It has long been Mr. Tidbit's practice to avoid discussing grocery products he has not actually seen on local supermarket shelves, no matter how long they have been advertised, as some of them never do show up. He'd rather not deal with phone calls from people whose lives are empty without, say, marshmallow-covered cranberries. That happened in 2003, when Hershey introduced, accompanying its regular semisweet chocolate chips, a version it called Special Dark "mildly sweet" chocolate chips. He thought he saw them, he blinked and they were gone, but not before he'd mentioned them. Then came the phone calls.
Well, they're back, at the same price as Hershey's regular semisweet chocolate chips. And this time Mr. Tidbit has definitely seen them, for several weeks running. So what are they? After intensive side-by-side tasting (the sacrifices that Mr. Tidbit makes for his art know almost no bounds), Mr. Tidbit opines they are much like the regular chips, but with less of the slightly bitter aftertaste of semisweet chocolate (which some folks love). That's because the Special Dark chips include cocoa processed with alkali ("Dutch-processed cocoa"), which is darker, but milder than regular cocoa.
On its website, given the recently popular idea that eating dark chocolate will give you immortality and shiny toenails or whatever, Hershey now describes Special Dark as "the dark chocolate for milk chocolate lovers."
A jarring note As canned tomato varieties multiply, Del Monte now varies the can. New Garden Select ("more like fresh") tomatoes (petite diced or sliced) come in a glass jar with a smaller-than-average label, to allow you to see the admittedly pretty contents. (The little tomato bits look shinier than the normal canned versions because they're packed in water rather than the normal tomato juice. Possibly to make up for that, the jars also contain natural flavor.) Of course, they cost more.
AL SICHERMAN
