ZOMG, Candy!

I picked up this assortment of Amedei tasting squares while I was in Italy. Even though I bought them in the country where they’re made, they were not cheap. Guess that’s par for the course when you make the world’s most expensive chocolate.

Each tasting square was about an inch and a quarter square and probably about 1/16th of an inch thick. Each was stamped with the word “Amedei” on a diagonal.

The Toscano Brown was a luscious looking light brown milk chocolate. The label promised, “chocolate of supreme finesse with scents of butter and vanilla. Delicate, extremely agreeable flavor.”

It had a smooth, thick melt with a buttery, light hazelnut undertone. Agreeable indeed!

The Toscano Black 63% was supposed to have “intense chocolaty aroma and rich, flowery flavour, with strong overtones of hazelnut.”

Mine had developed the barest hint of bloom, but it still tasted excellent. It had a sharp and snappy break. It tasted earthy and woodsy but lacked any acrid unpleasantness.

And now, the trio of 70% squares: The Toscano Black 70% claimed “fragrance of flowers and tobacco with an elegant flavour.” To me, it tasted deep, yet smooth with a lightly bitter edge. It had a few caramel hints and strong notes of roasted coffee beans.

The Trinidad’s label claimed, “Refined aroma with a pleasant impact on the taste buds,” which isn’t very descriptive. I found it surprisingly sweet and mellow for its cacao percentage, and quite enjoyably so.

The Ecuador (“extremely intense fragrance with a strong scent of cocoa”) was sweet as well, but with more of a woodsy edge. It was my least favorite of the bunch, with an off-putting hint of papery-ness.

The Trinidad and Toscano 70%s were my favorite. The only one that I didn’t care for was the Ecuador. It gets an O, while the rest get OMs!

I bought these Majani Gran Cru single-origin tasting squares while I was in Italy. I can’t read Italian, but I can puzzle out that they’re made in Bologna.

It’s been several months since I bought these, so they had developed a light bloom, but they still tasted just fine.

They come in 3 cacao percentages and from 3 origins. The squares are super thin and stamped with the Majani logo.

Belize was a 65% with a dry snap. It has notes of coffee and tobacco, with a bitter finish. While it was nice, I found it too earthy and woodsy for my taste, and it was my least favorite of the bunch. An O.

Ecuador was a 70% with another dry snap. It tasted fruity, with strong notes of raisin and strong cinnamon flavors. An OM.

Sur del Lago was a 75%. It was my favorite of the trio. It had a complex savory flavor that reminded me of custard and red fruits. An OMG. I love complex chocolates that leave me puzzling out their flavors!

Italy isn’t known for its chocolate as some other European countries are, but these bars show that they’re just as worthy of renown. If only they weren’t so expensive and not readily available in the states!

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.

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.

After I fell in love with Aequare’s 55% bar, how would their (free sample) 70% bar fare? Let’s find out, shall we?

Like the 55% (and all of Aequare’s bars), this bar is handmade from single-origin beans. Like all the bars currently for sale, it’s from their Quevedo, Ecuador grower’s summer 2008 harvest.

The 70% bar was wonderfully snappy. It had a luxuriously thick and smooth melt, surprising for a bar with such a high cacao percentage.

There’s a slight sweetness to the bar, but it is mostly dominated by strong, dry cocoa notes with hints of coffee. It’s extremely chocolatey, in a complex way.

I didn’t love the 70% as much as the 55% – the complexity just wasn’t as captivating – but I still greatly enjoyed it. An OM.

In addition to some delicious dark chocolate cocoa beans, Aequare also sent me an assortment of their handmade single-origin bars for free sampling. Today’s review is of their 55% semi-sweet.

According to their website, the beans that went into this bar came from Aequare’s grower in Quevedo, Ecuador and their summer 2008 harvest. How’s that for precise! I can’t remember if that was stamped on the box or not, but I think it should be. It would be a neat marketing gimmick.

The chocolate bar itself is nicely presegmented into tasting-sized squares. There’s a nice snappiness when the bar is broken apart. The color is a lovely medium brown with a nice, smooth sheen, and while the melt isn’t thick, it is silky soft with just a bit of tongue-coating-ness in the finish.

Flavorwise, it’s brightly sweet with great complexity. There’s a bold fruitiness that lingers in the finish, which also has just a hint of bitter/astringent cocoa notes.

It’s absolutely lovely, thanks to its pleasant texture and intriguing complexity. It blows every other bittersweet/semisweet chocolate that I’ve had in this cacao percentage-range out of the water. A ZOMG!

I recently received a generous box of free samples from Aequare Chocolates, a newcomer to the fine artisan chocolates field – they debuted just this past summer. Included in the box were their Dark Chocolate Cocoa Beans.

According to the bag, these are “lightly roasted and peeled cocoa beans enveloped in Aequare dark chocolate.” There’s a much longer description on their product page, where you learn that the beans are single-origin, hand roasted and hand peeled, and panned in several coats of Aequare’s 70% dark chocolate.

