Montezuma’s Sweet Paprika & Strawberry Milk Chocolate
This bar arrived in the post earlier this week - not a sample from the manufacturer, but a gift from my sister with a note saying “I saw this and thought of you”. I do love this job sometimes.
At first glance, the packaging is quite eye catching, but doesn’t quite hit the mark on closer inspection. It comes in a nicely designed box, but the chocolate inside is sealed in cellophane. It looks cheap and doesn’t quite fit with an (apparently) organic product. Then there’s the writing on the back of the box - 5 long paragraphs about how wonderful and fluffy Montezuma’s is and what genuinely nice people they are.
That set of some major alarm bells. Any company that feels the need to try to sell itself after you’ve already bought the product is usually hiding something. Before I’d even opened the box, I’d decided that the makers probably were not wonderful and fluffy at all.
But enough of all that. How does it taste?
Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to describe how this bar tastes, because it doesn’t taste of much at all. I can tell you three things it doesn’t taste of though: sweet paprika, strawberry and, somewhat unfortunately, chocolate.
The packaging may extoll the virtues of Montezuma’s unusual ingredients, with phrases like “weird but great”, “delightfully odd” and “we never claimed to be conventional”, but there’s one key phrase that really stands out for me, and that’s “extremely subtle”.
The fact is that every single flavour in this bar is so subtle that you can barely taste it at all. The result is one of the blandest chocolates I’ve ever eaten. Think of it as Dairy Milk watered down by 50%.
The strawberry content consists of tiny flecks of freeze dried strawberry that are so “subtle”, the only way you can get the slightest hint of flavour is to let the chocolate melt away entirely first. Even then, you probably wouldn’t know it was strawberry if you hadn’t read it on the wrapper.
I cannot even taste a hint of paprika in this bar. And the 34% milk chocolate just tastes cheap. It’s not offensive tasting… it just does absolutely nothing but slowly fade away in my mouth.
I’m really disappointed by this bar. I’d had such high hopes for the flavour combinations, and I feel quite bad giving a negative review to a British chocolatier. But I’m more concerned that I have a dark chocolate bar still waiting to be reviewed. Please let it be better than this…
Posted by Dom on 25 Jan 2008 at 10:01 AM
| 2 Comments
Filed in Reviews under milk, montezuma, paprika, strawberry, UK
March 5, 2008 : 8:24pm
So you didn’t like it then??? How ungrateful!!!The ‘weird but great and delightfully odd’ seemed so appropriate for you Dom. Next time I’ll add a pot of paprika sprinkles. Hx
March 5, 2008 : 9:27pm
I’m sorry. I have to be completely unbiased.
The added paprika sprinkles would probably have helped though..