I was in the department store David Jones on a sweltering 39C day and, in air-conditioned comfort happened to ‘find’ myself in their gourmet food hall’s chocolate section.
Admittedly what attracted me initially was the similarity to those Hotel Chocolat type of slabs that lucky Dom always gets to try – the mixture of dark and milk swirls in a home-made-looking splodge appealed to my eyes as well as my tastebuds.
Plus, it’s my new local – Victoria. The ingredients looked fine – sugar, cocoa butter, milk, cocoa mass, emulsifier and vanillin, but I laughed at their suggestion that the bar consisted of six-and-a-quarter 25 servings of 20g each. Then, after looking at the price tag of $13.95 for a mere 125g, their measly serves made sense – this stuff costs $2.23 for a mouthful, or $111.60 per kilogram. This is significantly more than the standard luxury chocolate, hand-made truffles, than generally retail for around $95 per kilogram.
That’s big bucks for a small block. But was it worth the price?
The smell was a very sweet one when freed from the strong plastic wrapper and I was encouraged by the description as ‘Belgian-style coverture chocolate.’ Coverture is essentially good quality chocolate that is favoured by chocolatiers because it melts quickly and has at least 32% cocoa solids. The cocoa solids weren’t specified in this block, probably because it was a mixture of milk and dark.
There was no satisfyingly snappy ‘thock’ sound when I broke off a chunk, but I’m prepared to allow that the summer heat was more responsible for this than the freshness of the product.
In my mouth, the chunk was decidedly creamy and it was the milk chocolate stood out as the key note flavour. This surprised me, until the dark asserted itself. Sadly, the dark had a distinctly unpleasant ‘cooking chocolate’ taste to it that jarred unflatteringly when compared to the sweet and superior blend of the milk. Instead of being a nice pairing, the dark actually ruined the bar for me and this would not be one I’d ever buy – or pay such a price for – again. In fact, I don’t think it would stand a chance against faithful stalwarts like Cadbury or Nestlé either.
Moral of this story – Pretty, Local and Pricey doesn’t necessarily equal Delicious, Decadent or Deserved.
Here’s something a little unusual, and certainly one up on the sweet cigarettes we used to have as kids. One hundred grams of dark and milk chocolate with a praline filling, made by Venchi (purveyors of inedible Absinthe chocolate). Certainly the only type of cigar I’m likely to chomp on these days!
It’s actually a combination of a 56% dark chocolate outer layer, a 33.3% milk chocolate interior, and a central core of praline with Piedmont hazelnuts.
As you can see, definitely three distinct elements to this ‘bar’.
When I broke a piece off for tasting, the praline centre started to break down almost immediately, flooding my mouth with lovely milky, hazelnut flavours, and then as the dark and milk chocolate joined in I tasted good rounded cocoa flavours from both the milk and dark. The cocoa flavours come through very well, giving way to the hazelnut pieces as you finish each mouthful. The centre is quite sweet but not too sweet, and the chocolate has a good soft mouthfeel, leaving the palate clean for the nutty finale. It certainly changed my previous opinions of Venchi’s ability to produce good quality(or even edible!) chocolate.
It’s a good balance of flavours, put together very well and offered in this slightly jokey packaging. Premium quality chocolate offered in an unusual format – not the first or last time we’ve seen that on Chocablog, eh?
This was bought in Plymouth, so they are available in the UK, and I’ve seen them on sale in motorway services in Italy and France. Definitely a good pick as a gift for someone with a chocolate and tobacco addiction!
Taking a step up from the Caramel Sweethearts, we have this Valentine’s offering from Hotel Chocolat. A pink “goody bag” packed with chocolatey delights. In no particular order, we have:
“Selection of the Season” Chocolates
This small tray contains six heart shaped, soft centred chocolates. There’s two white chocolate with a raspberry truffle filling, two milk chocolate with a hazelnut truffle filling and two dark chocolate with an unidentifiable (the packaging doesn’t actually give any description of these chocolates) – but very alcoholic – cream filling. Strangely, I preferred the white chocolate one here because the sharp fruity filling cuts through the sweet white chocolate perfectly. I found the milk chocolates a little dull and the alcoholic filling in the dark chocolates was just too much.
Drops Gemstones
These rather beautiful little drops of marbled dark and white chocolate taste every bit as delicious as they look. Because the chocolate is “fused” rather than mixed up, you still get all the flavours from the 53% dark chocolate as well as the sweetness and creaminess of the white chocolate. You get a 140g bag of them here which looks a lot, but doesn’t last very long!
Strawberry Meringue Lick
A pink, strawberry flavoured white chocolate “lollipop”, embossed with a picture of doves on one side and studed with small pieces of meringue and white chocolate buttons on the other.
I know I shouldn’t, but I really loved this. It’s very sweet, but the moment you take a bite you can tell it’s made with real (freeze dried) strawberries. The meringue pieces add a little bit of crunch to the texture – and even more sweetness! Definitely one for someone with a sweet tooth!
