Brooklyn’s Mast Brothers has long been one of our favourite bean-to-bar chocolate makers. As is the norm with Mast Brothers, everything about this bar oozes quality, starting with the beautifully printed wrapping and gold paper inside.
I’ve wanted to try this particular chocolate for a while, and finally managed to pick up a bar in Paul A. Young’s Soho shop last week. It’s interesting to me because ostensibly it’s a chocolate bar with two flavours that’s made with a total of just three ingredients; Cacao, Cane Sugar and Vanilla Beans.
The cacao is apparently smoked, then stone ground with the vanilla and sugar over the course of several days. It really couldn’t be simpler – and that’s what makes Mast Brothers chocolate so great.
The surface has an attractive, glossy appearance, with a few scuff marks and scratches that just add to the character and handmade feel of the chocolate. There’s a very pleasant, sweet and chocolatey aroma that’s neither too strong or too subtle. It’s just enough to make it impossible to resist breaking off a chunk the moment you open it.
The texture of the stone ground chocolate is slightly course, without being grainy. It starts to melt quite quickly, releasing its deliciously sweet, fruity flavour. Interestingly, neither the smoke nor the vanilla are particularly apparent individually, but together they lend a warmth and sweetness to the overall flavour. There’s a hint of smokiness in the finish, but there’s really no more vanilla than any other quality chocolate bar. It’s delicate and subtle and for a 71% bar, it’s very approachable and very moreish.
There was a part of me that was hoping for a more pronounced flavour, but I still love this chocolate. The chocolate maker’s art is in taking the smoked cacao and vanilla and using them simply to enhance the flavour of the cocoa bean, rather than treating them as separate flavours.
I don’t know anywhere outside of the US that sells this online, but Paul A. Young certainly has some in stock, and if you give them a call, they’re usually happy to deliver.
Another one (of many) items I picked up on my recent trip to Latvia. This elegant little white box is home to an assortment of chocolate truffles in three varieties (dark, milk & white of course).
Unfortunately a lack of English on the packaging leaves me guessing as to the true origins of these little 2cm balls but one thing was quickly apparent, and that is that Pure Chocolate is the company name, not a product description!
The dark chocolate truffle features a dark shell with a dark truffle centre. I’d hazard a guess and say that in this instance ‘dark’ refers to a chocolate with a cacao content of around 55% (the European bittersweet style) studded with dark chocolate sprinkles – a sort of posh version of he hings you might sprinkle on ice cream. The shell lacks real ‘bite’ and has a dryish texture. as it melts the cacao flavours are fairly unremarkable. The centre filling is not too sweet (a pleasant surprise) and blends well with the shell, but overall it remained decidedly average.
The milk chocolate version was a milk chocolate shell with a milk chocolate truffle filling was somewhat better, but I suspect that had as much to do with the fact that milk chocolate has more sugar and less cacao. Once again, a little more sweet than I would have liked but definitely not unbearably so.
The ‘white’ version is made with the same milk chocolate shell, only this time it’s dusted with small chips of white chocolate & the centre is a creamy coloured white truffle. Again, not as sweet as it could have been and quite tolerable, given my lack of a sweet tooth these days.
In fairness it has to be said that these were not the most expensive chocolates in the shop, and the shop was a large supermarket. Given that they cost only a few Euros, they managed to (mainly) exceed my expectations, and while they are never going to blow you away with sophisticated flavours, they do offer decent munching chocolate at a reasonable price. That said, I will not be rushing to see if I can find more next time i head East.
When I was a child, Mum would occasionally make Rocky Road. This was always a delightfully sticky mess where by a process of heating and mixing with other things, “Cooking chocolate” was magically transformed into something delicious and special.
When made, the Rocky Road was placed in an old, cleaned, ice-cream container in the fridge to be served up if we kids were good, or if it was a special occasion. There was usually quite a lot, in an ice-cream container so I used to sneak in and break lumps off to eat. Surely nobody would ever notice if a little disappeared? Sorry Mum…. Secret is out now. Of course, Mums are not as stupid as children think. Of course she knew.
Anyhow, during recent visits to Bracegirdles and Woolworths, a couple of Rocky Road products leapt out and reminded me of childhood. I figured it is probably best to do a taste-off: to compare with each other, and to compare with my memory of Mums Rocky Road made about 5000 years ago.
