Gianduja, for the uninitiated, is a mixture of chocolate and hazelnut paste. It’s sometimes sold in blocks (great for creating delicious desserts), used as a filling for individual chocolates, or as in this case, simply cut into small squares and served in its pure, unadulterated form.
These individual gianduja squares are made from Piedmont hazelnuts and Hotel Chocolat’s 50% Island Growers “Dash of Milk” chocolate which Simon has already reviewed and loved.
As you can see, they’re very simple looking affairs. As with the rest of The Purist range, the emphasis on the quality of ingredients, rather than weird and wonderful presentation.
Cut through one of the squares with a knife and you’ll see that this is simply a solid block of gianduja. It’s soft and smooth all the way through.
And it tastes wonderful. I’m not the world’s greatest fan of hazelnut, but this I really enjoyed. The texture is incredibly soft and smooth (particularly on a warm July day), and the flavours are perfect. The initial creamy, nutty flavour soon gives way to a more intense chocolate hit.
Even though these little blocks are 45% hazelnut paste, all the chocolate flavours still come through strongly. If anything, the texture of the gianduja enhances the flavour of the chocolate, as it melts much more quickly and evenly in the mouth. This stuff is Nutella for grown-ups. Highly recommended.
I’m going to be honest with you. I won these in the tombola at East Finchley Festival. I didn’t buy them, and Cadbury certainly didn’t send us them. Because they never send us anything.
I’m not really a breakfast bar kind of guy, but if something containing chocolate finds itself in my possession, I feel I have a duty to write about it. So here we are. A chewy cereal bar with raisins, and half dipped in milk chocolate.
Being Cadbury, the milk chocolate also contains nasty vegetable fat, and although it doesn’t give a cocoa solids percentage, it looks and tastes like Dairy Milk, which would put it at 21%.
The cereals in question are oats, bran flakes and something called “crispy cereal”. I have no idea what that is, but frankly, that alone makes me wary.
The whole bar has a sticky, shiny finish to it, but I’m not entirely sure what it is – the ingredients list is slightly too long for a mind as small as mine to decipher.
So before I’ve even tasted this bar, I dislike it. It’s full of junk and packaged to look like a healthy snack but is packed full of unnecessary junk.
But… it is kind of tasty. It’s crispy, chewy and tasty. The chocolate is thin, but there’s enough of it to know that it tastes Ok and does actually add something to the bar. And I ended up enjoying it.
But it wasn’t very satisfying, and I actually stuffed my face with three of them during the course of this review and still felt hungry. In the end, it simply served as a reminder as to why I don’t eat cereal bars. I’d much rather eat proper, fresh foods and have great quality chocolate separately, rather than trying to convince myself that a chocolate coated cereal bar is somehow going to do me good.
A while back, I went on somewhat of a European long weekend road trip sort of thing through Spain and France. On the Saturday, we drove all day and ended up in the rather scenic town of Dijon. The next day, we were surprised and delighted to find an open supermarket (on a Sunday? In France?!). While shopping for the obligatory mustard, bread and cheese, I found a little shelving unit with a bunch of what I assumed to be locally produced jams and conserves.
I was eyeing up the different jars and trying to figure out what all the names meant when one of them caught my eye. While I wasn’t at all sure about most of what the label said, there was no mistaking one bit of it – chocolat noir. Jam with chocolate in it is not something I’d personally come across before and after searching the Chocablog archives and reading the review of the Chocolat Factory Pear & Chocolate Jam I was certainly curious. My experience of French food told me you can’t really go wrong with French produce. Isn’t it actually illegal to serve a bad meal in France? It certainly seems like it!
I bought the jar put it with the rest of my French food shopping and then obviously forgot all about it.
Recently, I found it while tidying up the kitchen and decided to open it and try some. A bit of online research revealed the company, plus the ingredients, so I was ready for action. Being the purist that I am (OK, I’d actually ran out of bread), I tried it with a spoon.
It was a completely unexpected flavour, but very delicious. You can’t taste the coconut at all (which could be disappointing for coconut fans, though I wasn’t bothered), but the apple and chocolate flavours blend remarkably well.
What we have here is essentially very fruity, but not overly sweet apple jam. It’s not actually got a very strong apple flavour. Think of more solid, delicately flavoured applesauce streaked with dark chocolate that gives you the occasional rich chocolatey hit. Apparently they add dark chocolate chips to the jam, but obviously they don’t look anything like chips by the time the chocolate is over.
I’d be curious to see how this jam would fit in with recipes that call for more traditional apple or fruit jam. I found the flavour quite surprising, if not outright odd (in a good way!), as the texture and look of the jam would imply your standard jammy taste, but the taste is decidedly chocolate-sauce infused at times. I think it may actually increase with time (or closer to the bottom of the jar).
The company’s website says they do a few other chocolate-infused products and I’m keen to try them all now.
Mood foods have redesigned, rebranded and re-invented their range of Ombars, one of which I reviewed last year. The 2010 models are completely different though, with the cocoa content up to 60%, and a new sweetening agent in the mix.
Mood Foods have gone for coconut sugar as their choice of sweetener, which is something of a novel choice. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the various fruit sugar alcohols (malitol and xylitol for example) and the move towards agave syrup as a more natural sweetener.
Well coconut sugar is (according to the blurb on the wrapper) recognised by the Food and Agriculture Organisation as the most sustainable form of sugar in the world. Mood Foods also chose it for its soft caramel taste. It’s not a raw food but does have a very low glycemic index, and according to Ghandi (yes, that Gandhi) “It is a way to solve the world’s poverty. It is also an antidote against misery.”
Maybe Butler’s – ‘Purveyors of Happiness’ – should look into it?
So our new and improved Ombars have new packaging. They also have new ingredients, and a new look. The bars are much simpler in design and in the case of the ‘fruity’ ones at least, the chocolate is infused with the fruit ingredients. I had the new Acai and Blueberry bar, a Goji berry bar, and a Cranberry and Mandarin bar.
My original review was of the Acai and Blueberry bar, and I have to say that this bar is still very much about the berries. Lovely sharp citrus flavours from the combination of blueberry and acai hit you at once, with the raw cocoa sitting underneath the fruity explosion. If you want to taste the raw chocolate and coconut sugar, then this isn’t necessarily the bar for you. The berries win every time – not unpleasantly so, but the chocolate is a definite second fiddle.
The Cranberry and Mandarin bar (not pictured) is a different story. The dryness of cranberries sits well with the soft, subtle citrus flavours of mandarin, allowing the dark cocoa flavours to join in the mix. As the raw chocolate melts, the combination of the two fruits is allowed to develop in tandem with the cocoa, delivering a well balanced mouthful. Being raw chocolate, it melts quickly and leaves ther palate clean and refreshed. I found this one particularly enjoyable.
The Goji berry bar actually had a couple of the berries floating around in it, which came as a surprise. Like the Cranberry and Mandarin bar, the flavours here were much more muted and allowed the chocolate room for expression, as it were. The Goji berries were there as a subtle fruit hint rather than a kick, adding a little tang to the chocolate but never overpowering.
Of the three I’d have to say that I liked the acai and Blueberry the least, and that’s only because the berries were just so, well, there. The chocolate came second to the other ingredients, and that’s not really what chocolate bars shoiuld be about. Of the other two, I’d be hard pressed to pick a favourite. Both have excellently balanced fruit/chocolate elements, and with the only difference being the fruit part, it would have to come down to personal preferences.
The Ombar people are also a little nervous – some of the blurb on the inside of the wrapper is a request for feedback, so if you do buy one, be sure to let them know what you think.
