Vosges: Enchanted Mushroom

Yes, readers, I went there -- into the land of dessert fungus, that is. Disclaimer #1 is that I got this bar for free at the oyster & chocolate event I attended last week, and Disclaimer #2 is that no chocolate-loving blogger in her right mind could be bribed into giving this nasty blunder a favorable review. Read on for the dirty details.

Vosges: Enchanted Mushroom
Cocoa content: 66%
Notable ingredients: Reishi mushrooms; walnuts
Origin: Dominican Republic

Pleasures want not to mingle with other pleasures -- hasn't Vosges ever heard "too much of a good thing," and so on, and so on? Yes, mushrooms are delicious, with other savory foods. But upon being dried, powdered, and distributed throughout a perfectly good dark single-origin chocolate bar, they kind of lose their identity and start to feel showy, unknowable, unwelcome.

That's how they felt to me, anyway -- when you eat a chocolate bar, you're inevitably not tuned into the savory flavors that grace your dinner table: chili peppers, maybe; bacon, maybe, but that's because those foods have such strong flavor profiles that we know them distinctly as flavors, and not as composed dishes. Mushrooms, on the other hand, I think are too firmly defined as savory food. We have a range of ways we're expecting to experience them, and when we encounter them outside of that range, it's too hard to abstract from what our palates are used to.

In simpler terms, this bar was fucking gross and if I had paid money for it I would want my money back. Don't put anymore mushrooms in my candy bars, you fools. D.