Planète Chocolat White Chocolate with Thyme

White chocolate with thyme? What an odd choice for a flavour combination. Obviously, it was therefore my first choice for a chocolate bar to bravely pick up on our trip to Belgium. I do love white chocolate and I’ve had my share of herbal and spiced chocolates – cinnamon, cardamom, pepper etc. – but never something quite as unusual as thyme. Growing up in Israel, I’m accustomed to a somewhat heavy use of thyme in cooking, though I usually use it in salads and roasts and not as part of a chocolate dessert.

So what did my €5’s worth of handcrafted chocolate bar taste like?

The white chocolate itself was very rich and creamy, almost a mere two or three shades away from thick clotted cream. It was sweet, but not too sweet.

The thyme was peppered randomly throughout the bar, making each piece I broke off slightly different. Some had quite a lot of thyme and some had very little, with the majority being in between the two extremes. You could definitely feel the thyme in every piece and it was a core ingredient of the overall taste of the bar.

The initial flavour combination could only really be described as “intriguing” – is it sweet? Is it savoury? It is herbal? Is it all those things? The thyme definitely added a refreshing, savoury kick, but I didn’t find it overwhelming – the sweetness and thyme-ness seemed perfectly balanced, making the bar very palatable indeed.

I couldn’t quite decide what I felt about this bar but I knew one thing for sure – it was really rather moreish. I felt I needed another piece to accurately describe the flavour, then another, then another. Before I knew it, the whole thing was gone. Oops.

While this bar is somewhat out there on the chocolate flavour combination range, I would certainly recommend it. It’s offers a very interesting combination of flavours you’re not likely to come across all too often.

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