successful Business Without Necessarily Quitting Your Day Job is a slender paperback volume with just the pertinent information necessary to build a small business, based on your deep interest in food. Jennifer’s premise is to give the reader examples of small enterprises, like Intrigue Chocolates, who have struggled and thrived. She sees this pattern repeated by other successful foodies turned entrepreneur: a joining of passions, highly specialized skills, and a willingness to step into the void. A risky place that puts faith in the very thing driving us at Intrigue, and the basis of this book; Love of good food.

Here’s an excerpt;

(Aaron)…experimented with some habañero chilis he’d grown and dried the year before. With very minor tweaking over the next few years, this initial creation became his signature Jamaican Hot Chocolate Truffle, inspired by traditional Mexican spiced chocolates. From that first experiment Aaron was instantly hooked on chocolate in this form. “I loved playing with flavors in combination with chocolate and using my knowledge of plants to create those flavors naturally.”

Lewis now has a second book out, titled Food On Wheels: The Complete Guide To Starting A Food Truck, Food Cart, Or Other Mobile Food Business. Both of her books can be found for sale on Amazon.com. Follow her personal blog about small food business at smallfoodbiz.com where she loves to talk about food and entrepreneurship.

February: The Month of Love

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Love has been associated with chocolate for a very long time and for good reason.

Antioxidants help keep your heart healthy and also help lower the risk of cancer. Catechins and Phenols are the antioxidants present in chocolate. Catechins are Polyphenols that have been shown to slow the oxidation of other molecules that produces free radicals that can set off a chain reaction and create cancer cells. Also, Catechins have been found to help lower blood pressure, which lowers the risk of heart complications (can lower risk of cardiovascular disease by 37%). However, there are hardly any antioxidants in milk chocolate, so if you love antioxidants, eat dark chocolate (like Intrigue Truffles!). Flavanols also increase the blood flow to the brain which decreases the risk of stroke (can lower risk of stroke by 29%) and in a study has been shown to make your brain process things quicker.

  • Studies have also shown that dark chocolate helps fill you up which helps regulate how much you eat.
  • According to a British Medical Journal, chocolate consumption can help you live up to a year longer. Heart attack survivors that ate dark chocolate were shown to live longer than those who didn’t.
  • Phenethylamine is another compound found in chocolate. So when you eat chocolate it triggers the release of endorphins which make you feel good.
  • Anandamide is a compound in chocolate that activates the same brain receptors as marijuana, which helps you to relax.

And those are some things that Intrigue Chocolates can help you with!