Dr Kiki Sanford explains the science of chocolate. Like you didn’t already know:
This video comes from the Food Science video podcast which is great fun and educational too. For more of Dr Kiki, check out her blog, or you can see her on Revision 3’s Pop Siren.
(And if you’re reading this, Dr Kiki, Chocablog could do with a North American correspondent!)
Pure Flavour make a similar sort of chocolate to our Chocster-winning friend Emma Jackman from Conscious Chocolate, and oddly enough it was another Emma who sent me a couple of bars to review. Spooky huh?
The ingredients are remarkably similar to Conscious’ dark chocolate – all natural, all healthy, all yummy – but the bars are somewhat larger, and as you can see, they come hand wrapped in sellophane.
In a little experiment, I tasted this bar on it’s own with a clean palate (and thoroughly enjoyed it) and than after I’ been eating ‘ordinary’ chocolate (well, as ordinary as a posh choc lover can get!). The second time of tasting was quite remarkable. Having eaten some ‘normal’ chocolate, the difference in texture and flavour was immediately noticeable. This raw chocolate melts incredibly quickly and has a slightly grainy texture. The flavours are bittersweet, rich and dark, with good citrussy top notes and an underlying butter and dark cocoa taste. It’s remarkable how clean the palate is after a taste of this stuff. It disappears almost completely, leaving the mouth feeling fresh and without any feeling of ‘coating’ that you sometimes find with other forms of chocolate.
I still say that this is an acquired taste. It’s very different from chocolate as we tend to perceive it, but in a really interesting way. Also, bear in mind that raw chocolate like this is actually good for you. Organic, pure raw ingredients not only taste great, they are incredibly healthy as well. Win-win!
As ever, handmade, small batch, organic, raw products like this come at a premium. Having said that, I’m willing to bet that eating something like this twice a day could impart some serious health benefits.
I’d recommend trying this. It’s odd at first but every time I eat raw chocolate I definitely feel as though I’ve ingested something that’s doing me some good. Give it a go and support your local chocolate weavers!
This was another gift from my friend Paola. The last gift she gave me was the Chocolate Cellar’s Rose ‘N’ Chilli Chocolate, so I think she may have a thing about roses (or she’s trying to tell me something!?!). But I enjoyed the Rose ‘N’ Chilli chocolate, so I was looking forward to this.
The first thing I noticed about this organic, Fairtrade chocolate was that it was sealed in plastic. Even the wrapper notes that this is “currently non-recyclable”. I find this more than a little odd for an organic fair trade chocolate bar, and there’s no real need for it in this day and age.
That aside, and once I’d managed to break my way through the plastic, this turned out to be a wonderful bar of chocolate.
As you’d expect, it’s a solid milk chocolate bar, with rose oil in the chocolate itself. The milk chocolate itself is obviously made with quality ingredients. It’s deliciously creamy and chocolatey. The rose flavour is subtle but makes a real difference to the bar. Each little chunk tastes like a piece of Turkish Delight as it melts in your mouth.
I recommend breaking off a single chunk and letting it melt away slowly. It’s a wonderful refreshing, summery taste.
The one thing I did notice was that my brain was expecting a chilli hit which never came. I don’t know if that’s because I was conditioned by The Chocolate Cellar’s bar or if this M&S bar is actually missing something. The flavours are all so soft and subtle that it doesn’t really give you a satisfying chocolate ‘hit’. It would be quite easy to eat this whole bar in one go waiting for that hit to come. Luckily I have excellent self control. *cough*
I know there are people who actively dislike “rose” flavoured chocolate (often caused by being forced to eat bad turkish delight as a chilid, I find). If you’re one of those people, you may not like this. But you should still give it a go – it might just change your mind. It’s one of the nicest milk chocolate bars I’ve had in a long time.
Cocoa Farm have been shyly lurking on our local South Australian Foodland supermarket shelves and decent ‘cellar door’ wineries (such as Penfolds, home of Grange) for a wee while now, but have not been launched or advertised with any fanfare I’ve been aware of. Instead it was the packaging and the flavours that sounded intriguing: Shiraz wine chocolate and Mango, Lime and Chilli ‘no added sugar’ dark chocolate. Luckily too, Cocoa Farm is the only chocolatier in Australia that grow their own cocoa as well as make the chocolate. In fact, they’re the only cocoa bean growers in Australia.
That’s all very nice you’re thinking, but what about the chocolate? Fellow Chocablogger Simon has already covered the Shiraz Wine Chocolate which is a divine mixture of dark and milk chocolate with a cocoa content of 38% and actually does contain 11% Shiraz grapes and a non-specified amount of shiraz wine.
However, we had a second block (hopefully the first of many) to sample: the ‘No added sugar’ Mango, Lime and Chilli.
I am always skeptical about ‘no added sugar’ chocolate because it is precisely the sugar that complements the bitterness of the chocolate. In addition, after reading through the list of ingredients, I had no idea what ‘Maltitol’ or ‘Malic Acid’ was. After my fingers did some walkin’ good old Wikipedia informed me that Maltitol is a Sugar alcohol used as a Sugar substitute. It has 90% of the sweetness of normal table sugar and is used to replace sugar because it has fewer calories, does not promote tooth decay and has a somewhat lesser effect on blood glucose. As for ‘Malic Acid’, Wikipedia explained that it originated from isolating apple juice a couple of centuries ago and is now the source of tartness in sweet foods such as Mega Warheads and of course, Mango, Lime and Chilli chocolate.
Well perhaps I asked too many questions because it tasted just like Cocoa Farm’s normal dark chocolate and nothing fake or engineered as I dreaded. As Love Chunks commented, “I can taste all of the ingredients.” That might be because the chocolate also has lime and chilli oils in it as well as pureed mango. It results in a very unique taste that almost had me believing I was eating a healthy fruit bar. The chocolate is the first to dissolve, leaving behind the fruity, chewy remnants of mango and chilli in a refreshing finish (never did I think I’d use the word ‘refreshing’ to describe a chocolate). As such, it would partner up quite well with a chilled glass of champagne or sparkling burgundy. Bottoms up!