I picked these up in Waitrose just before Christmas as I was looking for something new to try. The simple black box managed to stand out amongst all the festive goodies on the chocolate shelf, so I thought I’d give them a try.
I’d never heard of Gü, but it’s obviously a play on the word “goo” and rather than anything exotic and foreign. In fact, when I visited the web site, they seemed to be having a lot of trouble even getting the accent characters right on their own site. I imagine this is partly down to their slightly bizarre habit of åddîng âççéñts to as many English words as they can.
Worse than that, after just a few clicks, I found myself staring at the administration screen for their online shop. Not a particularly auspicious start.
Despite the slightly naff branding and broken web site, the chocs themselves look quite nice. They’re clearly not hand made – each is a perfect sphere with a small flattened area to stop it rolling around. They’re all perfectly dusted with a precise amount of cocoa powder and each choc looks identical to its sibling.
Inside the dark chocolate (70%) shell is a liquid caramel centre. And it’s sweet. VERY sweet. The blurb says it’s salted caramel, but it’s nothing like the sea salt in Green & Black’s caramel offering. There is a slight buttery taste and texture to it, but the sweetness manages to hide any other flavours.
The chocolate itself is quite different. It has a strong dark flavour with very little sweetness, and that complete contrast of flavours is what makes these interesting. Let one melt in your mouth and you first get the lovely rich, chocolateyness followed by an intense sweetness when the chocolate breaks.
Personally, while I loved the dark chocolate, the caramel is just too sweet for me. I enjoyed the first few, but they quickly became a bit sickly. If you like your caramel extra sweet and gooey then give them a go. I don’t think I’ll be getting them again, but I’m looking forward to seeing what else Gü come up with.
You don’t come across much Spanish chocolate in the U.S., or maybe in any country, even if they are the ones credited with “discovering” chocolate. This company is named Delaviuda “Of the Widow” because after Manuel Lopez died in 1927, his widow took over their business and built up a reputation for her products. The box claims that today they are still made with “the same quality and flavor that have made them a Spanish tradition.”
The dark blue box denotes an ambiguous possible quality inside. There, you find a dozen blue-wrapped truffles. Given that they’re all wrapped a little differently, I’m assuming this was done by hand. The rustically smothered light brown balls have an instantly milky, nutty aroma. Once you break into the fairly thick 34% coating, the inside turns from solid to cool liquid on your tongue like a Lindor truffle. There I was thinking that was just a Lindt thing. The hazelnut and milk tastes are still here with the chocolate, hinting at a cinnamon presence, which is actually non-existent. They’re quite smooth, but I think the grease could ease down a bit. Unless that’s just my milk bias kicking in against all the extra dairy.
That aside, I really enjoyed these. They have a definite Spanish flavor, so they might not be for everyone if that isn’t something you like, but that was part of what won them over to me. They’re sweet and homely bits of chocolate all through.
Christmas – a time for giving. Then, when the giving is over, it’s a time for retailers to offload all their unsold stock. Yes, even chocolate gets the sales treatment.
What we have here are seven different chocolates – two white, two dark, and three milk. The milk chocolate is 35% cocoa solids, the dark is 55% and the white chocolate is white, so there isn’t any cocoa.
I thought I’d go in hard, so I started with the white chocolate Creme Brulee – a tried and tested Chocablog standard. This one promised a caramel vanilla ganache in a dark chocolate cup with a white chocolate topping studded with sugar. The caramel and vanilla flavours were really pleasant, and there was enough dark chocolate to take the sweet edge off the thick slab of white chocolate that had topped off the chocolate. It was actually rather tasty but it certainly didn’t capture the flavour of a Creme Brulee the way Lindt have.
The second white chocolate promised to be hiding a rich chocolate ganache laced with coffee. I was a little disappointed to discover that mine wasn’t finished with a coffee bean. but the photo suggested it was made of chocolate anyway. The actual chocolate didn’t really have much to offer in the coffee department. There was coffee flavour, but it was that generic, muddy flavour that suggests coffee without really giving you the true flavour.
Next up was the Lir Mystical Crunch, an oddly named confection of hazelnut and chocolate. Pleasantly soft and dotted with hazelnut fragments, it packed a generous nutty flavour combined with a creamy milk chocolate.
