Sometimes we bump into deals that are just too good to pass up. Fortunately we keep a slush fund, money to be used when we find deals. So when we saw this cocao at less than half the price charged at the discount grocery store, we grabbed it.
It is very high quality, imported from Holland, for a high end bakery company in Canada, and for unknown reasons ended up in a surplus food store at a great price. It is alkalized cocao, great for baking.
It is best before the end of 2026.. It came in 2 kilogram containers, three of which are now in our chest freezer for long term storage. The contents of the fourth have been transferred to a gallon jar, and a quart jar. The quart jar will sit in the kitchen cupboard for day-to-day use, and the gallon jar has gone into the dark top cupboard in the kitchen, to be taken down to refill the quart jar when needed.
I bake with cocao at least once a week, with my Chocolate Zuchinni Muffins. That is over fifty batches of muffins a year, each using 1/4 cup of cocao, so our first opened container is going to last a long time… and then there are three more!
I used the newly purchased cocao in the muffins I baked this afternoon, the chocolate aroma was mouth watering.
These kinds of purchases allow us to enjoy high quality food, which would ordinarily be beyond our food budget, if available at all where we live.
We are highly tolerant of foodstuffs that are safe past their best before dates. So many people toss this kind of food in the garbage. Not us. Most (not all) foods are fine past their best before dates. If frozen properly they are fine for a very long time past their best before dates, usually years past.
With a chest freezer there is a danger of food becoming lost in the chaos, and sitting there for too long a period of time. This affects taste and texture, but not safety. An example is a bag of milk purchased several years ago. During the pandemic is was difficult to find lactose free milk at our grocery store, so when we found it we bought extra and froze it, for those times when it was not available. Two of the bags settled out of site in the chest freezer. Attila retrieved one of them a few days ago.
The milk in that bag had significantly separated. I added it to my coffee for a few days, but the texture was not acceptable. So I started baking and cooking with it. The texture issue was not perceptible in my baked muffins, success. I used the last of that separated milk in a batch of muffins today. One more bag of separated milk to go!
Now that we have the new canning storage shelves that Attila built, and have organized our pantry, rotating food items is going to be a lot easier, with fewer surprises.
Worldly
Weather
14°C
Date: 3:00 PM EDT Wednesday 15 October 2025
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.0 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 14.3°C
Dew point: -0.6°C
Humidity: 36%
Wind: NNW 17 gusts 30 km/h
Visibility: 24 km
Quote
“She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.”
Jane Austen
1775 – 1817