ZOMG, Candy!

On Wednesday, I covered Madécasse Chocolate‘s Pink Pepper & Citrus bar. They make bean-to-bar chocolate in Madagascar, which, in addition to paying their cocoa farmers a fair price, generates 4 times the impact of Fair Trade.

Today, I’m writing up their Sea Salt & Nibs bar, which brags that it was Best in Show in the Paris Salon du Chocolat. As far as I’m concerned, it was a well-deserved award.

The Sea Salt & Nibs was “63% cocoa, crunchy, & a touch of salt”, with 2/4 dots on Madécasse Chocolate’s intensity scale. It was formed in the same mold as the Pink Pepper & Citrus bar, except its back was covered in tiny bits of cacao nib.

The chocolate had a softish bite with a light crunch from the nibs. They added a great cocoa depth without any of the bitter astringency that sometimes comes with cacao nibs.

The chocolate was intensely flavored. It started off mellow with a caramel cocoa depth, then took on powerfully bright citrus and cherry notes.

Every once in a while, I caught a crunchy crystal of sea salt. The salt brought a brief flash of saltiness while highlighting the fruity notes in the chocolate.

This was another tremendous bar from Madécasse. As corny as it sounds, every bite took me on a flavor adventure.

I am 100% sold on this brand and will be buying more bars the next time I’m at Whole Foods. A ZOMG!

Via Neil, here’s a tricky puzzler with a chocolate bar theme. From Cheezburger.com:

If you’re curious how this works, the solution can be found here.

Madécasse Chocolate is a new company to me. They’re “bean-to-bar in Madagascar” and, though they’re not Fair Trade certified (probably due to the expense), they claim that their business practices generate 4 times the impact of fair trade cocoa.

Pink Pepper & Citrus was 63% cocoa, pink pepper, & combava fruit. Combava fruit sounds super exotic, but I think it’s just another name for Kaffir Lime (still exotic, but slightly more familiar sounding).

The bar was prettily molded to highlight that it was made in Madagascar. It broke easily along its scores, but its texture was soft, with a matte mouthfeel.

This bar was astoundingly complex. I didn’t have to close my eyes or try too hard to really focus on the flavors; they came out swinging.

It started off with a deep earthiness, then yielded to a bright, citrusy fruitiness with an undertone of pepper’s just-shy-of-acrid essence (but not its heat). All this for only 2/4 dots of intensity on Madécasse Chocolate’s scale?

I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate in my day, and it’s rare to find bars that pack so much flavor complexity and just so much flavor, period. A ZOMG!

Stay tuned til Friday, when I cover Madécasse Chcoolate’s “Best in Show” winning Sea Sat & Nibs bar!

The NY Times recently ran what I thought was an unnecessarily snarky but pretty funny takedown of Williamsburg’s hipster culture. At one point, he visits the hipster chocolate haven that is the Mast Brother’s Chocolate showroom:

“Great food wants a great dessert, so I hied myself to the showroom of Mast Brothers Chocolate, a lodestar of the artisanal foods movement. This company makes it a point to wind-sail its cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic to Brooklyn, then to hand-sort these beans, then to let its chocolate ‘rest’ 30 days before sale. Only Leona Helmsley’s dogs have ever been so cosseted.

“The store smells like heaven; I would happily die there. For $10 you can buy a burlap sack used to haul the beans in, perhaps for use as a satchel. I told a freckled young employee in a peasant blouse: ‘I bet those sacks are very popular with single men. If all your stuff smelled like chocolate? Bingo.’ The girl nodded and enthused: ‘I got one for my birthday. Most of the people who work here have them.’ “

After I reviewed Bissinger‘s grapefruit gummy pandas, I thought I’d never buy another bag because they were just too expensive ($4.99 for a 4 oz bag). But this bag of Lemon Ginger Yuzu gummy pandas just sounded too tasty to pass up, so I splurged again.

The lemon ginger yuzu pandas had a soft yet sproingy chew that was incredibly pleasant to chomp on. Just enough bounce to keep things interesting, but soft enough to be easy on the jaw.

