Here we have another beautiful looking chocolate bar from Rózsavölgyi Csokoládé. The Hungarian bean-to-bar chocolate maker has some of the best packaging around, and this bar is no exception.
Unwrapping the simple paper band (featuring a boy riding a cow!) reveals the wonderful black-and-white print box, featuring cocoa pods and foliage. The bar inside is simply wrapped in wax paper, and features a perfectly moulded, intricate pattern. The experience of opening a Rózsavölgyi bar alone makes it worth the asking price. And we haven’t even tasted it yet.
Something else that I noticed was that there don’t seem to be any salt crystals on the bar itself. Most salt flavoured bars have the crystals simply sprinkled over the surface as the chocolate is setting in the mould, but here they appear to be in the chocolate itself.
The salt is certainly there. Bite into a piece of the rich, smooth 40% milk chocolate and the tiny salt crystals make themselves known. There’s the perfect amount of salt to lift the flavour without overpowering the chocolate itself. It has complex, nutty, liquorice notes, but it’s mainly just a delicious milk chocolate.
It would be very easy to eat a whole bar of this in just a couple of minutes, but it’s worth taking your time with it and savouring every small piece.
This bar has quickly earned a place as one of my favourite milk chocolates. I think Duffy’s 55% Ocumare still takes the crown, but this is another one you simply must try.
It’s available from Selfridges in London or to buy direct from Hungary via the Rózsavölgyi website.
I hadn’t heard of Konnerup before, but they are apparently a Danish chocolatier whose products aren’t that easy to get hold of in the UK. This bar came all the way from 2beans – a coffee and chocolate shop in New York. It sells in the US for $4.95 – around £3.25 – for a 50g square, so it’s priced at a similar level to many bean to bar dark chocolates.
The packaging is nice – a simple box with great typography and a small window onto the cellophane-enclosed chocolate inside, so you can see what you’re getting. My only complaint here is that the blurb on the back is written in a cursive font in yellow on pale green and is almost impossible to read unaided. I ended up having to take a macro photo and adjust the contrast to make it out. Maybe I’m just going blind in my old age.
White chocolate and lemon are a fairly safe combination for confectionery fans. There’s nothing like a bit of citrus to cut through the intense sweetness of white chocolate. But sometimes the combination of tangy fruit and intense creaminess can be a bit jarring. Getting the balance right is key to a bar like this.
Konnerup have also opted to add something a little different to this bar – yoghurt powder. And there is a definite yoghurty flavour to it. It’s difficult to know how much of that is from the milk powder and fruit and how much is down to the added yoghurt, but the overall effect is something a little nicer than the average flavoured white chocolate.
Of course, it’s only going to appeal to you if you have a sweet tooth, and there are many who just won’t get on with a flavoured white chocolate at all. But even coming from the dark side, I found it something I could enjoy, albeit in small doses. If you love your white chocolate, this is something you’ll want to look out for.
Recently I reviewed another bar from Hawaii-based Madre Chocolate that turned out to be one of my favourite flavoured bars of all time. Their Triple Cacao bar, made with both nibs and cacao pulp is deliciously fruity and crunchy.
That bar is made with cacao from the Dominican Republic, but this Earl Grey Tea chocolate bar is the first time I’ve reviewed something with beans grown in Hawaii itself. Or if you want to be precise, the Alae Estate in Hamakua, a district in the north west of Hawaii’s Big Island.
Hawaii is, of course, the only part of the United States far enough south to grow cacao, so any bar made from bean to bar on the island with local beans is something to shout about. But it also contains Hawaiian grown tea and vanilla, so it’s no surprise that the packaging calls it a Limited Edition.
The first thing I noticed about the chocolate was that it’s both incredibly smooth and very sweet for a 70% cocoa solids bar. There’s a gentle fruitiness as the chocolate starts to melt, and then the tea kicks in. It’s more pronounced than many tea chocolates I’ve had in the past, and although it overwhelms the chocolate a little, it’s really rather nice. There’s a gently spicy bergamot finish that stays with you for several minutes. Long enough to remind you that you want another piece.
This is the kind of chocolate bar I will happily nibble on through the course of the day, rather than one that I covet and love like Madre’s Triple Cacao bar. But for uniqueness of flavour and origin, it’s certainly something worth trying.
As much as I enjoyed my visit to The Chocolate Tree’s chocolate factory a few months ago, the real test is always in the tasting. And so I made sure I left with a bunch of their bars which have been waiting patiently for my attention.
The two at the top of the pile have enough in common for them to be considered together. They are made from the same batch of Madagascar beans, except for one big difference – one has been made with unroasted beans. Everything after that is comparable: similar conching times (40 versus 45) and the end results look pretty similar too. The 70% raw bar isn’t quite as dark as the other bar which is 72%. It couldn’t quite pass as a milk chocolate, but it definitely is lighter.
The packaging is rather lovely – very thick paper, covered in colourful flowers held together with stickers that carry all the details of the bean to bar process for that particular bar. It retains that homemade, artisan feel that The Chocolate Tree are so fond of.
How does it all taste though? Well, the raw bar definitely has some of the classic Madagascar fruitiness, but without the roasting those flavours are not fully developed. And I miss that. To me, there’s something lacking even though there are some other more subtle notes lurking in the background. But it isn’t for me.
The other bar is much more to my tastes. All the berries and fruits come flooding through immediately and don’t let up even after all the chocolate has gone. This is a really, really good bar of chocolate with lots of depth, and is even more impressive considering that it is the result of some of The Chocolate Tree’s first bean to bar experiments. At 72%, it finds just the right balance between bitterness and sweetness, and it is a really easy bar to eat. It didn’t last long at all.
Good stuff, and I’m really excited to see what comes next from The Chocolate Tree.
