ZOMG, Candy!

I bought two Tom and Sally’s 100% Organic Skinny Bars at a little chocolate shop near the Berkshires in Massachusetts. I tried to look up more about them, but Google seems to think there’s something scary about their website.

First up, a Belgian 41% milk chocolate infused with cocoa nibs. The chocolate was dark for a milk bar and scored into 6 even sections.

It had a weird plasticky, moldy undertone that was rather off-putting. The melt was mostly smooth, except where it was broken up with the crunch of the cocoa nibs.

While I wanted to like this bar for its organic-label, the chocolate was far from scrumptious, thanks to that weird undertone. An O.

The other bar was a Belgian 41% milk chocolate infused with cinnamon and nutmeg.

It smelled amazing! Sweet with the undertone of cinnamon spice. I wanted to mix it into tea and drink it up.

Unfortunately, the heavy spice scent was the result of an overly spiced bar. The strong presence of spices made the chocolate extremely gritty and astringent.

I found it unpalatable and couldn’t manage a second bite. A –.

It’s not every day that you run into chocolate with mushrooms, so I just had to pick up this Vosges Organic Enchanted Mushroom. Even if it did cost a bit more than regular Vosges bars (already expensive) because of its organic-ness.

This bar was comprised of Reishi mushrooms, walnuts, and 66% dark chocolate. Its texture was lightly gritty, which I attributed to the Reishi mushroom powder. I didn’t notice any textural contribution from the walnuts, though they did add a light nuttiness.

The chocolate tasted dark and woodsy with a strong fruitiness and a lightly astringent finish. I got strong flavors of sweet, genuine, Ceylon cinnamon, though it wasn’t in the ingredients list.

It was unusual and interesting but not tasty enough for me to want to buy it again. An O.

I got back to Rochester after being home for the holidays and was pleasantly surprised to find a free sample of Salazon‘s newest bar, Organic Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt and Crushed Organic Coffee, waiting for me in my mailbox.

I originally reviewed them when they first debuted a year ago. I just saw them for sale at a Central Market in Austin. It was nice to see that they’re doing well and have made it to market.

The bar smelled strongly of lovely roasted coffee. Like Salazon’s other bars, the additions – in this case, sea salt and crushed coffee bits – blanket the underside of the bar rather than being incorporated into the chocolate. The effect is quite pretty.

The texture of the bar was a nice mix of smooth, melting chocolate and the crunchy coffee and sea salt bits. The salt adds sudden flashes of sweet and sour. The coffee is neither overpowering or bitter, and the effect is that of a cafe mocha.

It reminded me of a Starbucks Frappuccino, with that diluted milky coffee taste. I found it to be a tad sweeter than what would be my ideal. I wanted a little more rich, roastiness.

Still, it was a great addition to the Salazon lineup. An O.

On Monday, I reviewed two of my four free sample bars of Fearless Chocolate. Today, I’ll wrap things up with my review of their Super Seeds Hemp Chia Flax and their Sweet & Hot Hibiscus Ginger.

It really doesn’t sound any health fad crunchier than “Hemp Chia Flax.” This 70% raw organic bar was studded with the three seeds.

The seeds added a textural crunch to the sharp snap of the bar. They bring a light mild nuttiness to the bar and tamp down the fruitier side of the chocolate. Here it mostly of deep cocoa with light hints of sweetness.

I enjoyed the flavors and texture of this bar. Like the others in the line-up, there’s a bit more astringency to the finish, but I think that comes with the raw territory. An OM.

Sweet & Hot smelled overwhemingly of ground ginger with an undertone of sweetness. It tasted just like it smelled, with a few brightly sweet and sour flashes, and had a slight grit to its texture.

It had the most astringent finish of them all, which lingered so long that it needed a chaser to displace it.

I enjoy gingerbread, and ginger is a star of the Asian cuisine I grew up eating, but this was too much ginger spice for me. An O.

Fearless Chocolate has a lot going for it. The packaging is smart, and it fills a niche with tasty, well-made chocolate, with the plain Dark as Midnight bar being my favorite. They’re definitely one to watch for the future.

I got an assortment of free sample bars from Fearless Chocolate Co., a bean-to-bar chocolate maker. They’re about as health food faddy as it gets. Their chocolate is raw, organic, kosher, gluten/soy/dairy-free, and stocked with superfoods.

These Fearless bars are my first foray into raw chocolate. Should be interesting!

I love the rustic cardboard look of their packaging – quite the wholesome and eco-friendly feel.

My assortment contained a 75% Dark as Midnight plain bar, and three 70% bars: Matcha Green Tea Peppermynt, Super Seeds Hemp Chia Flax, and Sweet & Hot Hibiscus Ginger. I’ll review the first two today and hit the other two on Wednesday.

