Blue Smoke: Grilled Jalapeno & Salty Peanut

Blue Smoke is an NY barbecue restaurant owned by Union Square Hospitality Group, where (full disclosure) I am currently interning. I received this bar in a nice little goody bag at the intern orientation along with a Shake Shack t-shirt and assorted other treats. Like breath fresheners. Blue Smoke has a chocolate bar, and I'm relieved that they've abandoned the pig on this endeavor -- opting instead for grilled jalapenos and salty peanuts, which are two of the best things in the world.

Blue Smoke: Grilled Jalapeno & Salty Peanut
Cocoa content: Unlisted (guess: 65%)
Notable ingredients: grilled jalapeno; dry roasted peanuts; sea salt
Origin: n/a

This bar is a rich man's Mr. Goodbar with a spicy finish. Actually, I was trying to figure out if it would be more meaningful to compare the taste with the Nutrageous bar, but I feel like that candy bar came on the scene a little late and that I may be the only person who ever really ate them.. daily. Both are apt comparisons: salty and nutty but still textured and sweet -- this isn't milk chocolate, but it's not too dark either. It's completely delicious, and the chocolate is dark enough such that it never gets too sweet.

Plus, the jalapeno made for a interesting experience amidst what would otherwise be an unoriginal (albeit consistently successful) formula. I love the taste of fresh jalapenos, but when dried and scattered throughout a salty chocolate bar, they retain little of the savory flavor and the spiciness is what really stands out. In this case, to me, the taste of the jalapeno was indistinguishable from the average chili pepper one encounters in a chocolate bar. This wasn't a problem -- I always like a little bit of spice in chocolate, given that it's not overdone. In this case, it was utterly delicious.

So, who knew: jalapenos and peanuts are a perfect pair; they go together like Ronnie and Sammy (like Chuck and Blair, NOT like Audrina and Ryan Cabrera.) And, furthermore, when thoroughly roasted and thrown together with a bunch of salt and sugar, they exceed expectations and surpass those candy bars that paved the way for them.

The Federal Trade Commission might take issue with my raving review of this product from the company I'm interning for, but I cannot tell a lie and I could not keep this one to myself. My readers will just have to believe me. This is what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. This bar gets an A.

Chuao: Firecracker

The other night I was relaxing in my chambers, watching Real Housewives (Danielle is a nutcase) when my mother shrieked in the other room because the dog got into the chocolate. See? A whole chunk was missing from the bottom left-hand corner before I even had a taste. Can you blame her? She just wants to do what I do! Unfortunately for her, though, dogs can't eat chocolate. She was ok in the end, but I have no doubt that this insane chocolate bar was a pretty weird trip for her. Read on.

Chuao: Firecracker
Cocoa content: 60%
Notable ingredients: chipotle; salt; popping candy
Origin: Venezuela

"A blooming, buzzing confusion" -- that's how William James characterized a baby's perception of the universe, and it aptly describes the experience of the Firecracker bar for a small, timid puppy such as my own. This bar was crazy, even for a human who's used to eating things like yogurt and whiskey encased in chocolate. I encountered popping candy (a.k.a. Pop Rocks) immediately in most bites, and they were the big pebbly kind that make an audible cracking noise. Each bite finished spicily with the chipotle, and the salt intensified everything -- as salt is want to do!

I'll never know how my dog experienced this bar because she doesn't blog. But I think it was a little too busy for my tastes. The chocolate is single origin but I could barely taste it amidst the chaos (the Chuaos?) Pop Rocks obliterate just about any other taste or texture, so they dominated the bar in an overwhelming way. Still, I had fun -- eating the bar and imagining what it might have been like for Wink.

I forgot to mention that I bought this bar at Food Emporium -- but I also received the same one from Dan days later. I want to assure all my readers that I now keep all my chocolate bars in a shoebox on my desk -- out of reach of all animals. All for me. B-.

Laughing Moon Chocolates: Chipotle & Cinnamon

I am always excited to try chocolate made by small companies in the Northeast, but since I moved out of New England I don't often see these types of bars in stores. Luckily, I have friends who like to drive unspeakably long distances, stay with strangers on farms, and bring back chocolatey relics. This bar, given to me by Dan, is made by the Laughing Moon Chocolates company based in Stowe, Vermont. The company makes all sorts of chocolates, ranging from handmade truffles to chocolate-covered cookies. This bar is part of their Signature line.

Laughing Moon Chocolates: Chipotle & Cinnamon
Cocoa content: Unlisted (my guess is 60%)
Notable ingredients: cinnamon; dried chipotle pepper
Origin: n/a

Chipotle doesn't mean much to me beyond delicious Mexican fast food, but I understand that it's also the name of a pepper. Chipotle peppers look like wrinkly, dried out brown pods, and they smell smokey like Lapsang Souchong tea. Or like bacon. What I didn't know previously is that chipotle peppers are actually just smoke-dried jalapenos -- they retain little of the heat of jalapenos in the smoking process, I guess.

