Dark Chocolate Engineering

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and a good engineer's breakfast, here's what you gotta eat: Chorizo sausage, 1 egg + 3 egg white omlettte, avocado toast, and instead of an orange have sliced mangos and get this - you put sriracha hot sauce _on_ the mangos.

Chocolate is okay but the dark stuff is unpleasantly bitter to me don't really like it. same with coffee. yuck.

Try it with Merlot -- IMO it's even better.

Tom P.

th Malbec wine.

Merlot lacks character. Malbec doesn't, but the character it has isn't grea t.

Shiraz is even more in your face, but you can make great wines with it.

Cabernet-sauvignon is better balanced. Pinot-noir is lighter, but you can s till make great wines with it (particularly in Burgundy and in Central Otag o in New Zealand). We have friends in Tasmania who do sell a very nice pino t noir which has won a medal or two. My cousin in South Australia doesn't d o as well - not badly, but not as well.

I do like dark chocolate - 90% cocoa solids or higher - but for me it doesn 't do anything for wine or vice versa.

Not too bad with a decent single malt either!

Some people prefer a sweet taste, which is what one obtains when replacing some of the bitter cocoa with some sweet sugar. Everyone has their own preferred balance of sweet sugar and bitter cocoa. In the distant past, my father would occasionally dabble in confectionery, mostly making chocolate truffles, (not the fungus variety). I did the assembly, tempering, and initial food tasting.

The recipe looked something like this: Note the use of bourbon instead of wine. Be sure to use sea salt (or kosher salt) as it's an important part of the flavor. Bittersweet dark chocolate should be about 70% cocoa. Mars Dove "dark" chocolate somewhat qualifies with 71% (not 50%) cocoa.

I tried to convince my cardiologist to prescribe dark chocolate therapy for my assorted heart ailments. Unfortunately, he was prepared for this and decreed that whatever benefits might be offered by the antioxidant flavonoids, they were summarily negated by the sugar and saturated fats. I countered that most of the fat was stearic acid, which admittedly is a saturated fat, but is an exception in that it doesn't raise my LDL cholesterol level. After a few more back and forths, I gave up.

Dove is a brand of fine white soap in the UK!

The only sweet dark chocolate I can think of is Cadbury's Bournville (named after the place they built as a model town for their workers).

It is only 36% cocoa solids though.

Any chocolate with

Dove is a soap here too. It's also a brand of expensive, greasy chocolate that tastes kind of like soap.

Cadbury is kind of like Hershey's, not very good stuff.

These are pretty good:

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I find chocolate engineered products have a disappointingly short MTTF.

And the cost in calories is high.

NT

Doesn't that have to be stamped by a rabbi or something? Not too many rabbis around here. In fact precisely none.

Amazing the TV adverts that claim their product is low in polyunsaturates as a key selling point, when probably less than one person in a thousand knows what that *actually* means.

I think you have that backwards, you should mean HIGH in polyunsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats are the good kind and unsaturated fats are the bad kind. Turns out it's not quite that simple though, but statistically it seems to work well enough.

Even worse is telling people to lower their dietary cholesterol. The dietary cholesterol is so much smaller than dietary fat any effect of lowering it is swamped by the saturated/unsaturated fat trade off.

It usually has to be inspected and certified. Kosher salt is somewhat of an exception. Kosher salt is large grain sea salt without the usual additives. It is normally used in meat processing to remove surface blood. The process is called "koshering" which just adds to the confusion. This should fill in the details: To the best of my knowledge, vendors of salt for meat processing get their products certified as Kosher to avoid this confusion.

Yep. So it is written, so it must be: Polyunsaturated fat is a type of dietary fat. It is one of the healthy fats, along with monounsaturated fat. (...) Polyunsaturated fat is different than saturated fat and trans fat. These unhealthy fats can increase your risk for heart disease and other health problems.

