Maitre Truffout: Nuts & Raisins

This is going to be an abbreviated entry -- partly because I am tired and partly because this bar was nothing special -- just a pile of Raisinettes disguised in a chocolate bar's clothing. Oh, and there were some hazelnut shards in there, too. Nothing we haven't seen before. On to bigger and better things next week, dear readers -- let's hope.

Lindt: Pistachio

I bought this bar at an A&P in Bronxville. I'm not really that into pistachios, and I was skeptical of how they'd pair with chocolate. I like the combination of pistachio and vanilla -- in my hometown, there is this great ice cream parlor called Rancatore's and they have a flavor called Kulfi which is basically an Indian-inspired blend of vanilla ice cream, pistachio, and some spices -- cardamom and nutmeg, I would guess. It's delicious. My purchase of this bar was inspired by my love of that ice cream flavor.

Lindt: Pistachio
Cocoa content: unlisted (guess: 33%)
Notable ingredients: pistachio nuts; almonds
Origin: n/a

The "filled" Lindt bars consist of little chocolate pods with some sort of creamy filling, joined together at the edges. These pieces, each about the size of a bullet, contained a single pistachio nut suspended in a vaguely almond-flavored cream filling. Having been surrounded by cream since however long ago this bar was manufactured, the pistachio nut itself was a little bit soft. It lost its signature saltiness and distinct flavor. Pistachios are never rock hard, but this one was softened to the point that even its crunchiness amidst a pocket of cream was compromised.

It's still kind of good, though. Lindt bars are truly never bad. The milk chocolate especially is so creamy and sweet and melty that it will complement whatever it encases. The fact that the nut had lost much of its distinctiveness and texture made the bar less successful but not actually less palatable. The only real complaint I have about these filled Lindt bars is that the pods are too big to eat in one bite and too messy to bite in half. This bar tasted pretty good regardless.

Next week I'll hopefully have made it beyond the A&P for my chocolate shopping. This one gets a B.

Frey: Sogni de Caffe

I've been bad -- I should have updated days ago, but I was traveling in another city and was busy dealing with some other desserts. Having found all of them delicious but none of them blog-appropriate, I'm back to discuss -- in brief -- another bar from my friend Dan, who plays music and has an eye for chocolate.

Frey is a 120(!)-year-old Swiss chocolate company with an adorable website that takes you on a simulated tour of a city square in Switzerland. Try it -- it's actually really fun. There's also a section on the website for chocolate advertisements, with a video archive dating back to 1969! And, believe it or not, this company is also owned by Migros, the Swiss supermarket chain.

So I'm not going to do the usual statement of facts about this bar because I left the wrapper in another state. There were two different cocoa contents going on because the bar consisted of a thick layer of milk chocolate on top of a thinner, dark layer strewn with ground coffee beans. I'm not typically crazy about coffee-flavored confections, and this was a pleasant surprise -- good, but not amazing. I found that the flavors worked but the little shards of coffee bean were too inconsistent.

That's all for now. Thanks, everyone, for reading my blog. I hope to come back next week with something closer to home. B.

Migros: Cremant

My traveling buddy -- and by that I mean my buddy who travels, not my buddy with whom I travel, because I haven't traveled very much recently beyond my usual New York-Massachusetts-New Jersey circuit -- brought this bar home to me from Switzerland! Migros is one of Switzerland's biggest supermarket chains, I guess, and being that Switzerland is the sort of unofficial chocolate capital of Europe, I had reasonably high hopes for this dark milk bar.

Migros: Cremant
Cocoa content: 53%
Notable ingredients: n/a
Origin: n/a

So the French word cremant sort of translates to.. creaming? That can't be right. Let's hope not. This bar was, however, exceptionally creamy, and it absolutely exceeded my expectations for what supermarket chocolate could accomplish. The last supermarket-brand chocolate bar I had on this blog was from Tesco, and that turned out to be a chalky, graceless nightmare. I'm thankful for this vast improvement. Plus, I love the packaging -- what the hell are those things, Raisinettes!?

This was a melty, full-bodied treasure. I loved the velvety, dense -- here I want to say "mouthfeel" but I won't -- you get the idea. This was dark milk chocolate at its best! This is a bar that I'd expect from a chocolate company -- not from a chain supermarket. But you know what, I've encountered surprises left and right in this crazy world: did you know Brody Jenner is dating Avril Lavigne!? Things are not always what they seem.

The Cremant bar has restored my faith in the existence of really good supermarket-brand chocolate. Cheers to that! A-.