A square chocolate with a domino-like pair of spots turned out to be a Sweet Cinder Surprise. Gianduja and cinder toffee – a slightly unusual combination given gianduja’s velvety smoothness and cinder toffee’s somewhat more brittle qualities. The pairing meant that inevitably I ended up with a bittersweet selection of fragments to munch on as the last of the milk chocolate flavours died away.
The golden cone was home to the French Swirl – an ‘ultra-smooth’ praline. Bags of hazelnut flavour in a truly smooth milk chocolate. Still quite sweet, but very familiar flavours and done pretty well.
The first of the pair of dark chocolates (after a palate-clearing pause) was another one which didn’t match it’s mugshot. The Mardi Gras Marzipan (who thought THESE up?) should have been topped with a pecan, but mine was dotted with pieces of pecan. Ho hum.
The centre of this choc was going to be a new one for me – bourbon soaked marzipan in dark chocolate. What I found was a thin sliver of soft marzipan covered in a thick, bittersweet dark chocolate shell. The marzipan certainly had an alcoholic tang to it, but still retained a good deal of almond flavour.
And so to our finale, as chosen by me. The Raspberry Indulgent blended raspberry and caramel in a dark shell, and to my mind this ought to have been the best of the bunch.
At first bite my palate was hit by the tang of raspberry, and once my tongue found the centre, the mixture of caramel and raspberry came flooding in. The zingy, summer taste of raspberry melted away, allowing the burnt sugar flavours of the rich, sweet caramel to finish off before the bittersweet chocolate ended the tasting.
Overall, I’d say these were reasonably good. Inevitably, they err on the side of milky sweetness which isn’t surprising given that the UK are still a nation of milk chocolate lovers. These are well worth the sale price of under two pounds.
Available in Sainsbury’s until they’re gone I guess.
Sorry Dom, I’ve done it again.
Dear Dom, Kind, Mighty, Intelligent, Gorgeous and Benevolent Ruler of Chocablog…
(She must mean another Dom — Dom)
I know, I know, you’ve said it (and emailed it) before and I thought I’d learned my lesson. Honestly, I did. Well, I certainly tried to. But this time, I didn’t. You see, I found this in New Zealand and got all excited because we don’t have this flavour of Whittaker’s chocolate available in Australia.
And why DON’T we, Whittakers, hmmm? I mean this one has got it all – high quality bittersweet 62% dark rows of heaven with added cocoa nibs; those lovely, tiny, crunchy little bits and pieces that can be eaten up whilst chomping the chocolate or left in the mouth right at the very end for one final flavour kick after everything else has melted away.
You see, dearest Dom, loveypuss sweetheart loveypuss, I didn’t have the self-control to remember to stop, take a flattering photograph and then start tasting it. I just started eating it; rapidly discovered how amazing it was and shared some with Love Chunks and Sapphire who also expressed their surprise and admiration for the block and helped me keep eating. It was simply too good to put down and do anything as mundane as get the camera out.
I know, I understand how disappointed you are in me, one of your best (if not the best) chocabloggers…
(*cough* *choke* — Dom)
…admired and revered the world over (or at least in my local supermarket), for letting you down at this late stage in the game. But you need to prepare yourself because – gulp, how do I put this – it got worse.
Before you start swearing or kicking me off your Facebook Friends page or cursing me with Compounded chocolate for the rest of my days – let me explain. I was back in South Australia doing my usual weekly shop. This of course, always includes a leisurely stroll down the confectionery aisle and all of Whittaker’s lines were on sale. ON SALE Dom – what was a self-respecting chocolate reviewer to do? Buy three of course:
Good so far, right? I lined them up on my white leather armchair, took my time in getting the angle, timing and lighting just right, then tore open the top corner of each block a tiny bit – just to get a whiff and snap off a row for another photo – and, well, things just got crazier from there.
All I remember in my self-inflicted cacao chaos was that they were all delicious. Dark Ghana was grainy but rich; Almond gold was milky smooth but had good, wholesomely crunchy almonds that made it feel like a meal and the creamy milk was every bit as inviting as the simple and honest label presented it to be.
Again, I apologise. And I mean it, from the heart of my bottom.
Yours, Kath from Australia.
(You call that a review?? Sheesh. Good job we have another Australian reviewer now! — Dom)
