What we have here is a couple of single origin bars from L’Amourette from San Francisco. Both of these bars are made with Venezuelan beans and both are 75% cocoa solids, but one is a Caranero variety bean and the other is a Rio Caribe. These are both unflavoured bars, but L’Amourette also do a variety of flavoured bars as well.
As you can see, the bars have a distinctive moulding, with a pleasing curved effect to the chunks and a nice glossy finish.
I tried the Rio Caribe first. It has a nice, deep aroma, and the first thing you notice when you bite into a chunk is that it has a surprising sweetness. The flavour builds as the chocolate melts, with some rich earthy notes, but not a great deal of complexity, although I did pick up some fruity notes toward the end.
The chocolate has a very smooth texture and it melts evenly and slowly. The chunks are a little big and difficult to break if all you want is a small piece, but once you do manage to break a chunk in half, it’s quite nice to let it melt slowly on the tongue.
The Caranero has a much lighter flavour, with less of the earthy, more bitter notes of the other bar. It has a more complex and delicate flavour, with a bit of woodiness and some flowery notes. This one is very easy to eat.
Both these bars demand to be consumed slowly. At 75%, they’re not bars you can eat quickly anyway. In terms of quality, they’re not the finest of the fine, but they are very interesting – particularly if you can get both varieties and do a little comparison yourself.
They’re not available to buy online at the moment, but according to their website they are available at a number of locations around San Francisco, and if you’re further afield, drop them an email and I’m sure they’ll be happy to help.
Now here’s something a little bit special – chocolate made from Criollo beans harvested from trees which can be traced back for almost a thousand years, making them genetically about as old as it’s possible to get. As it says on the box lid, ‘pure and wild’, and the ten pieces of chocolate in this rather lovely (and very Scandinavian looking) box are about as pure as you’re going to get, being made of nothing more than cacao and sugar. It’s also worth noting that this chocolate won a Silver at the Academy of Chocolate Awards in 2011.
Before you get to the chocolate you are presented with a fact sheet. As I unfolded this rather extensive piece of paper I was reminded of Ordnance Survey maps or old record sleeve inserts – the thing just kept expanding! It tells the story of the meeting between Rasmus Bo Bojesen and Marcela Baldivieso and the subsequent exporting of beans from Bolivia and the benefits to local villagers. You also get a few reviews and some artwork to enjoy while you lift the lid and admire the neatly arranged, individually wrapped 5g tablets of chocolate that await your pleasure.
So how does the grandmother of all cacao taste, I hear you ask? My answer would be ‘chocolatey’. With a straight 70-30 split between cacao and sugar the first taste is sweet, and then as the chocolate melts the depth of flavour from the beans unfurls over your palate. The smell of this chocolate hints at fruity, hazelnut flavours, and this is largely borne out when tasting. There’s a good dose of red berries in there, with a light, floral top note that lingers to the finish. The mouthfeel is slightly grainy but not in an unpleasant way. Think of it as part of the earthiness of the overall taste experience. The finish is woody with a hint of spice, and very pleasant.
That said, I do think that for a premium price (and believe me, this is a premium chocolate) I would have expected more from Oialla. When I said that it tasted ‘chocolatey’ that’s what it does. There are flavours lurking in the depths, but they never really get to burst forth in the way that manufacturer’s like Duffy Sheardown seem to do. If I were looking to pay top price for chocolate I would expect something impressive, memorable – exceptional, and I’m afraid Orialla didn’t quite come up to that standard.
Finally, here’s our interview with Rasmus Bojesen at last year’s Salon du Chocolat in Paris.
With an increasingly crowded marketplace, there are many companies who feel the need to have some kind of angle to accompany their chocolate. And in the case of Vancouver’s Zazubean, they have created what they call functional chocolate with all kinds of health benefits via some added ingredients. Not a completely unique gimmick, but still one that could bring in a few more sales.
The newest addition to their line-up has the rather cute name of Cheeky which doesn’t tell you much about what to expect although the picture of the monkey is a little more informative. And the bar is actually a nice dark 70% with banana, salted toffee and some maca thrown in for good measure. Maca? I had no idea but the Zazubean website tells me that it is a Peruvian root vegetable which is good for alleviating stress, fatigue and depression. Fair enough.
The chocolate itself is actually made in Switzerland from Fair Trade Organic Beans and has a lovely robust flavour. In fact, is almost a little too full-bodied for the other flavours in that it immediately dominates and doesn’t really give the banana or toffee much room to manoeuvre. But slowly the subtle banana begins to reveal itself and then lurks in the background without ever getting close to overwhelming.
And even the addition of some pieces of banana chips doesn’t ramp up the banananess of it all to that potentially dangerous level – they provide more texture than flavour. The many little chunks of toffee, on the other hand, give bursts of flavour and plenty of crunch too. I didn’t really sense much of the salt that was supposedly through the toffee and that’s a pity because when it was there, the salt really did add another dimension.
So I liked this quite a bit, despite the subtleness of the flavours. Or more likely because of the subtleness of the flavours. I’m not sure that I really got any of the stress relief it promised and it didn’t wake me up more than any caffeine-laden chocolate did but I would never buy a bar of chocolate for those reasons. As a simple bar of chocolate, its unique flavour combination delivered for me and that is all that matters to me.
Creative Confections by NADC is a new company from Scott and Kristin Berg. Since they informed me that the packaging for the truffles they sent me isn’t necessarily permanent, I will put my focus on the truffles themselves.
There are six in all, with flavor labels on a rather pretty piece of paper. All except for the Plain truffle have color swiped on top; the Orange is the only of these that doesn’t also include a little shine. I rather wish it did as the effect of the colored shimmer enhances a metaphor of truffles as jewels. It also lets the truffles, in their simple molds, sit with a pleasing combination of handmade and elegant.
In the green is a Rosemary truffle; its ganache is very smooth and very meltable, and its flavor is light. It’s more like a minty accent than a strong herbal element. Contrarily, the red Cabernet Sauvignon has quite more pronounced of a flavor, but still in a balanced way.
Painted orange, the Balsamic Caramel strikes up curiosity. Inside the chocolate shell is a free-flowing caramel, so this isn’t one to split into many small bites. The bite the balsamic vinegar gives is not entirely what like the presently-popular salt does. Yet tasting both balsamic vinegar and sweet caramel molded together in one flavor is disconcerting at first. I can’t decide from just one chocolate whether this taste is intriguingly innovative of unappetizing; however, the mere question has made it an interesting experience.
The Raspberry truffle is another nicely-balanced one, with the richness of the raspberry, which tastes true, fitting well into the ganache. The Orange truffle turns out to be one of the orange chocolates I’m fairly content with, perhaps because it is almost more fruity than orangey. The orange flavor is pronounced without necessarily being strong.
I ended with the truffle that probably ought to have been the first, the Plain one. The colors and flavors must have gotten me too excited to start with it. In any case, this simple, nice truffle exemplifies the smooth ganache all of these have (excepting the Balsamic Caramel, of course). The chocolate shells are all quite thin, which works with the style here. It adds to the delicate, laid-back effect. Since the chocolate is light in flavor, I wouldn’t put it higher than a mid-range cocoa percentage. This is one of the factors that make these truffles all too easy to keep eating, including the Plain, whose melting I rather lamented.
This is a nice start for Creative Confections. There are some classic flavors, but also a willingness to experiment. The balance of sweet and rich, with neither crossing the line, could mean a wide appeal. Neither am I sensing fillers or artificial taints. I can see this company coming to carve out its own niche.
