I found this bar in a shop selling Native American arts and crafts, making it yet another in a long list of unusual discoveries. It turns out to have been made in Brighton by someone calling himself The Chocolate Saucerer (a deliberate typo?). It’s made with fairly traded ingredients and contains 81% raw cocoa mass, which makes it possibly the highest cocoa content raw bar I’ve tried.
As you can see from the photo the bar is beautifully moulded, but also very hard to break evenly. I just chose to take this as a sign that the bar was all meant for me.
It has the classic mouthfeel of raw chocolate – very quick to melt, with a light sweetness which sits well with the cocoa flavours. At 81% I expected it to pack a serious cocoa punch, and that’s what it did, but in a raw chocolate kind of way. There’s an underlying bittersweet cocoa flavour which builds as the chocolate melts, but unlike traditional high-cocoa chocolate there’s never a sense of ‘too much’. As we’ve often discussed here, once chocolate reaches the high seventies or eighties in terms of cocoa content, it can often lose out on flavour due to the intensity of the cocoa, but I’m happy to report that Roar’s chocolate delivers without any cloying feeling, and like all good raw chocolate, it leaves the mouth feeling clean and ready for more.
I’m happy to see another raw chocolate maker doing such a good job, and very happy to see that we have yet another British company producing top notch products. If you like raw chocolate, try Roar chocolate!
This is the last of the current crop of American bars sent to us by online sweet shop Handy Candy.
I’m often wary of Hershey’s chocolate and I have to say, the name of this particular bar didn’t fill me with hope for the quality of the contents, or say much about the rest of their (presumably not-so-good-bar) range.
My expectations weren’t raised much when I opened the plastic wrapper to reveal this very ordinary looking, very thin bar of milk chocolate.
But then I turned the bar over and was greeted by a sight that was just nuts. Literally…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many peanuts in one place.
Looking at the ingredients, “peanuts” are listed in second place just below “sugar” and ahead of “vegetable oil”. Hmmm. “Chocolate” comes in fourth on the list. Given some of what we’ve said about Hershey in the past, that’s not necessarily a bad thing though.
Luckily, the overwhelming flavour of the bar is peanuts. And they’re actually pretty good and extremely moreish. If you were to force a small group of Peanut M&Ms to strip naked and run them over with a steam roller, you’d probably end up with something quite similar.
To my surprise, I ended up quite enjoying Mr Goodbar, despite initial impressions. If I were ever in the market for a nutty candy bar, but didn’t want something quite as filling as, say, as Snickers, then I’d certainly consider one of these again.
I was in my favourite shop for finding strange chocolaty things, and turned up the Wawel Gorzka Krakowska. Just the name is appealing: GORZKA! Say that a few times drawing it out. Sounds like the name of a gangster or underworld figure. The reality is less imaginative. It seems it means bitter. Ah well.
I have to admit, the packaging does get off to a good start, with nice bright colours and the silver bands give an impression of something pretty special.
This is a dark chocolate with Hazelnuts. Any chocolate with hazelnuts can be good or bad, and most of those I come across easily here are a light or milk chocolate, which is a bit on the boring side. So this one seemed like a promising and interesting change. It’s still easy to mess up a chocolate with nuts in, because it they are not fresh and crunchy the result is pretty horrible.
Opening the pack produced a heck of a surprise:
The top of the block is like the top of so many – nice and shiny, some nice patterns in. Nothing offensive at all. Not interesting either. The back though – that’s interesting. This chocolate says it has nuts in, and from the back – DOES IT HAVE NUTS ! I’ve never seen anything like it, there are a LOT of nuts jammed in here. It almost looks like the nuts have been pushed in when the chocolate was poured. Checking the pack – nuts are 17% of the total weight. It shows.
And the chocolate is a 70%. It shows.
The other thing that struck is the aroma – a rich, deep waft from the pack holds great promise for what is to come. Breaking this one up and tasting has been a sheer pleasure. The dark chocolate is rich, though not very bitter at all in spite of the name, and mercifully, not too sweet. The nuts are fresh, crunchy, and have some flavour. The combination works really well, and having lots of nuts is a really pleasant discovery. And all this for under $3!! Amazingly good value. The clever Polish folks at Wawel have a winner here. I can’t praise this enough. Mightily impressed.
It’s Chocophile time once again. The time of the week where we stalk interesting people before extracting them from their daily lives and subjecting them to intensive questioning about their chocolate consumption.
This week, we’ve been stalking Veronica Belmont. Host Revision 3’s Tekzilla, PlayStation Network’s Qore and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club The Sword & Laser.
Chocophile:
Veronica Belmont
- Occupation:
- Video Host / Journalist / Queen of the Geeks
- Web Site:
- www.veronicabelmont.com, twitter.com/Veronica
Interrogation Begins:
- Milk, dark or white:
- Typically milk, but I like to go dark when trying the more exotic flavor combinations!
- Your guilty chocolate pleasure:
- TCHO and Vosges chocolates, they have some of my favorite flavors!
- Favourite childhood chocolate:
- Cadbury Creme Eggs! I still get a bunch every Easter.
- Average Chocolate Consumption:
- I’ll probably eat a bar or two a month of the good stuff, but if I
pass a candy bowl I can’t help myself from stealing a few M&Ms!
- Fruit or nut:
- Nut!
- Crunchy or chewy:
- Crunchy
- Give or receive:
- Receive! I like getting new a different kinds of chocolates to
taste test! But giving is also fun… just not as tasty.
- Least favourite chocolate:
- Super bitter or white chocolate!
After careful analysis of the results, we have concluded that this may be our geekiest chocophile yet. We were particularly interested in her knowledge of TCHO and Vosges.
Management are contemplating recruiting this subject for an underover mission to investigate further…
