White chocolate with thyme? What an odd choice for a flavour combination. Obviously, it was therefore my first choice for a chocolate bar to bravely pick up on our trip to Belgium. I do love white chocolate and I’ve had my share of herbal and spiced chocolates – cinnamon, cardamom, pepper etc. – but never something quite as unusual as thyme. Growing up in Israel, I’m accustomed to a somewhat heavy use of thyme in cooking, though I usually use it in salads and roasts and not as part of a chocolate dessert.
So what did my €5’s worth of handcrafted chocolate bar taste like?
The white chocolate itself was very rich and creamy, almost a mere two or three shades away from thick clotted cream. It was sweet, but not too sweet.
The thyme was peppered randomly throughout the bar, making each piece I broke off slightly different. Some had quite a lot of thyme and some had very little, with the majority being in between the two extremes. You could definitely feel the thyme in every piece and it was a core ingredient of the overall taste of the bar.
The initial flavour combination could only really be described as “intriguing” – is it sweet? Is it savoury? It is herbal? Is it all those things? The thyme definitely added a refreshing, savoury kick, but I didn’t find it overwhelming – the sweetness and thyme-ness seemed perfectly balanced, making the bar very palatable indeed.
I couldn’t quite decide what I felt about this bar but I knew one thing for sure – it was really rather moreish. I felt I needed another piece to accurately describe the flavour, then another, then another. Before I knew it, the whole thing was gone. Oops.
While this bar is somewhat out there on the chocolate flavour combination range, I would certainly recommend it. It’s offers a very interesting combination of flavours you’re not likely to come across all too often.
The geeks in the audience may find the idea of ‘Ubuntu Chocolate’ mildly amusing, because “Ubuntu” is best known as the most popular flavour of the Linux operating system. The word is Zulu in origin and roughly translated means ‘togetherness’ and the concept of being connected to others. So it fits quite well with the concepts of free, open source software and as it turns out, ethically produced chocolate.
I bought this bar and a ginger bar (review coming shortly) at the Ubuntu stand at the Taste of Christmas show the other week. It’s a 60% dark chocolate with orange essence, cloves and nutmeg. As far as I can tell, the beans come from Ubuntu’s own cocoa farm in Sri Lanka, although that’s not made entirely clear on the packaging or their web site.
At 60%, the cocoa content isn’t that high and it’s fairly sweet, but the overwhelming flavour is that of the cloves, and I think that’s what will put many people off this particular bar. As Simon discovered in his review of Cukrček’s Clove & Rosemary bar, clove is very much a love it or hate it flavour.
Personally, it’s just a little too strong for my liking. The orange and nutmeg flavours are still there, and initially the chocolate has a pleasant taste not unlike a nice mulled wine, but as the clove flavour builds, it just becomes too strong – and then it hangs around long after the other flavours are gone.
I’m looking forward to tasting the ginger bar because that’s one flavour I just can’t overdose on, but this one was just a little too… clovey… for me.
It’s been a while since I had my hands on any of what we might term the ‘more unusual’ chocolate (Paul A. Young’s Sandalwood bar being a recent exception) so when I saw this in Berlin I just HAD to buy it. Curry, coconut and banana in white chocolate? How would they pull that one off, I wondered? It’s certainly not the sort of combination to spring immediately to mind is it? (Well, unless you’re in student accommodation, it’s 3am or so and you’re suddenly seized with creative hunger).
We’re not told the cocoa content of this particular bar, but in the light of the other ingredients it really doesn’t matter. As you bite into this chocolate you begin to appreciate that 4% is quite a bit. Sweet chocolate and dessicated coconut release their flavours, and a hint of bnana creeps in. It’s only towards the end of the whole business that you begin to ‘get’ the curry. It’s subtle at first, but eat a couple of pieces and wait a minute or so. As I breathed out I caught a whiff of turmeric and a hint of spice. A couple of squares later and the curry flavour is in full effect, mingling with the lighter, fruit flavours to create an interesting and not unpleasant blend of sweet and spice.
This is the sort of thing I’ve come to thing of as ‘surprise’ chocolate. It’s the “Here, try this. You won’t believe it.” sort of chocolate that people ask you about from time to time. It’s a potential answer to the “What’s the weirdest chocolate you’ve ever tasted?” question. Not unpleasant, well balanced and well executed, but there’s no way you’d hunt this down as a regular nibble, is there?
Full marks for ingenuity and boundary-pushing though. I can think of a few people I’ll be offering this to in the coming days.
Eggnog chocolate. I’ve never personally come across it, so I was rather intrigued by the idea. It’s a weird drink that I’ve grown fond of. I let my curiosity win out over an unsatisfying look at the ingredients list. The filling in particular is stuffed with unpronounceable names. It didn’t exactly raise my spirits, either, when I found that the bar is made by the very same Splendid Chocolates who make the Thanksgiving turkeys. Those turkeys had their shape to fall back on, but all this chocolate has is its name and a poinsettia wrapper. So much for novelty; it better taste good, at least, I thought.
Now, I truly believe that you can tell a lot about a chocolate by the color of its foil. This gold foil is too yellow; it spells out “cheaper” to me. Set it aside and you have a thick bar that breaks into five chunks. The white eggnog filling looks just as frightening as I’d imagined: a gooey, watery, pasty mess sitting inside the chocolate. You can’t pick up any smells from it, either, just from the chocolate. It doesn’t taste the most like eggnog, either. There are some faint Christmas spices, cinnamon and nutmeg, in there, but there’s so much sugar, as well. The sugar, along with the watery goo’s texture, is too distracting. The milky flavors come in more from the average milk chocolate, which is quite thick to be able to combat the goo.
I will give the bar this, it does get better as you keep eating. Tasting the Christmas spices with the sweet chocolate is nice enough. It is very greasy, though, which doesn’t work well with eating more.
As simply an “alright” chocolate, I don’t see why it should get away with costing more than another candy bar just because it’s an attempt at a novelty item. Honestly, if novelty is Splendid’s focus, can’t they do better than an okay chocolate that tastes a little like eggnog, stuck in a poinsettia wrapper?
