Rustika Dark Chocolate With Figs

Posted by in Chocolate Reviews on October 23 2008 | Leave A Comment

Another Slovenian offering, again courtesy of BeeBee, and again slightly unusual. The combination of figs and chocolate isn’t one I had come across many times, and this bar was made up of just that – fig pieces and chocolate. Yep, no fancy blending, mixing or special filling creation here; this is a bar of chocolate studded with pieces of dried fig.

It is of course the same 70% blend as the Cedar sap bar I reviewed some time ago – a very pleasant chocolate with a great mouthfeel and a good set of vanilla/cocoa/coffee notes to tease the palate. It softens quickly, releasing the little chunks of fig. Being dried fig, it does take a little chewing to get the flavours out, but it’s well worth the effort (and of course once again one has the option of playing Squirrel Cheeks with the bits and saving them for after the chocolate).

This sort of chocolate bar has me in a quandary. The combination of flavours does work very well, but faced with some of the stuff that chocolatiers like Dolfin manage to come up with, where ingredients are blended to produce subtle, complex flavours this might come across as a little inelegant. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who love ‘chunky’ chocolate. Whether or not this would appeal depends entirely on how you like your flavours delivered. Personally I rather enjoyed chewing my way through little fragments of fig as they blended with the chocolate. The pieces were small enough to mix well and large enough to mean that they did actually deliver their flavour before the chocolate had all melted away.

The whole fig and chocolate combination seems to be particularly European. I now have a number of fig based chocolates in my possession, and the nearest geographically would have to be Skellig’s entirely too moreish Baby Figs. One would hope that British chocolate makers would cotton on to this possibility and offer us something new, but I suspect it will be a small chocolatier rather than one of the big companies that comes up with something first.

Information

You might also like...

Leave a comment




Chocablog: Chocolate Blog