Sir Hans Sloane is probably my favourite chocolate company that we’ve never talked about on Chocablog (yes, there are still plenty of those!). The company is named after the 17th century physician who is credited with ‘inventing’ milk-based drinking chocolate while on a trip to Jamaica. Sloane brought the recipe back to England, where it was initially sold as a medicine, before being marketed as a chocolate drink by Cadbury in the 19th century.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of working with Sir Hans Sloane’s chocolatier and owner Bill McCarrick as part of the organising committee for The Academy of Chocolate Awards, so I’ve got to know Bill and his chocolates quite well. But I can’t think of a better subject of our first review than a drinking chocolate.
The packaging for all Sir Hans Sloane’s products follows the same simple and elegant red and white theme. Another sign of a quality product is that the label on the front not only tells me the cocoa solids percentage (55%), but also the conche time (72 hours). I wish all chocolate labeling was so clear.
Inside, the 300g tin is full of these interesting looking ‘beads’ – glossy, irregular shaped pieces of dark chocolate. Of course, being nothing more than pure dark chocolate means they’re quite versatile and you don’t have to limit yourself to making hot chocolate with them. You can sprinkle them on ice cream, or simply eat them from the tin. Which is, of course, what I did.
As you might expect, at 55% cocoa solids, the chocolate is sweet, but that just makes them that little bit more addictive. Don’t go expecting complex flavours, they just make a sweet, chocolatey snack. Eaten on their own, they might be a touch too sweet, but of course they’re really designed to be consumed as a drink.
The first thing you notice when you add the beads to hot milk is that they do take a little while to dissolve. The directions tell you to stir vigorously, and eventually the chocolate disappeared into the milk.
It’s here that you can appreciate why the beads need to be sweeter than you might expect. That little bit of extra sugar in the chocolate produces a very enjoyable, smooth and chocolatey drink. It’s really rather nice, and being made with real chocolate, there’s none of those sticky globules of powder left floating on the surface like you get with some some hot chocolates.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of hot chocolate, but I know that if I bought this, it would quickly get used up in drinks, desserts and snacking, purely because of the versatility of the beads. Recommended.
This bar was a gift from Martin of SeventyPercent.com who brought it back from a recent trip to Ecuador. Thankfully though, it is quite readily available online both in the UK and US, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting hold of a bar.
Pacari are a family owned Ecuadorian bean-to-bar chocolate maker. They use local, fairly traded, organic ingredients and produce their chocolate ethically and sustainably.
This particular bar is made with wild Andean blueberries, and lots of them. You might think blueberries don’t have much flavour, but the whole, dried berries in this chocolate are concentrated to the point that they’re actually quite tart.
Getting to that flavour isn’t easy though, as the pieces are quite hard and don’t fully release they’re flavour until you chew them a little.
The chocolate is made from local Arriba beans and evaporated cane juice. At 60% cocoa solids, it’s not the richest chocolate in the world, but that little bit of extra sweetness does work well with the blueberries. It’s a flavour that changes dramatically depending on how you eat it – let it melt slowly and the flavours are sweet and floral, but bite or chew a piece quickly and the deeper, richer notes combine with the blueberry to give an entirely different experience.
This 50g bar is all too easy to eat in one go. It’s not the most sophisticated bar of chocolate in the world, but it’s still very pleasant. And of course, it’s packed with anti-oxidants and other good things, so even if you do scoff it down in one, there’s no need to feel too guilty.
In case you didn’t already know Orion is a brand used by the Nestlé company in Eastern Europe, and this is part of their ‘Intense’ range.
I’m guessing that the reason this chocolate is branded as ‘Intense’ is mainly due to the 52% cocoa content of the chocolate, but the addition of Blackberry pieces may also have something to do with the choice of name. The front of the box makes mention of antioxidants, but the English section of the ingredients doesn’t shed any light on this. Suffice to say there are Polyphenols at play here.
What the English section does mention is that the bar contains 10% blackberry pieces, which in themselves are made up of Blackberry puree, pineapple fibres (a favourite, it seems), apple puree, ‘flavours’ and thickeners. Yum.
The bar is attractive enough – glossy, dark, chocolate with a cacao pod embossed into each square. when I slipped the bar out of the box and opened the foil there was an immediate ‘hit’ of sweet fruit with an undertone of chocolate. Notice I said ‘undertone’ – whatever’s in the chocolate certainly seems to the dominant aroma, and this is definitely the case when it comes to tasting. The first taste of chocolate – in itself fairly bland and lacking in any real depth or character – is quickly overwhelmed by a perfumey, sweet flavour. Find a blackberry ‘piece’ and bite down and it releases yet more of the berry/perfume flavour, which to be frank is quite unpleasant. It’s like a slightly bizarre floral, Turkish Delight sort of flavour which persists long after the chocolate has disappeared. It put me in mind of some of those brightly coloured ‘penny sweets’ from my youth, and I’m sure younger palates may well enjoy this, but it just isn’t something that excites me.
I’d like to see someone do something better with Blackberries. In fact, I’d love it if a British chocolatier came up with a ‘Heath & Hedgerow’ selection using berries and fruits from the UK. It would certainly show Orion (or Nestlé if you prefer) what real chocolate makers can achieve with a potentially wonderful flavour. In the meantime, I wouldn’t go out of your way to find this bar.
I’ll confess, I’m not really a chocolate spread kind of a guy, but when Sainsbury’s told me they had a chocolate spread with popping candy, I had to try it. As I’ve mentioned many times before, everything is better with popping candy.
They also sent me chocolate spreads with orange and coconut, and their chocolate chip peanut butter.
The first thing to say is that I made the mistake of leaving the jars out of the fridge. The labels do say to store the spreads at room temperature, but on an unusually hot summer day, they were perhaps a little too thin, and the chocolate chips in the peanut butter had gone a little melty! Entirely my own fault, and these are very easily spreadable straight from the fridge.
As expected, the popping candy spread turned out to be my favourite. The candy pieces are very small, not like the Thorntons Cloudy Lemonade bar I recently reviewed, where the big chunks were clearly visible. But still, they had a nice crackle to them – particularly when spread nice and thickly over bread. It is very sweet – but if you’re buying a chocolate spread, that’s probably what you’re looking for anyway.
The chocolate orange spread tastes… well… like a Chocolate Orange. I’m not a massive fan of orange flavoured chocolate, but in this case, the addition of orange flavouring does take some of the sweet edge off the taste.
The coconut flavour spread is very similar, but with the addition of tiny coconut flakes instead of orange. This gives the spread a bit of texture and a flavour that vaguely resembles a Bounty Bar.
The chocolate chip peanut butter wasn’t really my thing. While you can see it chocolate chips, you can’t really taste them. I happened to have a jar of plain old Sun Pat peanut butter to compare this with, and I much preferred that.
So I don’t think I’d buy the peanut butter, but I might consider chocolate spreads if I was in the mood for something sweet and filling. Looking at the ingredients though, I did note that they’re mainly sugar and only contain 4-6% cocoa powder.
But the one thing that might ultimately prevent me from buying these myself is palm oil, third on the ingredients list, right after the sugar and and rapeseed oil. I’ve no idea where the palm oil in these products comes from, but you can read some of the criticism of its use on Greenpeaces’s website and Wikipedia. For all I know, the palm oil in these spreads may be entirely ethically sourced, but without clear labelling, I’ve no way of knowing.