Le Pain Quotidien: Lait Masala Chai AND Oyster and Chocolate Tasting Soiree

This chocolate review will be cut a little bit short so that I can talk about an event that I attended -- don't worry! -- it's about chocolates I have known, and the bivalves whom they have known.

Burnt orange. Masala chai. The French language. Which of these items does not fit betwixt the rest? Of course the answer is that tired, oft-encountered spice: masala chai. Of course it is that ill-used, outrageously corny spice disguised -- in broad daylight (i.e. Starbucks) -- as exotic. Did you know that chai is corny? Like men's aprons -- like the word "segue"? It is.

Le Pain Quotidien: Lait Masala Chai
Cocoa content: 38%
Notable ingredients: masala
Origin: n/a

But Le Pain Quotidien isn't corny, and their market products are consistently delicious. So is this chocolate bar, which I had admittedly tasted long before this week. Not syrupy or salty but spicy and subtle. NB: Unintentional alliteration? Not corny.



The other thing I wanted to discuss is a chocolate-centric event that I attended this evening at Vosges's Soho boutique -- thanks to my chocolate-savvy uncle. The event was an "Oyster and Chocolate Tasting Soiree" featuring Chef Nick Korbee of Smith and Mills (Tribeca.) Four oysters from varying waters were paired with 4 distinct Vosges truffles and 4 drinks. The highlights for me came from separate pairings -- the Calm Cove oysters (Washington) were best of the bivalves, the white chocolate truffle with Kumumoto oyster brine and pearl dust was the winner for chocolate, and my favorite drink was a simple glass of Miller Hi-Life. All in all, a very "heady" evening, as promised by the online blurb.

Rapunzel: Dark Chocolate with Hazelnuts

So, obviously I didn't take this picture. I couldn't seem to get a good picture of this bar with my own camera -- partly due to the lighting in my room, but possibly also because of how ugly it is. More on that later. This bar represents my return to Westchester. Michael got it for me at the Village Natural Market in Bronxville, where I get most of my chocolate while in school. This bar seemed to be just about the last one there that I hadn't tried though, so I'm going to have to find somewhere else to shop soon. Anyway:

Rapunzel: Dark Chocolate with Hazelnuts

Cocoa content: 55%*

Notable ingredients: hazelnuts

Origin: n/a

On my bar the label says "dark." On this picture above, they call it "semisweet." I think the latter is more accurate given this cocoa content.

How did this chocolate bar get to be so busted, you ask? Honestly, I'll never understand why decent chocolate companies tend to drop the ball on wrapper design -- isn't that, like 80% of why you're buying the chocolate? And even the companies who clearly try to de-emphasize packaging in favor of highlighting some special bean-to-bar organic product aren't necessarily skimping -- minimalism can be cool, too (Fine & Raw comes to mind.)

The last time I ate an ugly bar of chocolate, it turned out to be sub-par, i.e. ugly on the inside, too. Rapunzel, in contrast, has made a pretty delicious product, and then decided to risk it all by selling it in this mess of a wrapper. I can't tell you how many times I passed this bar up because of how it looks -- true, I eventually bought it (well, indicated that I wanted it bought for me,) but I buy an unspeakable amount of chocolate compared to the average person. Its turn had to come up sometime or other.

The snap was good, the hazelnuts nicely roasted and distributed evenly and subtly throughout so as to make itself known in the texture. I wouldn't have expected a bar of this cocoa content to be so sweet, so I'm guessing they added a lot of cane sugar -- always a plus. Also, the wrapper reports that Rapunzel conches for up to 24 hours, which is allegedly a lot longer than most companies conch for.

So, I sort of feel like: if you got it, flaunt it! Let down your long hair. And hire a new graphic designer. B+.

Lindt: Chili

My friend Robert bought this bar for me -- somewhere in Newton, MA, I believe. It is part of Lindt's Excellence collection, which does some origin bars and other fruity things. More on that later. Here are the statistics:

Lindt: Chili

Cocoa content: This is another bar that doesn't list cocoa content. I will say more about this. Suffice it to say (actually don't, because I'm going to say more,) that I am irked.