Caramellow Mini Slab
Finally, we have the obligatory Hotel Chocolat mini slabs. This particular goody bag contains two of them – the first is a white chocolate and caramel chocolate slab, decorated with florentine and chocolate buttons.
I’ve mentioned before how much I like Hotel Chocolat’s caramel chocolate. It just gives an extra dimension of the milk chocolate flavours, and this little slab has plenty of that, along with a satisfying crunchy topping.
Rocky Road Mini Slab
Last but not least we have this milk chocolate slab, decorated with chocolate chip cookie and puffed rice.
Yes, this is chocolate decorated with a cookie that has been decorated with chocolate. That’s a lot of chocolate! I have to admit that after ploughing my way through the rest of the Goody Bag (on my own!) a few nibbles of this was about all I could manage. It’s delicious and crunchy, but at a total of 460g, I was starting to feel a little full by the time I got around to this one.
Overall, this is definitely a gift for a girl who loves pink and has a particularly sweet tooth. It’s not the most sophisticated Hotel Chocolat offering I’ve ever tasted, but it’s fun and tasty. And pink.
I went through the chocolate stash, and put a challenge to the family today: “Here’s your choice, now what will we pick to taste today?” Oldest son has been nagging for months to try the Lindt 99% that we found in Germany. Today he won.
Bear in mind we lugged this around Europe for weeks before getting it safely back to Australia, a mere half a world away. It’s then been safely stashed in the fridge to avoid the hot Australian summer. And before anybody says “What – keeping it in the fridge?” – yes. It’s a tip from Kath that seems to work fine. It sure avoids the destruction of a nice chocolate left in a hot house for a week – as we found last year when we turned 4 blocks of Lindt 70% into a dry, crumbly, whitish powder. Yuk. So the fridge is good.
As you will see from the back of the pack, there is information and ingredients listed in just about every language apart from English. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it’s best stored between 14 and 18 degrees (Doh!), Also that the 99% is achieved from Cocoa mass, Cocoa powder, and Cocoa butter.
The surprises don’t end there. A chocolate must be awfully serious when the inside packaging is firstly, a serious plastic tray, and secondly, comes printed with serious instructions!!!
On that inside packaging, we have a graph showing intensity vs time, with separate lines for Cocoa aroma (steadily rising), bitterness (rising quickly, then very slowly increasing), astringency (bouncing around), acidity (rapid early peak, then falling and rising slowly) and finally, fruitiness (very slow rise). This all seems frightfully scientific. Doing my best with a rough-and-ready translation:
Recommendations for the tasting
Excellence 99% is an exceptional high-cocoa chocolate with an intense cocoa flavour. The full flavour is made up of different components which unfold differently during the tasting (see diagram above).
Experience the unique taste of this unusual chocolate: Aromatic Cocoa in its original form with an intense degree of acid and bitter notes and hints of candied fruit.
To be able to enjoy this particularly cocoa-intensive taste experience, Lindt recommends the palate gradually become accustomed to high-cocoa Chocolate, first with Excellence 70%, followed by 85%. Experience the unique flavour of Excellence 99% by using a small piece to break off and melt on the tongue. A cup of coffee to accompany unfolds the full flavour particularly well.
So after reading the instructions, doing the translation, yada-yada, the moment of truth arrived. Time to open the pack and see what’s what.
On opening, we were immediately assailed by an intense cocoa aroma. Inside we have some very small squares (bear in mind, this is a 50 gram pack), I broke a few squares off, and then broke those into smaller pieces. Whilst the family have been moving gradually to the Dark Side, they are not all content to much their way through a Lindt 70% or 85% block like I am. So I was gentle with them.
First reactions came from oldest son: “Err, tastes of nothing much”. Well, it doesn’t, at first. The flavours build, and so does the bitterness (just like on the highly scientific graph). After about half a minute, there were grimaces all around. This is just too strong for them.
The Lady of the House declared that perhaps this is one for cooking with. Sacrilege! That amounts to swearing! Looks like I score all of the rest of the block for myself.
My own opinion is far more complex than that of the family: This really is a very dark, very intense, very bitter chocolate. The flavours start slightly earthy, and then the complexity builds slowly, over a matter of a few minutes. So does the bitterness. This is truly a masterpiece – to get something to 99%, with only a tiny amount of cocoa butter and sugar to hold it all together and prevent crumbling. But it is an acquired taste, and is certainly not for everybody.
This is the ultimate for the Dark Side Dwellers. Darth Vader, the Emperor, and all their cronies would be terribly pleased. (That’s a joke, geddit? Dark Side. Oh well, try harder next time). For me, I’ll be eking it out, very slowly, whenever I need a super-dark-chocolate hit.
As far as I know, we can’t get this in Australia. It seems to be readily available in France and Germany, and in England we saw it in Harrods for a couple of pounds each.
