Daily Dose of English 51
Chocolate
Daily Dose of English 51
Intermediate
Hey everyone! My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about chocolate. chocolate, the delicious, sweet, usually, treat that is in a ton of candy and drinks and sweet things all over the world. And I quite like chocolate. I don't know if that's an uncommon thing to say, but I think chocolate is very delicious. And so I want to talk a little bit about it today in this episode. So chocolate is a pretty old food in the world because the plant, the cocoa bean, is from sort of the Mexico area, Central America, and has been consumed for a very, very long time in human history. However, in the modern times, we're much more used to it being processed down to the more, I guess, the cocoa essence, cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and then creating what we call and think of as chocolate, which is many steps away from the original plant, but it really enhances that flavor and concentrates it and brings in a couple of additional flavors depending on what kind of chocolate you're eating. And we put that flavor absolutely everywhere. It's, in many ways, the default ice cream flavor, at least in the U.S., and I think around a lot of the world. Chocolate and vanilla are the two most common ice cream flavors in all of the U.S., and you can assume that if there's just two options, those are the options. You have the choices of chocolate or vanilla. And I typically go for chocolate. However, I do really like vanilla ice cream, especially if it goes with pie or something like that, or there's something on top. However, if it's usually out and about, the chocolate is almost always better. You have to get like a nice tub of vanilla ice cream for it to really be worth it. However, I don't really eat that much ice cream, honestly. And so I don't have that much chocolate ice cream. I use a lot more chocolate chips or of a chocolate bar necessarily for baking is a common use. So making chocolate chip cookies or actually that's mostly it. I don't think I use chocolate chips for much else than that, than chocolate chip cookies, but you don't need to. Chocolate chip cookies are fricking delicious. Actually, my favorite cookies usually include cinnamon and oatmeal. And so I really like cinnamon, oatmeal, raisin chocolate chip cookies are really good. Those are probably my favorite. But I do eat a fair amount of chocolate in a bar. Not like a lot. I don't think I eat too much chocolate compared to the average person. But when I do have a piece of chocolate, which is typically in like the afternoon for a little bit of a snack of some kind, I will have just a piece of dark chocolate. I prefer darker chocolate, so 70 plus percent at least. I think the chocolate that I currently have is like 75%, 76% cocoa. Um, and so it's a lot of a stronger chocolate flavor. It's a little bit more bitter and a lot of people don't really like dark chocolate because it doesn't taste that good to them. However, I think they're wrong. I think it's very delicious. And I have a little bit of a chocolate every so often, probably every, every other day. Maybe every day, if I'm really feeling, uh, having a tough time at work or whatever, I might go get a little bit of extra chocolate. Chocolate is also really common in candy, like I mentioned earlier, and it goes, it's sort of the external wrapping for a lot of the most common candy bars, at least in the US, that I grew up with. And so that kind of chocolate is very common, but that we call milk chocolate. And interestingly, there is a chocolate brand called Hershey's, which is, uh, you, I mean, you may be, you've heard of it, but Hershey's chocolate has a very particular taste because many, many years ago it was made with, uh, milk that was let sort of spoil. Technically the milk is very safe, but they ended up making chocolate with milk that had a sour flavor to it. And then it got popular, essentially, because a lot of people like the taste of Hershey's chocolate. Most people that grew up in the U.S. have had Hershey's chocolate and don't mind the flavor. However, people that grew up outside of the United States or outside where Hershey's chocolate was popular think that it tastes disgusting. It tastes sometimes really, really sour or almost like vomit to some people, especially Europeans, because there's different kinds of milk chocolate. And so that's a bit of an interesting piece of history. that has changed the way that a bunch of people experience a flavor. Just because you get used to it in your youth is why it tastes good or normal in a lot of ways. There's a couple other foods like that, depending on where you're from, right? So another example, there's these fermented soybeans that come from Japan. I believe they're called natto. I don't speak Japanese though. And they're, they have a very, very strong flavor. They're very fermented and people that try them for the first time in their adulthood often do not like them. They think they're