Serious Eats: Sweets
Pink Peppercorn Chocolate: Curative or Poison?
I'm getting tired of people touting the health benefits of chocolate. I just saw a couple ladies about town ogling Dolfin's "dark chocolate with pink peppercorns from Brazil" bar. "It's dark chocolate," they said, "it's healthy." Uh, yeah, cacao is naturally high in flavanols, and most of the time dark chocolate is packed with more cacao and less sugar than milk chocolate. We all know that by now. But perhaps we have forgotten that pink peppercorns are mildly toxic—imports of the colorful little beads (not true peppercorns at all but the berries of a plant related to poison ivy) were suspended for a period of time in the 1980s by the FDA.
But just because something's bad for you doesn't mean you shouldn't eat it. I bought one of Dolfin's little 30-gram pink peppercorn bars for myself. It was good. It was, um, piquant. No adverse reactions. I'm sure there's not enough pink peppercorn in there to kill you. But I also know that there aren't enough flavanols to save you. It's just candy, people! So eat well, stop at the gym or the yoga studio from time to time, and then, by all means, treat yourself to a strangely seasoned chocolate bar on the way home. Just don't expect too much.
Emily Stone, a food writer and proprietor of Chocolate in Context, is a chocolate enthusiast, itinerant traveler, and a lover of literature who lives in Pittsburgh.