The pandas smelled strongly of ginger with a lemony citrus undertone, and the flavor profile matched the scent. They started off sweet and gingery, then mellowed into a sweet lemon drop flavor with just a smidge of lemon zestiness.

The ginger flavor was strong and genuine, yet immensely palate pleasing. They captured all the wonderful essence of ginger flavor without its stinging bite, which was perfect for me.

These were unlike anything other gummi that I’ve bought (I know Haribo makes a lemon ginger gummi, but I’ve yet to see it in the wild), which is a shame because they were addictively delicious. For now, totally worth the premium and my new favorite gummi. ZOMG!

When I was in Seattle for a conference a few weeks ago, I managed to slip away to Pike Place market one day for an extended lunch break. On my way out, I found this little hidden, family-owned chocolate shop called Indi Chocolate.

Indi Chocolate does bean to bar, but they also do bean to beauty product. I only review things that I can eat, so I picked up a couple of their prettily molded plain dark chocolate bars.

The ingredients couldn’t be simpler: Cocoa Beans, Cocoa Butter, Sugar. The chocolate snapped, but softly. It had no grit, but neither was it perfectly smooth – instead, it felt luxuriously velvety on my tongue.

The chocolate’s flavor was spectacular: lightly sweet with fruity berry notes and enough of an earthy, bittersweet undertone to keep things interesting. The finish was slightly astringent, but not overpoweringly so.

Indi Chocolate turned out to be a high quality treat with enough flavor complexity to keep me breaking off additional nibbles. An OMG.

I recently reviewed and loved Askinosie’s single-origin dark chocolates. Serious Eats just reviewed one of their flavored bars, which makes me want to go out and buy their entire line.

Here’s another guest post from ex-pat friend Neil! ~Rosa

Late on a Friday night at a German supermarket, I discovered a new Ritter Sport flavor I hadn’t even seen advertised yet: the Ritter Sport à la Crema Catalana.

I spied something like a crème brûlée on the package and my heart skipped a beat. I bought two, knowing I’d devour the first and have to review it properly later.

It is the standard Ritter Sport size and shape. The bar breaks pretty much as expected between the squares.

What an intense flavor experience this is! This is one of the sweetest candies I’ve had. The chocolate tastes almost like an afterthought to the bold filling.

While both are creamy and blend together, the filling at first has a little more heft to it. The sweetness is almost too much to handle, and you can taste the intensity of the filling’s contribution to this if you even just briefly hold a square in your mouth before chewing it.

This filling flavor was not what I expected, not a standard crème brûlée. It’s almost more like the filling of a Cadbury Creme Egg, though certainly more refined.

It turns out that a crema catalana is a different dish than the usual “cb”, as I call it, so the discrepancy between my expectation and experience makes more sense.

I recommend Ritter Sport fans seek this out for its novelty value and any super-sweet-tooth types as well. I wanted to love love love it, but the nearly overwhelming flavors drop it back a bit, so this is an OM for me.

Serious Eats recently ran a delectable slide show about caramels in Chicago. I’ll have to find time to hunt some of those down while I’m in town for Sweets and Snacks.

Photo above is Le Caramel’s caramel cream.

Here’s another guest post from ex-pat friend Neil! ~Rosa

A staple of Dutch towns is the HEMA department store. I dither on its American equivalent. K-Mart? Target? Everything there is their own brand, from clothing to sausage to the carpet cleaner.

Often, when you ask a Dutch person “Where would I buy a…”, the answer is “HEMA”. I discovered recently that they have candies I’m curious about. To that end, I bought a huge bag of mini caramel & biscuit bars.

Each bar is about 3 inches long. The form is your basic, chocolate-covered candy bar. It turns out it is tough to cleanly eat these.

[Note from Rosa: Do these individually wrapped chocolate bars remind anyone else of wrapped tampons?]

The chocolate flakes fall, the biscuit crumbs drop, and the caramel threads stretch. This mess is the least of the bar’s issues.

The chocolate taste simultaneously involves acidity and salt. The caramel falls flat, flavorwise. And the biscuit is there for just texture, it seems.

My officemate may have put it best when saying that this is trying to be a Twix, and failing miserably. They’ve become an office snack for when I’m desperate for sugar but not discriminating on any other level. These rate a –.