I’m a notorious chunk hogger when it comes to pint-sized ice creams. Not only do I spend ten to fifteen minutes arduously selecting the perfect Ben and Jerry’s flavor for the night, I also mine the chunks out of the ice cream before anyone else has a chance to get to them.
People often ask, ‘why don’t you just buy a chocolate bar, or some chocolate covered raisins, or some nuts?’ This misses the point. Chunks are delicious because they’re covered in slightly melted ice cream, because they are cold and consequently have a great snap, because I appreciate textural diversity, and because it is like digging for treasure in the Mayan jungle.
Chunk love is not reserved solely for ice creams. Cookies, brownies, baked goods in general, and chocolate bars are also fine places for chunks.
Berkshire Bark: chocolate bars with colossal, honking, no-holds-barred chunks. My friend Betsy and I discovered them at the annual Chocolate Festival in Chelsea last autumn. We’d been taste-testing almost every type of chocolate offered – French, Japanese, New York, California, Belgian – when we teetered across Berkshire Bark’s booth, where they were serving up big chunks of chunky chocolate. The Chocolate Festival was Berkshire Bark’s coming out party; they were about to release their chocolate bars to the market. Betsy and I were immediate fans. We tried every kind. We gave them as many thumbs-up as we had (four).
Skimp is quite definitely not in the Berkshire vocabulary. Every piece had boulder-sized hunks of cranberries, roasted cashews, candied ginger, macadamia nuts, crushed coffee beans, dried mango, homemade caramel, all glued together with silky chocolate.
Big hit. Big… chunks.
