Zokoko is an Australian bean-to-bar chocolate maker. Unlike the Daintree Estates chocolate we reviewed recently though, this bar doesn’t use Australian grown beans. Instead, the beans from this bar are harvested wild in Bolivia, so has more in common with Rasmus Bojesen’s wild Bolivian chocolate.
First things first; the packaging. I really like it. A slick black box with an embossed logo that slides open to reveal the gold wrapped bar under a flap of card with a picture of jewels.
The bar inside the wrapper is just as impressive. It’s not the biggest in the world at 85g, but it feels hefty with seven big chunks, each embossed with the Zokoko logo. From the moment you pick up the box to the moment you put the first chunk in your mouth, it looks and feels like a quality product. It has a glossy appearance and a rich, fruity aroma that makes it almost irresistible.
One thing this has in common with the Daintree Estates chocolate is the texture. Plenty of cocoa butter ensures that glossy finish translates to a beautifully smooth mouthfeel. The chocolate melts slowly at first, taking a moment for the flavours to start to come through. When they do though, the flavours take you on a wonderful journey with caramel, tanin and red fruit notes.
It’s no suprise that this chocolate won a bronze medal in last year’s Academy Of Chocolate Awards, it’s quite difficult to put down. Unfortunately it’s not very easy to get hold of outside Australia yet, but if you speak nicely to the Zokoko people, you might be able to get hold of some. It’s worth it if you can.
This little bar has been in my collection for a while, and it’s a bit battered and very slightly bloomed. But that won’t stop me eating it, so I thought I may as well review it as well.
Obviously for a fully accurate review, someone at Amedei would need to send us lots of new chocolate. Yes, I think that’s what needs to happen…
This bar is packed in the standard Amedei way. It’s a simple 50g bar wrapped in a deceptively large card pouch, that might make it look the same size as the 70 – 100g bars from other manufacturers that you’ll see alongside it in the shops. It looks nice, but if you don’t know Amedei or look at the weight on the back of the pack when you buy it, you might not be overly happy when you see the size of the bar inside.
That aside, Amedei is one of the best chocolate makers in the world, if not the best. Year after year they produce award winning bean-to-bar chocolate in their factory in Tuscany. Chocolatier William Curley uses Amedei chocolate exclusively in his chocolates, but this is the first time I’ve tried one of their own flavoured bars.
This is a 63% cocoa solids dark chocolate with small pieces of Sicilian almond liberally scattered through it. Those almond pieces add a nice texture to the chocolate as well as a surprising amount of flavour. The chocolate though is a touch on the sweet side for my liking and while there is a bit of fruitiness, there’s not a lot of depth to it.
It’s simple, sweet and nutty. Very easy to eat, but not the finest of fine chocolates. Not my favourite Amedei offering, but it’s one of those chocolates in my stash that I wish I’d got around to trying when it was it it’s best. Given the size of the bar and how quickly it disappears, I’m going to have to get at least two next time though.
It’s about four years since Chocablog reviewed it’s first salted caramel, so it makes sense that high street retailers would catch up at some point and start to produce their own versions of this contemporary (and hugely successful) combination. Now I’m not a regular shopper at M&S, so when I did happen to find myself in one of their stores, I thought I’d have a quick look at their current chocolate offerings, and when I saw this I thought it would be fun to give it a go. Obviously this is never going to be competition for some of the amazing salted caramels we’ve reviewed over the years, but M&S have a reputation for quality and I wanted to know how they’d approached this recipe.
Reading the ingredients list we find that the milk chocolate contains 35% cacao – a similar level to most of the better supermarket milk chocolates. I also noticed that this bar is 42% sugar – almost half of the recommended daily amount for an adult if you eat the whole bar! So it’s sweet. At this point I was thinking ‘well I hope there’s plenty of salt in the caramel’, but unfortunately the caramel to chocolate ratio isn’t particularly high so there wasn’t much chance of the filling balancing the sweetness of the chocolate.
Furthermore, the caramel itself is the M&S version of salted caramel. It’s a safe, middle of the road, polite sort of salted caramel. In other words, it’s a bit of a let down. The sweetness of the milk chocolate more or less obliterates what saltiness there is in the caramel filling, making the whole thing a bit of a let down.
It’s unrealistic to compare something like this with any hand made or small batch salted caramel chocolate, but I did expect something a little less ‘safe’. To my mind the whole point of salted caramel chocolate is to provide those lovely little peaks of flavour from the main ingredients, and unfortunately the majority of what I tasted was sugar. It is possible to grab a taste of the caramel but it’s all too brief, and the chocolate lacks any real depth or character.
Possibly the worst attempt at salted caramel anything I’ve ever tried.
The ubiquitousness of butter toffee couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I was always more than happy to eat the occasional Skor bar, but these days it is turning up in all the best chocolate shops and also in the supermarkets too. And so President’s Choice have added a tin of it to their line.
The large tin looked a lot more impressive before it was open – there’s a lot of packaging to house the fifteen or so large pieces inside. Each piece is very generously coated with pieces of roasted almonds too. So generously that the bottom of the tin is absolutely covered with pieces that fell off and you’d never know because each bit of toffee is still very generously coated. The nuts are there more for texture than anything else and despite the fact that there are lots of them, they definitely take a back seat to both the chocolate and its contents.
The chocolate isn’t anything to write home about – there’s no percentage provided but I’m assuming that we’re talking about something in the twenties or thirties. Any issues with the chocolate, however, is completely overshadowed by the butter toffee which is really good – nice chunky pieces which are rich and crunchy, just the way they should be. This isn’t a sophisticated butter toffee like those which have been perfected by the likes of Poco Dolce, this is just a big slab of buttery goodness which is rough around the edges and very easy to eat.
I definitely wouldn’t complain if someone handed me another tin right now, just in case someone was considering it.
