Emils Gustavs Sea Salt & Lemon

Posted by in Chocolate Reviews on July 3 2013 | Leave A Comment

Emils Gustavs Sea Salt & Lemon

More handmade treasure from Latvia courtesy of Gustavs, and this time it’s a milk chocolate with lemon sea salt. As you can see, when they say sea salt, they mean sea salt! Consider this – the salt content of a Lindt Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt is 1% and you know it’s there the moment you taste the chocolate. It doesn’t take much to work out that there’s considerably more than 1% here.

Gustavs bars (or should that be slabs?) are beautifully moulded with the filigree and birds design, and come sellophane wrapped in an elegant cardboard sleeve. Presentation wise, everything says ‘high end’.

Emils Gustavs Sea Salt & Lemon

The chocolate itself is a slightly different tale though.It’s a pretty basic 30% cacao chocolate (comparable with UK commercial chocolate) and fairly unremarkable, but the addition of Lemon Salt really saves it. That generous sprinkling of crystals transforms this bar from mediocre to (almost marvellous). As I popped the first piece into my mouth I was unprepared for the taste explosion which followed. The initial sweetness of the chocolate was almost immediately joined by the bright lemon of the salt, and then the saltiness kicks in to create a maelstrom of flavours – by turns sweet and citrus, punctuated by saltiness. It’s a bit of a taste rollercoaster!

Emils Gustavs Sea Salt & Lemon

With a fairly meagre 30% cacao it could hardly be called fine chocolate, which is a real shame because I couldn’t help but feel that if Gustavs had just gone a little further and sourced some really good cacao (and put more of it into this bar) then they would have a truly remarkable product on their hands.

As Gustavs are based in Latvia I doubt their products are THAT easy to get hold of in the UK, and to be honest the cost of having it sent over from Riga probably isn’t worth it, but if Gustavs up their game and source some ‘proper’ cacao then they really could impress.

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