Each bar has a little corner bite missing from it, representing the 1% of their profits that’s donated to charity. I’d say that the bar is the size of about 2 of the full bar’s 18 segments, which makes it more like 11% – that would be a nicely hefty charitable contribution!

The 75% Dark as Midnight bar was about as pure as dark chocolate gets. The only two ingredients were organic raw cacao and organic unrefined cane sugar.

It smelled like cacao beans with a bit of chalkiness. The break was sharp and snappy, with a velvety, matte melt.

It tasted sweet and deep, starting with hints of spice before yielding to a light fruitiness and a cocoa finish. There’s a light astringency to the finish that I normally associate with bars of a much higher cacao content, perhaps due to the rawness of the chocolate. An OM.

Matcha Green Tea Peppermynt sounded like a dubious flavor combination. It smelled minty and sweet.

It first tasted like a peppermint candy with an undertone of bright sweetness. Then the grassy, herbal, slightly bitter flavors of tea came through, before giving way to sweetly fruity notes. It finally ended on a tea-ful, slightly astringent finish that lingered.

While I found it nicely complex, it wasn’t for me. An O.

Stay tuned til Wednesday, when I cover the Super Seeds and Sweet & Hot bars. In the meantime, if you want to pick some up for yourself, they’re available online.

When I met my sweetie in Saratoga Springs*, our wanderings about that cute little town took us into a natural food store. This Alter Eco Dark Chocolate Quinoa (aka Midnight Crunch, hidden under that hefty price tag) bar caught my eye, as I’d never seen quinoa and chocolate together. At nearly $5 with tax, it was definitely a splurge, but one that I couldn’t pass up.

Alter Eco is a brand that’s only recently made its way onto my radar. They’re a Fair Trade organization that’s also carbon neutral, and I believe all of their stuff is organic as well. This bar was all three.

The back of the box describes this bar as, “A crispy chocolate like no other. Made with cacao and quinoa from Bolivia, Alter Eco Dark Quinoa chocolate brings together ancient ingredients from indigenous Andeans.”

As you can see, the bottom of the bar is heavily studded with bulging spheres of quinoa. While I could easily see it, however, I couldn’t taste it. Or if I was tasting it, it just tasted like crisped rice – the ingredients list calls it “rice-quinoa crisps”, so maybe it was all just one crispy entity that I was eating.

No matter. While the crisps added a nice little airy crunch, the real star here is the chocolate. At 61% cacao, it’s quite snappy.

It started off with dusky cocoa notes, then a fruity sweetness emerged along with notes of caramel and coffee, until the chocolate disappeared, leaving me with that lovely fruitiness in a lingering finish.

I could take it or leave it with the quinoa crisps, but the chocolate I could eat all day. It was satisfying yet kept me reaching for more. As always, I’m amazed at how much flavor complexity can come from just cocoa mass, cane sugar, and cocoa butter.

The bar earned itself a ZOMG! The next time I’m feeling flush and in the mood for a candy splurge, I’m going to check out more of the Alter Eco line.

Finally, for those who care about these sorts of things, the bar is soy-free, GMO-free, gluten-free, vegan, and without artificial flavors or emulsifiers.

*For the record, I don’t often refer to the boyfriend as my sweetie, but the alliteration was too good to pass up

Apparently my distaste for Rochester winters has been, well, apparent. I recently got an email from Lisa Reinhardt, a University of Rochester grad, telling me that she sympathized about Rochester winters.

Fortunately for the sake of the blog, she was also emailing to tell me that she was the owner of Wei of Chocolate, a chocolate company that makes organic, vegan, and Fair Trade chocolates, and would I like to try some free samples, two of which would be chili chocolate? Yes, please!

I got a bag of 6 dark chocolates with very (for lack of a better word) yoga-y names and claims to bring you warmth, insight, joy, etc. According to the company website, Wei of Chocolate will help you “take your experience of chocolate to a whole new level by experiencing the finest quality organic chocolate, infused with intentional blends of deliciously complex flavors designed to balance body and mind.”

Read the rest of this entry »

After I noted TCHO’s off packaging, they sent me fresh samples with their new packaging. In the months since my roommate bought the pack that I first tasted, TCHO had switched from an inner paper liner (which probably contributed the nasty paper flavor) to an inner foil liner.

It seems like they’ve also reformulated the chocolate a tad as well. This time, only the Chocolatey was 70%. Citrus was 67%, Nutty was 65%, and Fruity 2.0 was 68%. The latter three are made from organic beans, and “Nutty” and “Fruity 2.0″ are fair trade as well.

The etchings on the mold have changed too – I much prefer the current line graph markings.

“Citrus” tasted dusky at first, then became brightly sweet and fruity/citrusy. It totally hit its mark.

“Fruity 2.0″ had a darker sweetness to it. It tasted of cherries and strawberries and carried a brightly fruity finish. There was no duskiness, and the bar had a thin melt.