Notable ingredients: chili extract (premium red)

Origin: blend, made in Switzerland 

I've had a bunch of chili bars before (among them: Dagoba's Xocolotl, Christopher Elbow's no. 2, Dolfin's Dark Pink Peppercorns, Organic Meltdown's Cinnamon & Chili) and I've always felt like the spice was too strong, or that it wasn't balanced out by enough sweetness. I recently really enjoyed the Dolfin peppercorn bar because that was 59% cocoa, and was thus sweet enough to cut the sharpness of the chili. I wasn't sure how to approach this bar though because Lindt doesn't tell you the cocoa content. I've encountered this problem with Flyer Chocolates (just a few weeks ago) and it's really irksome. I think what's going on here is that it's not actually DARK chocolate as advertised. I think I wrote here that I would classify all cocoa contents above 60% as some sort of dark. This Lindt bar literally tastes like creamy, milk chocolate. I would probably put it at about 50%. It's frustrating that I can't confirm that anywhere, even on their website.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with milk chocolate. Lindt has always done milk better than dark. And to this bar's credit, I have never seen chili used this well. The melt here takes precedence over the edge of the chili, so you only encounter the spice's bite after the piece has melted in your mouth. It's subtle, basically, which reminds me of the Taza Mexican chocolate that I used to buy at the Farmers' Market in Lexington, MA. No appeal to chocolate extremists, but entirely delicious.

I said before that I wouldn't take points away for misleading packaging, because the main objective here is to know chocolates -- and to remember them fondly. I'll remember that this bar was a tasty treat, courtesy of a good pal. B+.

The last thing on the agenda: I want to address the issue of Origins. Obviously I have not eaten much origin chocolate (beans harvested from a single source) recently. I am not so interested in origins right now purely because there are so many whacky mix-ins out there -- how can I pass them up? The next two entries will be silly, but I'm going to try to keep my eye out for some interesting origins in the next few weeks. 

Flyer Chocolates: Milk Chocolate & Roasted Almonds

"Conched for days"

John Paris is the Swiss chocolatier of Flyer Chocolates, which is conservatively distributed out of Atlanta. I never see it anywhere. This I found at Eden Gourmet in South Orange, NJ. It's not often that I buy milk chocolate but to every cocoa content there is a season -- especially when roasted almonds are in the mix. This bar won out over the Vosges Goji bar I was considering, in part because I've already had Vosges a few times but also because goji berries taste of dirt. Here are the stats.

Flyer Chocolates: Milk Chocolate w/ Roasted Almonds

Cocoa content: I don't know because it's not listed on the wrapper or on the website.

Notable ingredients: Bourbon vanilla beans; roasted almonds

Origin: Swiss

I expected this to be really good because they talk about some weird "conching" technique in which the chocolate is kneaded and stirred for days to make it creamier. It's supposed to prevent the unpleasant aftertaste associated with sour-milk Hershey's-type chocolate. It's not that good though. The ratio of almonds the chocolate is really nice (read: heavy on almonds) but the chocolate is so devoid of an aftertaste that I feel like I didn't eat it at all. It's almost airy -- too light. It doesn't coat your mouth like a Dove or Lindt creamy milk does. It actually kind of tasted like a slightly sweeter version of the bland milk chocolate of which those Valentine's hearts are made -- the ones wrapped in pink foil. Or the chocolate that Raisinets are made of. Unimpressive, but still kind of tasty. Underwhelming is more accurate. B-.

Organic Meltdown: Cinnamon & Chili

This is what I just started eating last night. I bought it at Chelsea Organic on 7th Ave at 18th St. It's actually a brand that I haven't seen before although I buy most of my chocolate at organic markets like Whole Foods and Eden Gourmet. Some stats:

Organic Meltdown: Cinnamon & Chili

Cocoa content: 71%

Notable ingredients: cinnamon; chili

Chocolate source: Switzerland

What's cute about this bar is that there is a code on the inside of the wrapper that you can register on some website and save/dedicate a tree. There is a little note under the code that says "Any unclaimed trees will still be saved. Forever!" So I think maybe it is more about dedication and I don't do that. 

The cinnamon in this bar is kind of hard to taste; with every bite I get it for like 5 seconds before the chili overpowers it. The chili in this bar is definitely spicier than most other chili bars I've tasted, including a Dolfin bar that I had a few weeks ago. That is badass but it didn't really make the bar taste any better. The Organic Meltdown has great melting potential but is almost gummy upon chewing. I didn't get immense pleasure from tasting this bar. The block perforations are sensible and I like the wrapping. B.

Just a note about milk/dark labels. The system I'm working with right now is this: any cocoa content up to 35% is MILK. Between 35% and 60% is DARK MILK. Between 60% and 85% is DARK. Above 85% is EXTRA DARK. I will maybe include a notation if the bar calls itself "Semisweet," but most makers don't talk about that.