Amatller Chocolate 85% cacao Origen Ecuador

About: Amatller is a Catalonian chocolate made in Barcelona since 1797. On their web site you'll find the type of content that chocolate lovers care about, for example,  "how to store chocolate."The chocolate itself is good, though perhaps disappointing in the context of 200+ years of chocolate making from a country that brought chocolate to the west. But it's good chocolate, and way (cripes way) better than some brands with massive distribution and marketing machines.


Flavor: Slightly sour - just slightly. Deep and earthy. Nice profile. But only slightly fruity. It would be nice to compare the Ghana and Equador versions of this 85% bar, but I find them different but hard to differentiate.

Texture: Brittle and a bit crunchy, but with smooth follow-though.

My rating: 8.2 ... better than 8 but not much. Would have again, but there are better options.   

Here,  10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'.


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Amatller 85% Cacao Origen Ghana

About: Amatller is a Catalonian chocolate made in Barcelona since 1797. On their web site you'll find the type of content that chocolate lovers care about, for example,  "how to store chocolate."The chocolate itself is good, though perhaps disappointing in the context of 200+ years of chocolate making from a country that brought chocolate to the west. But it's good chocolate, and way (cripes way) better than some brands with massive distribution and marketing machines.


Flavor: Slightly sour - just slightly. Deep and earthy. Nice profile. But only slightly fruity. It would be nice to compare the Ghana and Equador versions of this 85% bar, but I find them different but hard to differentiate.

Texture: Brittle and a bit crunchy, but with smooth follow-though.

My rating: 8.2 ... better than 8 but not much. Would have again, but there are better options.   

Here,  10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'.


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Bissinger's Coffee Toffee 75% Dark Chocolate

About: Here's what I wrote elsewhere on this blog about this chocolate:
"It's still the case that in the US it's possible to engender some cachet by touting European heritage. Bissinger's is not above doing this and proudly proclaim their 17th century French title of "Confiseur Imperial." On their packaging they list "Paris 1600s USA 1845." These declarations compensate for Bissinger's currently somewhat lackluster mid-western orgins. I was right in thinking that some St. Louis manufacturer was not going to make good chocolate. But I was wrong in thinking it couldn't be excellent. It most definitely is excellent."

Here's the thing about this bar. If you're able to not consume it quickly for some reason, then it'll go stale. There's almond toffee bits there that don't like laying around an open package for a long time. I will never explain how I found out about this - it involved lots of other chocolate bars, though. 

The picture on the bar makes it look like there's a lot of toffee, but it's not really like that. It's more like a sprinkling of toffee on the bottom of a regular bar of chocolate.

Flavor: The chocolate is great. You can't really go wrong with coffee flavoring, maybe ever. The toffee is nice. It all becomes a tinybit sweet, especially for a 75% bar.

Texture: Smooth, creamy, excellent texture, with crunchy toffee.

My rating: 9,  on the scale of 1-10, where 10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'. Give me more!




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Valrhona Le Noir Amer 71% Cacao Dark Bittersweet Chocolate

About: Valrhona is a French made chocolate. You can read about it elsewhere on this blog. Many others rave about Valrhona, and it's probably a reflection on my pedestrian taste and philistine tendencies that make me not as big a fan.


Flavor: I find this bar better than its 85% sibling. It's smooth and has a rich chocolate flavor with fruity notes and no surfeit of acidity.

Texture: Solidly nice and smooth. 


My rating: 9.0  on the scale of 1-10, where 10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'. Give me more!




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Valrhona Le Noir Extra Amer 85% Cacao

About: Valrhona is a French made chocolate that  is targeted at professional chefs and 'high-brow' consumers. The company, now owned by Bongrain, a French company that is known for making cheese, is serious about chocolate (and, it goes without saying, in Cheese, since it's French and all). They offer culinary classes and lots of chocolate options for baking, as well as a line of dark chocolates. With that pedigree, I had high expectations.


Flavor: It's okay. It's really not bad at all. If you compare this to Godiva, for example, it's really so much better. But... I suppose I am a victim of my own expectations. I've had some mind-blowing French chocolate, but this was not it. The chocolate barely has any aroma, and the flavor is relatively simple and flat. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing too right with it, either. In a word: bland.

Texture: Any 85% cacao bar is going to be a bit hard and brittle, and so is this one, but the texture overall is quite good.


My rating: 8.0  on the scale of 1-10, where 10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'. Give me more!




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Dagoba 68% cacao Lemon Ginger bar

About: Dagoba Chocolate is marketed, like so many other brands, as a "guy makes chocolate and gets passionate about it and starts a business and ba-boom!" I'm wiping a joyful tear just now as I write about it, but it's a good story and one that makes me want to buy stuff from them. The fact that they sell cocoa powder  and feature recipes on their web site and generally seem like chocolate enthusiasts is a marketing plus. 


Flavor: Both the lemon and the ginger come through nicely, and the chocolate is nicely flavored and pleasant. This is a worth-while, nicely flavored bar. The chocolate flavor comes through with a nice profile - lemon, then ginger, then chocolate, with a long-lasting follow-through.


Texture: It's okay. I like creamy chocolates, and this is on the just-ever-so-slightly brittle side.Also, the pieces of something - perhaps the ginger - are a bit crunchy. That can count as good or as not so good.

My rating: 7.5  on the scale of 1-10, where 10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'.




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Delicata PUUR Chocolade Zee Zout (Sea Salt) 60%

About: If you go to the Netherlands, which you should. You'll want to go shopping, which you should. You'll find lots of Albert Heijn supermarkets, and you'll get food there, which you should, food being a good thing. Albert Heijn has items that are branded by them, and Delicata is their high-end chocolate line. You can see the little "ah" between the T and A in the picture.  Who knows who makes this chocolate for them. I don't.

One thing to note about this chocolate is that it's for chewing. Let it just melt in your mouth, and you'll end up with salt. 


Flavor: This chocolate is 60% cocao mass, which means there's 40% left over for 1) sugar, and 2) salt. Like many other bars, this chocolate include lecithin and vanilla, as well. The salt comes in little surprising explosions of flavor, though the sugar is a bit heavy - this is  a sweet bar. Perhaps that's necessary to compensate for the salt. The chocolate is good; nothing stellar, but okay.


Texture: Perfectly reasonable; pretty smooth.

My rating: Solid 8.  

Here,  10 means 'mind shockingly good' and 1 means 'would not bother'.


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