We’ve all heard by now about chili chocolate, chocolate soda, chocolate pasta, and the like. But chocolate tortilla chips? It sounds like someone just fell off the edge from creativity to oddity, but looking at the bag, there is no hint that they aren’t an average gourmet snack.
FoodShouldTasteGood may be a long name, yet this company does try for all-around tastefulness and quality. Besides these, they make sweet potato, multigrain, and olive chips, among others. The list here is gluten free, all natural, trans fat and cholesterol free, and not genetically modified. The ingredients are limited to stone ground corn, sunflower and/or safflower oil, semi-sweet chocolate powder, evaporated cane juice, corn bran, Dutch cocoa powder, vanilla extract, and sea salt.
There are a couple of recommendations for serving these, with the peanut butter and banana slices suggestion being the only one I didn’t get to. Before we look at those, however, here’s what I thought of them plain. Ripping open the bag reveals equal measures of strong chocolate and tortilla chip smells, leaving you still wondering how they’ll taste. Their coloration is a warm brown with the sturdy look/texture speaking of their natural/healthier quality. They tasted a little odd at first. It tastes like you’re eating chocolate, but ground corn is somewhere in there also, as is the unmistakeable crunch of a chip.
I didn’t linger on the plain chips, quickly scooping up some salsa, which I found a welcome addition. You taste the salsa and feel the crunch more, with the chocolate’s slight sweetness acting like the accent a mango or peach salsa might have. Only difference here is that it’s coming from the chip, not the salsa.
The vanilla ice cream combo I wasn’t so fond of. At first it was okay — ice cream on a chip instead of a cone, but then I felt I could taste the corn in the background and found it too odd. But let’s not leave out the feedback I got on this: “I think this is so yummy”… it would be fancy after a Mexican meal. So maybe the dessert option is “cooler” than just doing chips and salsa.
Lightly heating them (restaurants usually heat tortilla chips, after all) brings out the chocolate flavor more, perhaps taking away potential oddness. I also tried hot sauce (which I personally liked more than with salsa) and black beans — that one works seamlessly, the flavors just connect.
Day one of eating them I was convinced you just had to have the taste for chocolate tortilla chips. Day two finds me happily eating them right out of the bag, glad to discover something new and worth it. So I’ll close with another feedback quote: “What’s better than something salty, crunchy, and chocolatey?”
This is the second of the handful of Zotter bars I picked up in Vienna, and possibly the most unusual in terms of title/flavour. A little research reveals that Uzbekistan is something of a fruit producing country, and the Golden Cherry is one of a number of fruits exported from there. Obviously the packaging designers decided that people in Uzbeki costume carrying giant cherries would be the best way to illustrate this. Who are we to argue?
Physically, the bar is identical to the Butter Caramel bar I reviewed recently, and it has the same Organic/Fairtrade pedigree that all Zotter bars seem to have. Cracking it open and having a peek reveals this;
As you see, the bar is composed of the same ‘base layer’ of cocoa and nuts, with the cherry element sat atop. A quick taste confirms that tis is indeed the same stuff as the Caramel bar, but with a layer of slightly tart cherry preserve in place of the caramel. Although the cherries have been marinaded in cherry brandy, there’s not really a great deal of alcohol present in the overall flavour. It tends to come in at the finish as the warmth of your mouth releases the alcohol vapour. The cherry flavours are well pronounced, with the nutty/cocoa taste of the base layer getting a bit more of a look in this time. The almonds are much more obvious, siting well with the fruitiness of the cherries. It’s unlike most of the cherry/chocolate combinations I’ve tried in that the fruit seems to sit alongside the chocolate and other elements rather than dominating proceedings, which is what tends to happen, particularly with cherries. It’s also less sweet than the Butter Caramel bar was – a plus in my world.
Although these bars are obviously factory produced (and sold at a premium) it’s the quality of the ingredients (and the wacky flavours and gorgeous packaging) that push up the price. However, you get what you pay for, and what you get from Zotter would seem to be top quality ingredients put together by someone with an adventurous palate and a healthy disregard for convention – you only have to look at the photo of a smiling Mr Zotter drenched in chocolate to realise that!
Zotter bars can be had by mail order in the UK – expect to pay a little over £3.00 a bar (plus postage) though, and that isn’t really too much over what I paid for these in their country of origin!
Three week’s after Hotel Chocolat’s Christmas launch, Thorntons held their own Christmas event yesterday, showing what they’ve got lined up for the festive season.
Held in central London, just around the corner from the swanky Hotel Chocolat apartment, this was a very different affair. Thorntons clearly wanted to have a bit of fun with their Christmas launch and decided to hold it in a pub – complete with santa, a couple of elves, carol singers and a snow machine. Obviously, they weren’t taking this entirely seriously, which was fine by me.
The timing of the event was a little unfortunate – being held on a Thursday afternoon meant it wasn’t really suitable for the average blogger who has a day job. As it turns out, I think I may have been the only blogger who managed to sneak an invite, which is a shame as the Thorntons people are always friendly, sociable and willing to talk openly about what they’re doing.
So what of the actual chocolate? Of course, the Christmas range itself is exactly what you’d expect form Thorntons. There are such delights as milk chocolate santas on sticks, advent calendars and chocolate Christmas decorations, but as with the Hotel Chocolat launch, it wasn’t the Christmas themed products that caught our attention.
Perhaps the most interesting news for me is that the hugely popular solid chocolate blocks are going to be available in “teeny tiny” and “huge humungous” sizes (those probably aren’t the official names, but they should be). The small 69p blocks are particularly interesting to me, as they’re not much more than people pay for cheap chocolate in the newsagent. There’ll only be a limited range on sale to start with, but if they’ll be a hit and the range will expand quickly.
I also got to try a new range of rather tasty cookies, and I’m hoping to get hold of some for my lunch review soon. All I can say for now is that they go rather well with white wine…
We don’t often post links to random videos here on Chocablog, but when Ed David got in touch to share his video about Brooklyn’s finest, Mast Brothers, we thought it was such a beautiful piece that we wanted to share it. Thanks, Ed!
