Mast Brothers Black Truffle
This was always going to be an interesting bar for me. Just how do you marry together the flavours of fine chocolate and something as earthy and powerful as black truffle? Well, those Mast Brothers have done just that with this 74% dark chocolate bar, adding a pinch of Maine Sea Salt as a counterpoint to Italian black truffle..
Have you ever eaten black truffle? If you have then I’m sure you know how strong a flavour they have. Not something one would necessarily associate with fine chocolate, but of course if someone like the Mast Brothers offer it as part of their range you know it’s going to work. The origins of the beans in this bar remain a mystery, which is the case for almost all of the Mast bars, and it’s a little strange given that if you take one of their factory tours you are presented with the whole range of beans they use in their bars and allowed to taste each individual variety. When it comes to the bars themselves though, no information is given about which beans were used in which bar, and in what quantities.
I would have been surprised if the first flavour had not been the black truffle. As the small rectangle of chocolate met my tongue, that deep, earthy flavour sprang out at once but it was only the main flavour for a few short moments because as soon as the chocolate began to melt balance was achieved. The rich, mellow flavours of the chocolate (kicked up a notch by the additional sea salt) flooded my mouth, pushing the earthiness of the black truffle back and delivering deep fruit and wood notes with that sweet & sour combination holding up to the last. The truffle is there to the 9Long) finish but it’s never allowed to get out of hand, being held in check by some fairly powerful cacao.
How did I feel about this bar? Personally I liked it a lot. I might even go as far as saying it’s one of my favourite Mast Brothers bars, but I’d be hard pressed to say it was an absolute favourite. It’s certainly unusual, definitely ‘grown up’ chocolate, and absolutely worth tracking down if you like your sweetness tempered with a little salt and some dark, earthy flavours.
Information
- Buy it online from:
- OldFaithfulShop.com (US)
- Contains dark chocolate (74% cocoa solids).
- Filed under mast brothers, salt, truffle, us.
I bought a bar of this when I went over to NY, I’ve got a review of it coming up soon..I agree, it is delicious, and may be one of my top bars up there!
Sounds like my sort of chocolate bar – love truffles, love salt in chocolate, love dark chocolate altogether!
What I find so amazing & fascinating about chocolate are the different viewpoints on it. For example another site wrote this about this bar:
The dearness of it all: Chocolate & Black Truffle (Tuber melonosporum), add salt.
King of the fungi… the stuff of gunfights, thefts, fraud, mysterious disappearances of hogs & highly trained dogs.
Brillat-Savarin called truffles the kitchen diamond & this bar just cuts them into pulverized dust, then hydrolized in an acid bath in a kind of culinary ‘blood diamonds’.
Fantastic beginning falls prey to a flawed but well-intended blueprint: deploying Madagascar cacáo’s brightness to counter those earthen ground truffles which pose a natural choice due to their own inherent chocolate flavor. (Unclear whether these hail from their ancestral grounds in & around Var & Perigord, France, or of the “summer variety” which come from Northwest USA).
An inauspicious cacáo crop of ripping acidity (seen in full view from Mast’s Madagascar 72%) offers far too much contrast, compounded by ham-handed blatancy with the truffles / salt, & the whole contrivance clashing about with the dexterity of a truffle hog trying to play drums by mostly hitting cymbals.
Just about any other origin at the moment (save for Ecuador) would complement & harmonize this to a greater degree.
A bar best suited for jaded souls who’ve had enough of the purist chocolate pursuit & need to head in a renewed direction: pairing cacáo with anything & everything they can get their mitts on like stinking cheese & fat salamis between swigs of Bordeaux.
I recently blogged this one myself (mine had prettier gold blue wrapping 😛 ) and must admit that it didn’t float my boat as much as I’d hoped it would. I think this was due not only to the musty strength of the truffle, but the acidity of the chocolate itself, whereas I prefer earthier, woodsier chocolate. Funny thing is (and admittedly it wasn’t a huge testing panel I tried this on), I found that men seemed to love this one and women found it a bit too “stinky”, tastewise.
Oh dear.
This was like licking a pigs armpit.