I love how, in the above close-up, they could just as easily be a bunch of potatoes. The one on the far right even has eyes!

The beans are heftily-sized and much larger than I expected them to be, probably because I was using chocolate-covered espresso beans as my mental reference point. I’d guess that the chocolate-covered cocoa beans are between 2 to 4 times the size of chocolate-covered espresso beans.

Each bean has a generously thick layer of chocolate coating that crumbles and melts in the mouth with no thickness. The chocolate carries dry cocoa notes with a slightly sweet finish.

The beans inside add a dry crunch and grittiness. They taste even more deeply of genuine, pure cocoa flavor and release a winey fruitiness when crunched.

Aequare has managed to produce a complex, intriguing, and deliciously poppable snack. They’re so addictive that I could eat several in one session, yet so intense that it was satisfying to stop after a handful. I was able to spread the bag out over several sessions. I give them an OM.

And bonus kudos for Aequare’s excellent blog post documenting the Dark Chocolate Cocoa Bean making process.

Here’s the second of my two Vere bars (remember, they were buy one get one free), Vere Raspberry + Lemon.

Like its Mint + Nibs counterpart, the Raspberry + Lemon is an organic, single origin bar. It takes the cacao content up a notch, to 75%, and I found that difference hugely apparent. The snap of this bar is super hard – it almost hurt my teeth. It was so snappy as to be unpleasant to bite into.

The scent was dark and chalky with just a hint of citrus sourness. Upon tasting, if you survived biting into it, you’d find a dry melt and a bar that tasted of powdered dark cocoa with a lightly sweet and tart fruity finish. I could taste the raspberry and lemon, though I’m not sure that I would’ve been able to identify the specific fruits in a blind tasting.

While the Mint + Nibs bar was studded with bits of cacao nibs, the Raspberry + Lemon bar was full of raspberry seeds. That I greatly appreciated, which is surprising, considering my profound distaste for seedy raspberry candies. It may have been my imagination, but I felt as though I got a bonus burst of sweet raspberry flavor from grinding up those seeds.

All in all, the fruit flavor was decent, but the chocolate was lacking. And the bar was way too hard to eat. This bar would greatly benefit from a reformulation to make it softer. An O.

I bought this Vere Mint + Nibs bar at my local food co-op. They were buy one, get one free, and I’m never one to turn down a chocolate deal! If you’re curious, the other Vere that I chose was a Raspberry + Lemon one. It’s currently languishing, unopened, in my chocolate stash, though I presume that it will be consumed and reviewed in due course.

I’m going to purposefully ignore mentioning how the mark over the “e” in Vere affects how one would pronounce the name. Because honestly, is that really necessary, Vere?

I will point out that the bar is certified organic, and it’s single origin. Also, the blurb on the back of the box suggests that it’s at least fair trade in spirit, if not in certification, so that’s plenty enough hip points there to not need silly naming gimmicks.

The Mint + Nibs (I will concede it the use of “+” instead of “and” but refuse to use all lowercase letters) smells strongly of mint oil (as opposed to fresh mint) and dry cocoa. I love the presentation – little bite sized pillows of shiny dark chocolate etched with uniform squiggles.

The melt is pretty dry, which is unsurprising, as it’s a fairly high 70% cacao. The nibs give it a gritty crunch. The bar’s pleasantly intriguing texture makes this fun to chew. I find it best appreciated through chomping rather than melt-on-the-tonguing.

The chocolate is lightly sweet and fruity, with a light undertone of mint oil. There’s just the barest hint of effervescent refreshing mint finish. As previously mentioned, the plentiful nibs do wonders for the texture, but they don’t add much to the flavor.

All in all, it’s a great bar for snacking but not complex or inspiring enough for slow savoring. An OM.

I threw a chocolate tasting party ages ago and have been sitting on these tasting notes since then. Today, some quick hits for the last Friday (alas!) of my spring break. Part II will come Monday, when I’m back (boo!) in class.

Ghirardelli Duet, from their new line of Luxe Milk chocolates, pairs “creamy milk chocolate” with “rich dark chocolate”. It’s divided along it’s heighth axis so that it looks like a milk chocolate bar with a thin dark chocolate backing.

It had a woodsy smell with some tobacco notes to it. I found it surprisingly smoky. Its thick and creamy melt combined with its complex flavor earned it high praise at my party and from me. An OMG.

Lindt Madagascar is a single-origin 65% dark chocolate bar from their Excellence line. It has a cool melt with a fatty feel to it. The finish was quite enjoyably fruity. Another party favorite; another OMG.

The Cafe Tasse 77% was a holiday gift from my friend Steve. It’s a higher cacao percentage than the 60% noir bar I previously reviewed. It had a sharp snap and was unusually thick – in this case, a reference to its physical dimensions, not its melt – with an arid finish. An O.

More quick hits to come on Monday. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to eke out one last weekend of fun in Albany as our men’s hockey team takes on the ECAC championship playoffs.