The Grand Chocolate Pasta Experiment

Posted here and at food_porn.

Okay, so I made the chocolate pasta after our dinner tonight. I just made a very simple dinner of cheese pizza for Lance, mushroom pizza for me.

Then, it was time to try the chocolate pasta.

First, I had to gather all the necessary ingredients:



The chocolate pasta was made in Venice. That jar on the left is chocolate honey from La Maison du Miel in Brussels. Vanilla extract is for the vanilla sauce. To the right is grated dark chocolate.

I set a pot of water to boiling. While the pasta was boiling (which only took a few minutes), I made vanilla sauce (halved the recipe).

(I didn't photograph this bit because I only have 2 hands. I needed to constantly stir the sauce and check on the pasta simultaneously.)

Once the pasta was draining and the vanilla sauce was almost done, I melted the honey in the microwave for about a minute (it's very thick). I poured the pasta from the colander back into the pot. I added the vanilla sauce, and I tossed to coat the noodles.

Then I divided the pasta up evenly between two bowls.

I drizzled the chocolate honey over it and sprinkled the dark chocolate shavings on top.

The end result:



Ooey gooey noodles!

(Sorry the photograph isn't very pretty...it's a messy dish.)

The sauce, I must say, was very very good. The combination of the vanilla and the chocolate honey was nice, and a good complement to the bitter chocolate pasta. It was almost a bit too sweet, though (although I think Lance was trying not to stick his face in the bowl to lick every drop of it...he can handle things that are more cloyingly sweet). I'm not sure the dark chocolate really added anything, although it just kind of melted into the sauce anyway, so I'm sure it gave it a little more depth of flavor.

There was a bit too much sauce for the amount of pasta, though. And it would've been better if it had been thicker.

The pasta seemed overcooked. There were no cooking directions on the package, so I just had to take a wild guess. I had it boiling for 3 minutes, but I should've drained it after two. The noodles were a bit limp and soggy. And the texture is nothing like regular pasta. I tasted a noodle without any sauce, and it didn't really taste like much of anything.

Overall, I'm not sure I would make this again for dessert. I would try it with chicken mole. I still have 3/4 of the package of pasta left.