Fine & Raw: 83%

This bar was given to me by my cousin Margaret, of Margaret Are You Grieving? Fine & Raw is a small company in Brooklyn. We will discuss what "raw" means. First, the stats:

Fine & Raw: 83%

Cocoa content: 83%

Notable ingredients: agave

Origin: Ecuador

The raw food movement is an eating/lifestyle trend that emphasizes uncooked -- or very lightly cooked -- foods for health reasons. But there's also a sort of snobbery to raw foodism, because uncooked and unprocessed foods are "close to the earth," and usually pretty expensive. Raw chocolate is no different, really: Fine & Raw uses ambiguous "artisan low heat techniques" and they avoid additives like dairy and sugar. They skip the conching process, which improves the creamy texture of chocolate. 

Again, Fine & Raw doesn't add sugar -- by which I mean cane, or corn syrup, or anything like that. They do use a natural sweetener called agave nectar, which is kind of like honey and is popular among vegans because it comes from a plant rather than an insect. Agave tastes pretty much like any other sweetener, especially here because it is in such a small amount.

This chocolate really wasn't that fabulous because the point of raw food isn't taste or indulgence. This would be of more interest to people who are really excited by organic candy and cooking processes that interfere with the ingredients as little as possible. In my case, I'm not so concerned with those things because at the end of the day, all I want is to have known delicious chocolates. This bar's rating gets bumped up slightly for the pretty packaging, to a B.