If you read my recent review of Pierre Marcolini’s Los Ríos bar, you will know how sad I was when the last piece was eaten. My sadness was tempered somewhat by the arrival of this little beauty – a remarkably similar bar from Pacari.
Pacari have become something of a Chocablog favourite in recent years, not just because of their organic bean-to-bar & social responsibility credentials but because of the fantastic flavours they have managed to coax out of their Arriba Nacional cacao beans. In fact it’s safe to say that I had very high hopes for this bar due to it being organic.
Pacari’s bars aren’t made in fancy moulds. They have an elegant simplicity which really shows off the chocolate. Slit open the foil wrap and slide the bar out and you can see the deep reddish-brown hue of the chocolate. Sniff it and there’s the promise of deep, rich flavours with hints of woody overtones, red berries and exotic fruit. Pop a square into your mouth and allow it to melt slowly and those flavours come rushing out to greet your palate.
With a good level of acidity to set the mouth watering, the flavours of the Arriba Nacional beans just keep coming. However, the flavours are a bit of a jumble, with earthy, dark notes colliding with hints of fruit, berries, caramel and a touch of roasted coffee. It has a good melt, but that is due to the amount of cacao butter used. The finish is slightly tart and doesn’t hold for as long as one might expect.
Rather than being a refined bar which showcases the Arriba Nacional bean, Pacari have created a bar which would go well with a good strong espresso or which might make a fine tasting chocolate mousse. The slightly chaotic flavours and undertones of dark bitterness won’t be to everyone’s tastes (I actually rather liked it, but did end up making a coffee to go with it) but it hints at greatness. Perhaps if Pacari work on this one a little longer it might well reach the heights of greatness that it seems to suggest.
It was all British Airways fault. Thanks to sequence of events which involved airline takeovers and the subsequent lack of flights available to Air Canada passengers within the UK that meant I ended up in Brussels. Or rather Brussels Airport. I was stuck there between flights back in March and since I wasn’t able to sleep, I shopped.
Most of it was window shopping, but it turned out that Brussels Airport is jam-packed with chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate. A wonderful selection of chocolate, both Belgian and non-Belgian. To be honest, it was hard not just to go completely nuts in my sleep-deprived state and fill the remaining space in my suitcase, but I showed some restraint and bought what could be best described as a lot of chocolate.
The Belgian bars I picked up was from a unfamiliar company to me, Corné Port-Royal, although I see they’ve already found their way onto Chocablog already. And considering the large range of bars and boxes on display, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that they’ve been around in Belgium since 1932. Alas, the majority of the bars didn’t make it back to Canada, but one managed to hide at the bottom of my case – dark chocolate with dried fruit.
It is a lovely looking bar of chocolate – nice and shiny, with lots of sultanas and whole nuts studded into the back. And there’s quite a range of nuts too – pecans, almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios making this a bit more classy than your average fruit and nut bar. The chocolate is very rich and buttery, but would be a little on the dull side if there wasn’t anything else in there to hog the limelight. It clocks in at 52% which leaves a bit too much room for sugar for my tastes, but the abundance of nuts does help to compensate for that sweetness.
There’s nothing too fancy about this bar, but that didn’t stop me from finishing it very quickly. Sometimes you just need to eat some yummy chocolate and this would definitely fit the bill if you want something nutty. I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to search it out, but between this and the other two varieties I sampled, I’d be quite happy if I was diverted through Brussels Airport again.
Potomac Chocolate is a small bean to bar chocolate company located in Woodbridge, Virginia, just outside Washington DC.
Founded by Ben Rasmussen in 2010, Potomac is a very small artisan operation, run out of Ben’s basement. But an Academy of Chocolate award and a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund new equipment mean that Potomac is a name you’re bound to be hearing more of.
This 70% bar with cocoa nibs and salt was sent to me by Lee from Chocolatiers, although according to Ben’s blog, it’s soon to be discontinued in favour of separate nib and salt bars. If you want to try this chocolate, you’ll have to move quickly.
I want to start with a word about the packaging. I’m a little conflicted about it.
