Cocoa Loco Sea Salt & Sunflower Seeds Dark Chocolate

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Cocoa Loco, so I was a little surprised when a selection of bars turned up on my doorstep featuring entirely new packaging. I was even more surprised when I visited their stall at the Speciality & Fine Food Fair over the weekend to find a large chocolate slab with “Chocablog” written on it produly displayed on the stand.

The slab is now our Facebook page cover image, and while we can’t be bought with chocolate, it’s not something we’re going to refuse either!

The updated Cocoa Loco packaging is really rather good. The boxes are simple, clean and elegant with a little window on the back that shows the chocolate inside.

The dark chocolate in this bar is a robust 73% cocoa solids from the Dominican Repuplic, and has a robust flavour to match. It’s both organic and Fairtade, but it doesn’t have a lot of subtlety to it. I think some might find it a little too dark.

The sunflower seeds and sea salt on the other hand, work perfectly. The seeds have a wonderful texture and give a slightly nutty flavour to the chocolate, and the sea salt does manage to lift the flavour of the chocolate to a point where some sweetness does start to come through.

The flavour of the bar as a whole does actually change significantly depending on how you eat it. If you can resist biting into it and just let it melt away slowly before crunching the seeds, you get a lot more sweetness from the chocolate. The trouble is, all those delicious seeds make it quite difficult to resist munching.

Overall, I do like this chocolate, but I think I would love a milk chocolate version. I tried a couple of Cocoa Loco’s milk and white chocolate offerings at Speciality and they were wonderful. I particularly liked the honey & sesame seed milk chocolate which had the flavour and texture of a high-end Toblerone. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to pick a bar up, but I’ll certainly be hunting one down!

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