But anyway, this information is irrelevant, because I didn't taste a hint of chipotle in the chocolate bar. Was I not tasting closely enough? Cinnamon, the other notable ingredient in this bar, was certainly present and dominant in every bite. While I've found some flavors -- like chili and salt -- to be overwhelming in unsubtle doses, there was something kind of nice about the heavy load of cinnamon here. It tasted really homemade -- like the hardened product of a vat of chocolate into which a bunch of cinnamon was poured. Though it may indeed have overpowered the chipotle, cinnamon is a ritzy treasure, and I appreciated that it came out to play.

The wrapper promises that "you won't find chocolate like this anywhere else," and as far as I know, they're right. Ubiquitous as cinnamon appears to be in pastry, it is not often paired with chocolate -- and chipotle is of course an even rarer accompaniment. This bar's rating can be attributed to its originality as well as its taste: B+.

Theo: Spicy Chile

Theo is one of my favorite American chocolate makers -- they're based in Seattle and they have four main brands of chocolate: Classic Collection (to which this bar belongs); Fantasy Flavors (this collection consists of the 3400 Phinney bars you've seen here); Single Origin (here's an example); and something new called the Theo & Jane Goodall collection, which I have not yet tried but which sounds adorable. This attractive bar was purchased at my trusty Village Natural Market in Bronxville.

Theo: Spicy Chile

Cocoa content: 70%

Notable ingredients: chili peppers

Origin: n/a

I think chili is one of those chocolate companions that strike the seasoned chocolate eater (may I be so bold?) as sort of trite, and which at the same time can really shock people new to the game. Another one of those flavors would be salt -- "like mayonnaise on a bowling ball" a friend once said of the seeming incompatibility. If you pay attention you actually see it all the time, but it's not immediately intuitive like, say, chocolate and raspberry. Anyway, I've eaten a lot of chili chocolate bars in my day and the whole thing has become a little bit routine. And then came Theo.

Reader, believe me when I tell you I am a chili head. I pour Sriracha on my pizza and tinker with habaneros in my spare time. But I was not expecting the hotness that was this chocolate bar. Objectively, I should say, it wasn't so hot. It was less hot, for instance, than a jalapeno pepper. But every other chocolate bar has been only mildly spicy -- I mean: a little playful wave of spice as the taste subsides. This bar made me gag and run for water. It was so much spicier than I had expected.

Granted, the nutrition label lists three distinct kinds of chili: guajillo, cayenne, and pasilla. On the Scoville chili pepper heat scale, those three peppers are in roughly the same range as the jalapeno. Perhaps Theo is just a little more serious about showcasing the ingredients it uses. But, in my mind, Theo is a chocolate maker first and foremost. So, really, the spice shouldn't be so intense that it overwhelms the chocolate, which is exactly what happened here. I can't even tell you how the chocolate tasted or what the interaction of chocolate and spice was like, because all I got was spice and discomfort.

Maybe those uninformed chili naysayers are right -- when chocolate really tastes like chili -- and not just a subtle hint -- it's all wrong. This bar gets a C.

Perugina: Peperoncino

I just navigated the entire Perugina website in Italian in order to learn about this bar -- yes, yes, I know about Google Translate, but for some reason it didn't work on this site no matter how many times I tried! So, please excuse some lapses in information. Anyway, the facts:

Perugina: Peperoncino (The NERO Collection)

Cocoa content: unlisted -- or hidden in Italian somewhere on that website

Notable ingredients: chili pepper -- or "estratto di peperoncino"

Origin: n/a

This is now the third spicy bar I'll have reviewed on this blog. I'll compare it to the others in two categories: the quality of the chocolate independent of the chili, and the interplay of the chili and chocolate flavors. I don't know the cocoa content of this bar and it's hard to estimate because it was really dark and snappy but surprisingly sweet: I would guess, roughly, that it's about 65%. The bar had remarkably good texture, especially for one that was so tasty. Usually when a bar snaps as cleanly as this, it's 80% or over, and totally devoid of sweetness. This bar was sweet in very much the same way as the Lindt bar that I tasted earlier: sugary to an almost milky -- though still pleasing -- degree, with a strong, balanced wave of spice following the initial few chews. 

It's a good thing, as far as I'm concerned, to think, upon biting into a chili chocolate bar: "does this really contain chili?" The best spicy chocolates taste completely unspiced until the bar has started to melt a little bit in your mouth -- say 5 chews or 5 seconds -- and I say that for two reasons.

1.) It lets you really get a feel for the chocolate before the spice distracts you.

2.) It gives you a chance to develop the sugary taste to the extent that it can balance out the spice -- which, here at least, is really strong!

This was really good, and comparable to the Lindt chili bar in every way. So, I'll give it the same grade: 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. 

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.