Bracegirdles
A hunk of Bracegirdles Rocky Road is about 100g, and will set you back $5. The chocolate is some unspecified Belgian milk variety, and is quite sweet. Running down the ingredients list, there are also dried apricots, roasted almonds, marshmallows and raspberry lollies.
The one I don’t remember from way back when is the dried apricots, but I think it’s a nice touch. The overall result is SWEETNESS, with lots of milk chocolate, the gooiness of the marshmallows, and the nuts give a pleasant crunch. The dried apricots don’t really stand out but contribute to the texture and that huge hit of sugar. Mercifully, there don’t seem to be a lot of the raspberry lollies – things which I think are somewhat overrated.
As far as a Rocky Road goes, it’s pretty good. Very sweet. But that’s how they are meant to be. It compares well with the memories of the perfection that Mum used to make when I was about 8.
Grans (The Block)
The makers aren’t kidding when they label this “the block”: It is a huge great slab of what is actually a fudge, coated in milk chocolate.
Apart from the milk chocolate, there is not really a great deal of resemblance to a real Rocky Road. The fudge centre contains sugar, condensed milk, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, vegetable fat, butter, roasted peanuts, desiccated coconut, and compound white chocolate. That makes for a lot of sugar.
For those with a sweet tooth, this is very pleasant eating: the chocolate is nothing special either good or bad, the fudge centre is very sweet but quite pleasant. I struggled, though, to find any of the peanuts or coconut in the fudge. I even resorted to breaking a piece up into quite small bits to try and find the elusive pieces of white and pink shown on the box, without success.
So: very sweet, quite pleasant, but is it Rocky Road? Nah – don’t think so.
This afternoon Valrhona launched their newest chocolate brand, ‘Dulcey’.
Dulcey is being marketed as a fourth kind of chocolate – “Blond chocolate” as opposed to dark, milk, or white. In actual fact it’s primarily caramelised white chocolate, which is something that has lead to many people comparing it to Nestlé’s Caramac – something that I loved as a child.
In preparation, I bought a couple of bars of Caramac to take to the Dulcey launch event at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. I felt horribly guilty carrying a sugary Nestlé product into a Valrhona launch, but I wanted to find out what other people thought about the comparison.
As it turned out, I needn’t have been too embarassed – during the speeches, Caramac was mentioned at least five times, although it was quite obvious that the French representatives of Valrhona didn’t really have a clue what Caramac was. I decided to educate them and shared my Caramac with Valrhona communications manager Diane Lefrançois.
She wasn’t impressed, and neither was anyone else. Some childhood memories are best left that way.
The first thing to note is that they have quite different ingredients. Caramac doesn’t actually contain any cocoa products, and is made primarily from vegetable fat, sugar and sweetened condensed milk.
Dulcey contains 32% cocoa butter and many other ingredients familiar to white chocolate, but it also contains whey and butter – something you’ll never find in real chocolate. So neither of these products are actually chocolate, but the Dulcey does have a fairly high percentage of cocoa products.
Comparing the two products side by side and you can immediately see the difference. Dulcey has a rich, caramelly colour, whereas the Caramac is pale by comparison. It’s also very, very soft. The Dulcey has a chocolate-like snap to it, but Caramac just bends and breaks.
Caramac’s texture is soft and grainy, a bit like fudge. Not having had it for years, I found it quite off putting. I’m so used to the clean, smooth texture of real chocolate that the Caramac I used to love just feels like the ingredients have been mixed together in a bucket.
Dulcey is ultra smooth and glossy. That’s because it contains so much cocoa butter and dairy butter. It melts like chocolate, but as it does it becomes intensely sweet. Even sweeter than the Caramac in fact. That was a surprise.
With the sweetness though comes a lot of interesting flavour notes. The caramel flavour is pronounced, and there’s a rich toffee note. Valrhona claim a natural salt note at the end, but I didn’t really pick that up. By contrast, Caramac has no real flavour at all.
In reality, there’s no comparison at all. Valrhona Dulcey is a million times better than Caramac. The comparison is inevitable, but they really aren’t the same thing. That said, Dulcey is way too sweet for me to eat on its own, so I was a little surprised that it’s being launched as a bar for consumers as well as a couverture. We tried a few desserts made with Dulcey, most of which were delicious, but I couldn’t eat more than a couple of pieces of Dulcey on its own because of that sweetness.
Pastry chefs are probably going to come up with some wonderful creations with Dulcey, but I could only recommend the bars to those with a very sweet tooth.
