Tastings

Unless you're hiding under a rock, you've noticed that, in the days leading up to Valentine's Day, chocolate varieties flood the market. Make your Valentine's more romantic and indulgent with these gourmet chocolate-and-wine varietal pairings.

Green & Black's Organic Chocolate Peanut Bar ($3.50, 3.5 oz)
This smooth-tasting bar is a mix of milk chocolate (37 percent, to be exact), caramelized organic peanuts and sea salt. An Aussie Shiraz – for its fruit-forward, jammy notes – would stack up well with this bar. Or, if you're a fan of whites, consider Gewürztraminer; its sweet notes will contrast nicely with the sea salt.

Harry & David Bing Cherry Chocolates ($22.95, for a 16-oz box)
Embedded inside each of these double-dipped chocolate balls is a dried (but juicy!) bing cherry. Yet when paired with a festive, sparkling Rosé – such as Cupcake Vineyards Brut Rosé, $16, which has a nose of wild strawberries – the chocolate reveals a softer finish.

Diners at Le Fooding. Photo: Pabo76/Flickr

What happens when the best French and American chefs of the moment converge on New York City for a weekend of casual culinary madness, all in the name of charity?

It's called Le Fooding D'Amour Paris-New York. The two-day event took place in Long Island City, N.Y. at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and included tasting stations by David Chang (Momofuku), Wylie Dufresne (WD~50), Yves Camdeborde (Le Comptoir du Relais), Sean Rembold (Diner), William LeDeuil (Ze Kitchen Galerie), Christophe Pelé (Bigarrade) and more.

Slashfood attempted to try as many of the dishes on offer as possible, considering the long, snaking lines and lack of lighting at the outdoor venue.

Check out our photos after the jump.

Chorizo tacos at Austin's Arandas #3. Photo: Jessica S. Ralat

A whopping 69 percent of poll respondents told this recent Brooklyn-to-Austin transplant that the Lone Star State's tacos were the best in the nation and relayed some excellent suggestions. We were able to sample some 40 tacos around Austin, setting them against the closest Sunset Park, Brooklyn, counterparts we could find. Here's one taster's subjective opinion. (Austin is growing on him.)

6. Austin's Arandinas (suggested by Slashfoodies Lacey and LP) pork taco vs. Brooklyn's Matamoros cabeza taco:
Arandinas' juicy, eminently scarfable pork taco went head-to-head with Matamoros', uh, cow head -- and triumphed.
Winner: Arandinas, Austin.

5. Austin's Mi Madre's Restaurant (suggested by Jodi and others) Pork Adobado vs. Brooklyn's Matamoros Enchilada taco:
Anticipating a chili steam engine from this red-sauced breakfast taco, we instead found spiceless goop in a flour shell ill-matched to its flurry of onions and avocado slices. The slightly spicy red enchilada taco at Matamoros is still the one we hold dear.
Winner: Matamoros, Brooklyn

Four more, including the winner, after the jump.

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is the sixth in a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Early in our relationship, whenever I told my husband I was headed to a cupping, he (a coffee lover but not a fanatic like me) would imagine something, er, otherwise-related. Now that he knows cupping as a coffee-tasting ritual he might be disappointed -- or relieved -- but at least he understands why I'm a bit jittery when I come home from one.

The cupping process traces back to the 19th century, when beans were graded basically on a "yes" or "no" scale: Too many defects (like disease or mold) earned an ix-nay, while just about everything else was considered acceptable.

Today, cupping serves several different purposes: At the coffee's point of origin it allows farmers, importers, brokers and roasters to test the quality of a crop; after roasting, the roasters themselves will cup coffees for consistency, flavor profile and to detect the effects of aging; and at the consumer level, coffee cuppings are the rough (and fun!) equivalent of wine tastings, and are becoming widely available to the public.

Kyle Spencer, 23, and Xiao Yu, 24, are barely of drinking age and have been brewing beer for less than a year, but nonetheless wear their ambition, literally, on their sleeves.

"Brewing for a living is something we both wanted to do," says Spencer, promoting his nascent brand by wearing a gray, short-sleeved Beta Beer T-shirt alongside partner Xiao Yu. Despite his expert presentation, Spencer is nervous: For the first time his product will be tasted by "actual people who have beer backgrounds."

This kind of fledgling enthusiasm was par for the course at the Brooklyn Beer Experiment, a new cook-off in a city obsessed with cook-offs, part of the groundswell of our nation's craft-brewmania and a first from competitors turned co-organizers Theo Peck and Nick Suarez. "We were cook-off rivals," says Suarez, "and decided we could do this as well as anyone else could." Sunday afternoon at Brooklyn's the Bell House -- a space primarily used as a music venue -- more than 25 chefs infused their eats with beer, and local homebrewers like Spencer and Yu hawked their wares.