I tend to love, simple, classic chocolate packaging. Bars wrapped in foil and paper are much more appealing to me than those wrapped in plastic, or even card boxes. But the wrapping here is just a little too simple for my tastes. I’m sure that’s partly down to the resources of a small artisan chocolate maker, and partly a deliberate decision to keep things as simple as possible, but with chocolate this good, I find myself wishing the wrapper sold it a little better.
Even when unwrapped, it’s a very simple looking bar – at least until you turn it over. The underside is studded with a generous helping of cocoa nibs and some small salt crystals.
The flavour is wonderful. Deep, rich and fruity. As the chocolate melts, it seems to become sweeter as the more gentle caramel notes come through. Those naturally sweet notes contrast nicely with the slightly bitter nibs and the whole thing is lifted by the addition of a little salt. With the random nib & salt placement, every piece is subtly different but equally good.
I love this bar. In fact, by the time I got around to writing about it, I only had one small chunk left. It’s the kind of chocolate that can disappear very quickly.
It’s interesting that Ben has opted to go for separate nibs & salt bars in future, as I think they work very well together in the same bar. But I know I’d love to try the salt-only version – for me, the simple flavour enhancement that the salt gives is probably all this chocolate needs. But you should probably try the whole range and decide for yourself.
What makes the perfect brownie?
It’s a serious question, and almost provoked a stand-up row around my judging table at a session of the Great Taste Awards the other week. Taking part in the awards judging is great fun, but not always easy: especially when there’s a major disagreement. Like those brownies: to me, they were absolutely perfect: dark, rich, and so gooey you almost had to eat them with a spoon.
Oh, and did I mention – there was a ripple of salted caramel running through the centre, with that almost-bitter edge from the scorched sugar providing just the right balance for all that oozing chocolate. I think you might be able to tell that I rather liked them: indeed, I was ready to nominate them for a two-star gold award, maybe even higher.
To my utter surprise, the other judges started muttering about a rather ‘undercooked’ taste. One even said they were ‘too gooey’. But that’s the whole point of a brownie, I insisted. There’s no such thing as too gooey! I’m not normally an argumentative sort, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s brownies. I even remember my first – back in nineties New York, at Eli Zabar’s EAT up on Madison, with its eye-watering Upper East Side price tag, but my god, the sheer luxury of it. Unbelievable.
In the end, I called in the Kofi Annan of the judging session, a man who just happened to have won the Supreme Champion honour four years ago for his incredible brownies, Patrick Moore, from More? The Artisan Bakery in Cumbria.
He took a bite, chewed thoughtfully, and nodded. “Yes. These are very good indeed.” I felt vindicated.
But what about some of the country’s leading brownie makers? Paul Young, for example, uses golden syrup in his mix, along with serious amounts of Valrhona to produce a brownie that is incredible, but seriously too much to eat in one sitting, even for me. I’ve tried. Believe me.
I asked Kate Jenkins from the award winning Gower Cottage Brownies for her secret. “It’s all about the cooking”, she said. “I always tell people – if it doesn’t look cooked, then it is cooked.” She favours the Belgian Callebaut chocolate for her baking: the Gower Cottage style is soft, fudgy, almost light, but deceptively intense.
For literary inspiration, I turned to the author Stella Newman, whose first novel Pear Shaped contains a crucial passage about this very subject. “As with many things in life, the perfect brownie is all about timing”, she told me. “Just one or two minutes too long in the oven can send a perfectly fudgy, squidgy brownie into the realms of cake-ishness, from which there is no return.”
I had to give the last word to Patrick Moore, since his Muddees have been officially declared as near-perfect as it’s humanly possible to get. His recipe uses a unique mix of buckwheat and other gluten free flours, along with some 70% Callebaut chocolate, a good salted butter, and differently sized chunks of chocolate scattered through the batter. “You need those pieces so that it melts in the mouth at different times, and gives the brownie another texture”, he explained. “And you need the salt to improve the robust flavour of the chocolate.”
So – his definition of perfection? An eggshell crisp crust, rich and gooey inside, and very slightly underdone in the middle. That’s official then: gooey it is. And never, ever, mention the word cake.
