Jean-Marie Auboine 70% Sano Domingo Bean to Bar

About: Auboine is a Las Vegas based chocolatier that sells chocolate there and in San Francisco airport. This bar is marketed as bean-to-bar with stamped conching times (wow 28 hours!). The conching is supposed to help the texture and flavor by "release of volatiles." I don't doubt that conching improves flavor - that's empirical. I'm not sure people really know about release of voletiles, but whatever.

For a bean-to-bar chocolate, the ingredient are slightly mysterious, listing cocoa mass and cocoa butter separately. I'd normally think of bean-to-bar being just beans and sugar. 

Auboine makes many (like 10s) of different types of flavors and is proud of serving the high-end Las Vegas casinos. That, like the bar, sounds just slightly better than it is.

Flavor: Solidly good. Fruity with a great long lasting earthy full flavor. So.. nice, though not mindbogglingly so.

Texture: Creamy, but ever so slightly grainy. It's got a very fine little crunch as you eat it, and that's suboptimal to my taste.

My rating:  Pleasant. Solid 6 for flavor, but not that exciting on the texture.

Rating Value	Meaning
1	Really bad chocolate. There's something just really really wrong here in almost every imaginable respect.
2	A bar with this rating has at least two drawbacks.
3	A bar where something is starting to get seriously wrong.... for example, really weak flavor with an otherwise acceptable texture.
4	This bar is below average, but just slightly. Mostly it's not worth eating again. Something isn't quite up to par, for example a poor texture but fine flavor.
5	This is an average good bar that's worth eating. There's nothing really wrong with it, but also nothing particularly spectacular. Or, perhaps it has a good characteristic that's evenly counter-weighted by something weak.
6	A solidly good bar with one characteristic that's above par, for example a great texture.
7	An solidly good chocolate that has two above par characteristics, but nothing mind-blowing. Good, above average flavor, but nothing to die for.
8	An excellent bar with no weaknesses and at least one characteristic that's super.
9	An awesome bar to die for with amazing texture and flavor.
10	You have been touched by God.

Back to the list of bars