So Christmas is over, VAT has gone up and the weather is still dreadful. What better time to pop into an Aldi in search of potentially tasty bargains? On this occasion my eye was drawn to this interesting looking little wallet which was home to eight of these little slabs of dark chocolate.
The chocolate is 56% cacao and contains only four ingredients (and no colourings or preservatives), so it’s proper stuff. Remembering Dom’s recent review of a similarly salty chocolate, I decided to go choc side down first, then choc side up. Chocolate side down allowed me to have a taste of the cacao before the saltiness took over. It’s quite smooth, not too bitter, and has a good mouthfeel. There’s enough sweetness in there to balance well with the salt, and once the roasted almonds join in it’s quite a tasty little mouthful.
I was actually quite surprised at just how different the ‘choc side up’ tasting was. There’s a lot of salt/nut flavours, and the nut pieces insulate the chocolate from the heat of the tongue, meaning that it’s quite some time before the chocolate begins to melt (although this does require a degree of self control). This is evidently not the normal way to eat chocolate, but it did mean that my third tasting allowed me to differentiate the flavours and gauge their balance, and I have to say that for supermarket chocolate, it isn’t half bad at all.
Of course you could buy something similar made from much higher quality ingredients in small batches, but considering that this is relatively ‘pure’ chocolate that won’t break the bank, I’d say it’s definitely worth a go. They’re cheap enough not to be a luxury but tasty enough to impress.
The East India Company is probably not be a name you associate with chocolate. In fact, it’s probably not a name you associate with anything much in the modern world. In the past, it controlled entire subcontinents, but now a reborn company has set it’s sights at the more modest fine food market.
With a shop in London’s Conduit Street and an online store selling teas, coffees and sweets, they seem to be taking expansion a little more slowly this time.
They have a small range of their own bars, and they sent us this sample to review.
As you can see, there’s a fair number of peppercorns on there. Enough to make me a little cautious when breaking off a piece. The look immediately reminded me of Hotel Chocolat’s Pink Peppercorn bar, although I have no idea who makes this one.
So how does it taste?
Well, rather peppery, frankly.
Even when carefully sampling a piece with no peppercorns, the overwhelming flavour is pepper. It’s not overly hot (despite the fact there’s also chilli powder in the chocolate), but the pepper still does a very successful job of obliterating most of the chocolate flavour. It’s not horrible, it’s just something that I think will appeal more to pepper lovers than chocolate lovers. If there are such things.
This isn’t something I would buy, and it’s really more of a novelty item than anything else. Admittedly it’s a very pretty novelty item, but at £5 for an 80g bar of chocolate, I do think you’re paying for the name and the illusion of history more than anything else. For that price, I’d like to know the origin of the chocolate I’m eating – and to be able to taste it.
The family and I are travelling around the South Island of New Zealand. Naturally, when in another country there are many things to do: places to see, countryside to look at, and food to taste.
Much to the amusement (disgust?) of the family, I’m also interested in ducking into supermarkets and checking out what’s available as the chocolate-of-the-masses for our friends across the ditch, this being what the Kiwis call a 3½ hour flight from Australia over the Tasman Sea.
Exhibit 1 is a Whittaker’s Cashew nut bar. Most of the Whittaker’s range is available in Australia, but I’ve not seen the Cashew nut before. It seems like some of the Whittaker’s range is not exported, including the dark squares placed on the pillows in a hotel we stayed in, and which was especially yumbly.
In New Zealand, Whittaker’s is available absolutely everywhere. I found this Cashew nut bar in a roadside shop where we stopped to buy apples. It’s milk chocolate with whole cashew nuts. I scoffed the whole lot down before noting the cocoa percentage – a web check shows it at 33%.
This is a sweetish rich chocolate; Cashews have a pretty mild flavour at the best of times,
and they are really a bit drowned out by the chocolate. Pleasant, and very easy eating but I would not walk over broken glass for it.
