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.
Varsha