disgusting and they taste like something has died. However, Japanese kids often grow up just eating them normally, and they get used to the flavor when they're really young, and they learn to really like the flavor and love the flavor. Those are some pretty obvious examples because people who aren't used to the flavor are often revolted or disgusted or repulsed or they hate the flavor. But that same thing happens a lot with tons of different foods that are maybe a little more mild. So for example, lots of people in Latin America grew up eating fruit with salt or with chili on it. However, that's not a common thing in the US. And it's not like it's gross. People just don't really like it that much in the US, usually, unless they grew up eating it, because it's not something that is necessarily restricted by borders. But OK, I'm getting way off topic, though. I was talking about flavors and getting used to a flavor of chocolate, and especially Hershey's being sort of known for that weird flavor that it has. But going on with chocolate, there's a lot of other ways that we use chocolate. For example, cocoa powder is a really common baking ingredient as well as chocolate chips and shredded chocolate or whatever you wanna use it for. And cocoa powder is great for making cakes or for making things have a chocolatey flavor. If you make smoothies even, you can put some cocoa powder to give it a bit of a cocoa flavor. and make your drink kind of brownish. That's not the best use of cocoa powder in a smoothie, honestly. It doesn't look a little bit suspicious. However, it tastes really good. And then a drink that I have tried here in Mexico several times that it uses chocolate is not hot chocolate. Hot chocolate is a pretty common thing in lots of the world. It's just essentially a chocolatey beverage that is quite sweet and delicious. But here, you can find agua de chocolate, or chocolate water, is what they call it. It's based in water, but like a lot of foods and drinks are. But it is essentially a sort of cold chocolate smoothie, and it only has a little bit of sugar or sweetener, and it's primarily sort of chocolate powder. I don't really know exactly what it comes from, but it's a very chocolatey drink. It's not thick, but it has pieces floating in it, some chunks, you might call it. And so it's a little bit of a weird texture to get used to, but it's really, really delicious. And I am a huge fan of chocolate water, basically. I'll leave it there. I also want to talk a little bit about my growing up with chocolate, because we never had candy in my house. Candy was not a thing that was around. However, we still liked it. sweet treats and things. However, we wanted to have them be a little bit more, a little healthier, a little healthier instead of leaving everything up to Snickers bars or whatever. But we ended up using a lot of chocolate for that because chocolate is really good. And so we would buy lots of chocolate that was from, usually from local places that would do their own chocolate bars and add interesting flavors and create good chocolate bars. And so still to this day, a common gift from my mother is chocolate. She'll buy a nice chocolate bar and give it to me as a gift for my birthday, Christmas, whatever it is. Um, typically a nice chocolate bar in the U S is relatively large, right? It lasts a good while, but they can be upwards of 15, just $20, depending on how nice the chocolate is. And so whenever I get a really nice chocolate bar like that, I liked to, I like to savor it and let it make it last a long time. Normal chocolates, not that expensive. It does get a little bit spendy, right? It's not cheap, but it's, it's relatively affordable if you want to have chocolate. Um, and then the last chocolate, I guess, memory I want to share is a Christmas tradition that my family had of making hot chocolate every time, like the, uh, during the scene in a movie, um, where they sang a song about hot chocolate. That was not a very great description, but there's a Christmas movie that we'd watch every year called, uh, the Polar Express. And there's a scene relatively early in the movie where they sing a song that is all about hot chocolate. And so at that point, that's when we would go make hot chocolate to drink, and it was very delicious. And all we did for that hot chocolate was milk, cocoa powder, maple syrup, and I think that's it. I don't think there was anything else in that hot chocolate and it ended up really, really good. And so if you don't have any like box hot chocolate and you have those ingredients, try it or something similar. I bet it would be really good with honey or any kind of milk, even if it's not necessarily cow's milk. But anyways, I've talked enough about chocolate for today. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a thing or two about words or chocolate. And let me know down below what you thought. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
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