Supermarkets everywhere in NZ sell Cadbury chocolates, a great many of which are made in New Zealand, including varieties not available elsewhere. But because we expect a certain standard of Cadbury, I’ve concentrated more on other things.
My next sample is the “Trade Aid” organic dark chocolate with orange. This fair trade range seems to be widely available in NZ, I saw it in quite a few places. According to the pack this is made in Switzerland for an importer in Christchurch. It is 58% cocoa, with all manner of ethical sources listed for the cocoa beans, sugar, and so on.
I found this one in a New World supermarket one evening while looking for breakfast things for the following day: Must have priorities right. This is a pleasant chocolate, with a couple of things I think could be better: the orange is very subtle and you’d struggle to pick it if not told it should be there. It also seems to have a slight harshness to the flavour. It’s kind of grown on me but I have had other middling-dark chocolates that are better. Pleasant, but not exceptional.
Next up, I had noticed Richfields chocolate in a few places – all sugar free and containing that thing that can cause “trouble” if eaten in excess. Not interested.
Then in a Four Square supermarket at Franz Joseph Glacier, I found Richfields Dark 70% with Kiwi fruit; I subsequently saw this in a number of other places.
What could be more Kiwi than chocolate with Kiwi fruit? The tourist trinket and junk shops all think so too, selling some other brand of Kiwi-fruit chocolate with pretty pictures on the label, at tourist-shop prices.
This is very rich, a chocolate to eat in small quantities. The Kiwi fruit part seems at first to be over-rated, and I can’t even tell its there. But the chocolate has a richness and unusual complexity of flavour compared to many other 70% blocks. My guess is this is the Kiwi fruit doing its thing. I could easily eat too much of this. Of course, coming in a massive 250g pack for about NZ$4 makes it pretty good value as well. Subsequently scoffing of a bit more confirms: this one has to be my pick of the bunch, really pleasant and very good value for a mass market product.
And finally – the New Zealand equivalent to the venerable Muesli Bar: energy food to keep a weary traveller fuelled up.
This is the Naturally Tasti Choc and Peanut Nut Bar. It tastes better than it sounds. So much so that I commandeered the whole boxful and told the rest of the family to go find something else for themselves. The chocolate is only compounded, but when they call this a nut bar they are not kidding – there’s loads of nuts, a generous slathering of chocolate. It’s not excessively sweet and the chocolate / peanut / gooey-binder-stuff go well together.
These are very pleasant, and I could easily eat too many. If I could find these back home, I’d buy them because they’re really good.
Information
- Contains dark chocolate, milk chocolate (33, 58, 70% cocoa solids).
- Filed under cashew, dark chocolate, kiwi fruit, milk chocolate, new zeland, orange, peanut, whittakers.
Another little souvenir of a trip to Europe, where marzipan seems to be much more popular than it is here in the UK, particularly in Germany, which is where Niederegger have their factory. As you can see, these chocolate coated marzipans are modeled on three different desserts (‘Himbeer’ being Raspberry). There are nine pieces in the box (three of each flavour), and they’re not small.
Each piece is made up of a dark, bittersweet chocolate coating (50% cocoa) or milk chocolate (33% cocoa) surrounding a marzipan sweet which has been filled with the appropriate ‘dessert’. The chocolate coating isn’t that substantial, but the filling makes up a fairly decent proportion of the finished product. Unfortunately only one of the three fillings was actually chocolate based.
The bottom line with these really is how much of a marzipan lover you are, as it’s the dominant flavour throughout. Unfortunately it’s not one of my favourites (I’m one of those people who leaves the marzipan when eating Christmas Cake) and not even the brightness of the raspberry or the depth of the extra chocolate filling in the Chocolate Mousse sweet could soften the taste of the marzipan sufficiently for me to really enjoy these.
Unless you’re a marzipan lover (and I know that such people do exist) then I’d have to say that if you fancy some dessert-themed confectionery, you’d be better off tracking down some Lindt Petits Desserts bars. Indeed, two of these flavours are available from the Lindt range (and to my mind taste a lot more like the thing they purport to imitate).