“Chocolatey” was by far my favorite. It was initially sweet, then gave way to a strong nuttiness with a fruity undertone. It had a thicker melt and mouthfeel than the other bars.

Nutty had a darker nuttiness than the Chocolatey did – more reminiscent of hazelnuts, I think. It had a strong, jammy sweetness that lingered in the finish.

I greatly enjoyed this set of TCHO bars. A little packaging change made a huge difference! I’m impressed at how well the bars hit their flavor marks. These would be great bars to use for a chocolate tasting party. They’re all similar percentages, yet their flavor profiles are distinct and easily discernible. Chocolatey gets an OMG, while the others get OM.

Salazon Chocolate Co. is a newly launched company that’s specializing in organic salted dark chocolate. Thanks to my candy press status, I got to try them out via free samples from Pete Truby, the company’s founder.

According to their FAQs, Salazon is Spanish for salted. Their wrapper features a striking picture of salt farmers in South East Asia. Salazon’s natural sea salt actually comes from South America; the photo was just too pretty to pass up.

It’s also featured as the design on the bars themselves. They plan to change the photo in the future (necessitating the expense of getting new molds, perhaps?) and are inviting people to submit their own travel photos for consideration.

There are currently three bars in their lineup. The “plain”, so to speak, is their “organic dark chocolate with natural sea salt.”  The salt crystals visibly line the bottom of the bar (they’re not mixed into the chocolate).

The chocolate has a firm snap and a clean, smooth melt. It smells dusky and sweet, with notes of citrus. The salt does wonders – it brings out the many flavors of the chocolate, making it brightly sweet, tangy, and fruity, with an almost sour/salty tint. If you’ve never had salted sweets before, this bar will give you a flavor epiphany.

Next is the “organic dark chocolate with sea salt and organic turbinado cane sugar.” This seems to be Salazon’s alternative to a salted milk chocolate bar. Rather than dial down the cacao, they turned up the sweet by adding turbinado sugar, which has a large granule (visible in the photo below; see the brown speck just above the watermark?).

The salt’s effects are much more tempered here, thanks to that additional sugar, and the taste of the salt doesn’t come through much. The chocolate, still smooth and creamy, feels a bit thicker, and the bar tastes more muted. I mostly get a milky, caramel sweetness with a bit of a raisin finish. If I didn’t know that it was dark, I could swear it was milk.

The third and final bar in the Salazon line-up is “organic dark chocolate with sea salt and organic cracked black pepper.” I often seek out chili chocolates to try, but I have less experience with pepper and chocolate.

The bottom of this bar, flecked with big bits of cracked black peppercorns, is a visual treat. The salted chocolate component is back, with the sharp, tangy, sour, saltiness of the “original”, followed by a black pepper finish (full of olfactory peppery-ness). I don’t think I like it, exactly, but I did enjoy the evolving flavors and found them intriguing.

Salazon’s debuting with a solid product line of tasty bars. An OM and my best wishes for them as they make their way onto the market.

TCHO chocolates have long been on my radar. I finally got to try them when my roommates were kind enough to bring me a variety pack from California. The variety pack contained 2 each of their fruity, chocolatey, nutty, and citrus flavors.

All of the squares were about 5 centimeters across the diagonal and quite thin, just half a centimeter. All were comprised of 70% cacao.

“Fruity” was made with organic and fair trade beans from Peru. It had a sharp snap with a very dry mouthfeel. There was a definite red fruit fruitiness to it, but the overall flavor was dominated by the stale taste of paper/cardboard.

At first I thought I just had an off square – I had unwrapped it to take photos and then rewrapped it for later -  but that cardboard taste pervaded the other, not-unwrapped-until-tasting-time squares.

“Chocolatey” (beans from Ghana) smelled duskier and featured strong cocoa notes and an almost savory tinge. Its mouthfeel is also dry, but it’s a bit smoother/creamier once it starts melting. The paper/cardboard taste is present in the finish.

“Nutty”, made from organic and fair trade beans from Peru, was the softest and creamiest of the bunch, and it did carry a distinctly nutty favor. But that paper tinge is still there.

Finally, “Citrus” (organic beans from Madagascar) smells sweet and has a very dry and crumbly melt. It tastes a bit chalky with a sweet bright finish, and again that infuriating, ruinous tinge of paper/cardboard taste.

I think TCHO needs to rethink their packaging on these bars, as they all took on an unpleasant, papery overtone that ruined the taste experience. I’ve had them sitting around for a few months, but bars should keep for at least that long, especially when you’re selling them in 90-day supplies.

I’m torn on how to rate these. The paper taste warrants a –, but that doesn’t seem quite fair, as TCHO didn’t mean for them to taste of paper. Then again, they did choose the packaging and neglected to put a “best by” date on the package or any storage guidelines (that I could find) on their website. So the – stands, with the caveat that my supply was off.