Lowering dietary cholesterol does very little. According my former cardiologist, if one manages to survive a near zero cholesterol diet, the loss in overall cholesterol is maybe 10 mg/dL. It also works the other way. My GP mentioned that in med skool, some of the students volunteered to live on a maximum cholesterol diet for a month. Eggs, cheese, and saturated fats. After a month, there was no change in the various lipid blood tests from their previous diet.

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You can synthesise your own cholesterol, and statins work by stopping you d oing that. I've been on them for years, and they do seem to work.

My two-year younger brother got diagnosed with blocked coronary arteries wh en he was 64 (about the same time that I got told that my aortic valve need ed replacement) and got a quadruple bypass with a week.

My coronary arteries got checked out during the run-up to the aortic valve replacement, and one of them was perhaps 30% blocked.

Since my father had had two by-pass operations, the first when he was in hi s sixties, and my maternal uncle had his first coronary when he was much yo unger (and by-pass operations weren't routine) I've done better than my fam ily history would lead you to expect.

My mother's brother was a doctor, and did all the right things after his co ronary, and didn't get his second - fatal - coronary until he was 82.

I was working on medical ultrasound back in 1976-79, and our machine was us ed to follow the state of the heart of a guy who had had a bad coronary, wh ich killed off enough of his heart muscle to kill him within a week.

We could see which bits of his heart wall weren't contracting when they sho uld have done. With survivable coronaries the dead bit is smaller.

There's also this myth the British are peddled constantly about how our diets are so unhealthy and we need to adopt a more Mediterranean-style one to be healthy like they are. Anyone who's lived in Spain and/or Italy will know that while fish and fresh veg does play a part in their diets, they are also huge carnivores. The Spanish with their masses of hams hanging from the ceilings of their supermarkets and butcher's shops and the Italians with their seemingly endless variety of exotic sausages. It wouldn't surprise me if the Med countries are constantly lectured by the same bunch of Globalist liars about how they need to adopt a more healthy British-style diet! You can never please these people so why bother even trying? That's the way I look at it anyway.

Cadbury is now owned by Kraft. They closed some UK plants substituted their own brown greasy gunge that they claim is chocolate in Cadbury's eggs a couple of years back. It went down as well as a lead balloon.

Hershey's is one of those products I try a piece of very occasionally to see if it has improved any. I never could understand the appeal of sweet rancid vomit flavoured chocolate but for some reason Americans like it.

Leonidas are one of my favourite Belgian makers:

Their orange peel strips dipped in dark chocolate are particularly good.

Nobody has ever suggested that the Mediterranean diet is vegetarian.

Why Cursitor Doom might imagine that it should be is a total mystery.

All of which are quite expensive, and don't form a large part of anybody's diet (unless they are both rich and crazy).

Seems unlikely. The bunch of globalist liars Cursitor Doom is wittering on about seem only to exist in his fevered imagination. He lacks the wit to ha ve invented them, but some right-wing propagandist presumably thought them up as fodder for the particularly gullible. Cursitor Doom is the only loon who has ventilated the fatuous conceit in a place where I'd get to see it

Cursitor Doom pretending to ignore his imaginary harpies.

Statins do lower cholesterol, but have side effects that prevent me from using them. Specifically, chronic back and arm muscle aches. Instead, I now take Ezetimibe (generic for Zetia) 10mg, which costs more but doesn't produce any aches so far. However, I get my best lipid test results from irregular exercise.

Your family medical history is very much like mine. Those that survived WWII died somewhat early from various cardiovascular problems (stroke, heart attack, congestive heart failure, etc). It's the result of everyone coming from a small Polish town with plenty of intermarriage which tends to promote recessive genes. Choose your parents wisely.

That sounds rather familiar. Before and after I had a triple bypass operation, my cardiologist ran an echocardiogram and later a radioactive Thalium stress test. Both can show which parts of the myocardium (heart muscle) are moving properly and which parts are dead. Both tests showed that one small section of my heart didn't move properly. I was impressed with the detail offered by the echocardiogram but not very impressed with the blurry mess produced by the stress test. I had hoped that real time 3d MRI cardiac imaging would become more popular, but probably is far more expensive than an echocardiogram: