Time for another offering from James Chocolates, and this time we have some rather interesting looking caramel chocolate discs with vanilla and sea salt.
The thing that intrigued me most though, was that ‘Great Taste Gold’ award logo on the package. I’ve not been that keen on the sweet 60% dark chocolate I’ve tried recently, so I wondered if this milk chocolate could really warrant such an award.
Inside the fancy pink and purple box, we have this little stack of discs, sealed in plastic. Open the bag and you’re immediately hit by the delicous aroma of vanilla. It’s like sniffing a big bowl of ice cream. Yum.
The discs themselves are very simple affairs. Solid chocolate, about 4cm across, flat and round, with a slightly dull finish, and a soft snap.
And they taste, really, really nice. Of course, being a caramel milk chocolate, they’re quite sweet, but the chocolate is very similar to Hotel Chocolat’s caramel chocolate which I just can’t get enough of. It’s smooth and creamy with a slightly burnt edge to it, and every so often, a grain of sea salt that serves to enhance all the flavours. It’s clear that a lot of thought has been put into the balance of flavours here – much more so than I’ve seen in other James products.
It’s all too easy to get carried away and eat the entire 100g bag of these very, very quickly. Really, they need to be shared with a friend over a horrifically slushy movie. Or broken up and sprinkled over ice cream. But for the time being, I’ve had to hide the bag from myself, as I know they’ll be gone in seconds if I leave them lying around.
Want to win some?
Update: This competition is now closed!
Having told James how much I liked these, the man himself has offered to give a couple of boxes to Chocablog readers. If you want to be in with a chance to win one, you can enter in two ways. You can:
- Leave a comment on this post. The comment can say anything, but make sure the email address you enter is valid so we can contact the winner.
- Retweet this post on Twitter.
You can enter both ways if you like, but please, no more than once each per household, and this giveaway is open to UK residents only. I’ll pick a winners (one each from Twitter and post comments) on Tuesday May 4th.
The long summer here in southern Australia is drawing to a close. Days are getting shorter, temperatures are coming down, warm clothes are being found, and the rains have come to a dry country.
Here where I live, when it rains, by crikey it rains. We don’t get “English Sunshine” hazy rain, we get short but intense downpours. We’re a long way from the tropics, but at this time of year, the rain is very similar to a tropical downpour in Hong Kong, or a summer storm in Greece. Ka-whooompa! And then 15 minutes later it’s all over and done with.
On a cool Autumn morning – waking up to the sound of rain, eating breakfast watching the rain, then the clouds rush by, and then marvelling at the bright sunshine – thoughts most assuredly turn to chocolate.
My most excellent friends at Menz – makers of the venerated and extremely moreish Fruchoc – have another little goody: The Cherrichoc.
Imagine a fairly unevenly formed ball of dark chocolate, and buried inside the intense, slightly bitter, slightly marzipan glace cherry flavour normally associated with the cherries used in a Black Forest Cake. The centre is not quite as soft as the label might lead you to think – but chew through that and there is a huge whack of flavour.
Although these come in a fairly tacky plastic bag hung on a hook in the supermarket, the chocolate is a fairly respectable 50% cocoa solids. Surprisingly, given the flavour punch, the centres contain only 7% glace cherries (along with sugar, coconut, and other odds and ends).
Now, as luck would have it, my two teenage sons don’t like preserved cherry of any kind very much. They won’t even eat a Cherry Ripe, instead tossing them over in my direction (Oh no… what a shame!). And, to make matters worse, the Lady Of The House does not much go for dark chocolate.
That means this little pack of goodies are mine, mine, all mine!! Mwah-ha-ha! Soon world cherry domination shall be mine!
Oh… where was I? Oh yes. I get the whole pack and don’t have any obligation to share. What a shame.
If you like Fruchocs and cherries, try these. Seriously yum.
Here we have another offering from Läderach, a company whose products I found in abundance at Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport. This particular bar offered me another take on grapefruit (my previous experience being grapefruit and chilli) paired with lemongrass – something I’d only previously tasted in fine chocolate ganaches. A glance at the ingredients (helpfully provided in five languages) told me that this was a 36% milk chocolate with ten percent grapefruit crispies (whatever they are) and 0.1% lemongrass flavouring. Interesting.
If you look at the photo of the chocolate carefully (click to enlarge it), you may notice a certain grainy, dappled colouring to it. This is the ten percent ‘crispies’, which are basically small crystals of sugary grapefruit flavoured stuff that, once the chocolate has departed, clump together into a sweet, sticky lump in the mouth (if you suck all the chocolate out of the mixture carefully). I’m not sure where the lemongrass figured in all of this – possibly to tone down some of the rampant grapefruit flavour, I don’t know – but for me this was all about the grapefruit. The chocolate didn’t really stand a chance in the face of that acid, tart rush that comes as soon as it begins to break down in the mouth. I could have been eating any old rubbish and it wouldn’t have mattered a bit as far as taste went.
It often surprises me when a company produces a chocolate bar that doesn’t allow the consumer to actually taste the principal ingredient – i.e. the chocolate itself. Either the chocolate maker has lost the plot and forgotten that they’re supposed ot be producing something that tastes of cocoa, or the quality of the chocolate is so poor that there’s a perceived need to mask it with stronger flavours. The other Läderach bars I’ve tasted have, on the whole, been pretty good, which makes this a bit of an anomaly.
Sorry Läderach, but on this occasion I’m afraid it’s a big ‘Nein’.
SeventyPercent.com is a web site for the hardcore chocolate lover. They devote their lives to tasting, analysing and talking about every intricate flavour and aroma of dark chocolate, in much the same way as wine tasters do.
I’ve always been a little wary of people who take their chocolate that seriously, but last week I took the plunge and went along to one of their tasting sessions. And not just any session, this was their advanced level Connoisseurs Club tasting.
Although I regularly get together with friends to taste chocolate, I’ve avoided events like this in the past. My main concern has been the simple feeling that analysing flavours in such minute detail takes some of the sheer joy out eating chocolate. I’m all for learning about the distinctive flavour characteristics of Madagascan beans and how the farmer and chocolate maker influence the flavours at each stage of the process, but I’ve never really believed that listening to someone reel off a list of Jilly Gooldenesque adjectives would aid my appreciation.
So it was with a mixture of excitement and nervousness that I made my way to the Scotch Whisky Society in Farringdom for this session organised by SeventyPercent’s Martin Christy.
Luckily, there were a few familiar faces in attendance, including our old friends Louise Thomas and Jennifer Earle, so I didn’t feel entirely out of place. Jennifer had brought back some samples from her recent trip to Madagascar, so that formed the main theme of the evening.
But we started off with a 70% Jamaican chocolate from Amedei, comparing individually wrapped squares to the bar form. The two had noticeable differences, with the bar form being more buttery and having a little less flavour than the squares.
We then tried two varieties of Fresco ‘prototype’ chocolate, also Jamaican, for comparison, neither of which were as good as the Amedei.
Next up, we tried a Tobago Cocoa chocolate from Pralus, and a couple of stone ground chocolates, including the Taza 70% that Deanna reviewed last year. The connoisseurs in the room scrunched up their faces in annoyance at this, while others – myself including – enjoyed it for its candy-like sweetness and texture.
Later in the evening, we got to Jennifer’s selection from Madagascar, which was complemented by a couple of bars Martin had brought, and the Hotel Chocolat Madagascan bar I reviewed last week. Unfortunately, some of Jennifer’s chocolate hadn’t survived the journey home particularly well, but there was a good selection. The star of this part of the evening was Jen’s tupperware box of raw beans that she’d picked up off the floor. They really were rather good.
Finally, we got the chance to try some Theobroma Grandiflorum – a relative of the Cacao tree (Theobroma Cacao) that produces the chocolate we know and love. This was a bizarre substance that somehow managed to mix the qualities of chocolate, a burnt fry-up and a little bit of engine oil, in a single chunk of weirdness. An interesting taste, but for educational purposes only.
And that really sums up the evening for me. There were several points in the evening when I marvelled at other people’s ability to describe flavours I could barely detect, but at the same time it wasn’t something that I felt the urge – or the ability – to do myself.
There’s absolutely no doubt that this was a lovely bunch of people who love their chocolate, and despite the constant urge to shout “IT’S JUST CHOCOLATE!” throughout the evening, I found myself having a thoroughly enjoyable time. And you know what… I think I’m going to do it again.
