Vosges: Gingerbread Toffee Bar

Please excuse this long sabbatical -- I've been wrapped up in other things, but I wanted to stop in to tell you about a bar I've recently Known. This particular one was a Hanukkah present. It comes from Vosges, the excellent chocolate store with locations in Soho and the Upper East Side. Oddly, most high end chocolate stores seem to be concentrated in and around these two neighborhoods.

Vosges: Gingerbread Toffee Bar
Cocoa content: 65%
Notable ingredients: allspice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, toffee
Origin: n/a

This is one of Vosges's limited edition candy bars, probably just released for the holiday season. I thought it was going to be amazing because I'm a huge fan of gingerbread, but as it turns out, gingerbread is one of those things that you can only expect to enjoy when it is entirely itself -- in other words -- not trying to lend its graces to other treats, candies, cookies, pastries, and the like. With the exception of cookies -- gingerbread cookies are great -- nothing is a good vehicle for gingerbread spices. If you've had a disgusting gingerbread latte at Starbucks, then you already know.

I don't know what I expected -- for there to be little nuggets of chewy gingerbread tucked into the chocolate bar? Needless to say, there were not. The word "gingerbread" on the bar actually just indicates the presence of spices commonly used in gingerbread -- allspice, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. And the bar wasn't simply flavored with these spices -- rather, the toffee was flavored with these spices, and the toffee was -- allegedly -- strewn throughout the bar. So, at this point we're about 3 degrees of separation away from gingerbread, the advertised star of this bar.

As it turns out, there wasn't even any detectable toffee, really. There was something crunchy, which I still can't identify, and there was a certain stale space flavor, reminiscent of those gingerbread lattes. My dreams were a little bit dashed.

In fairness, I didn't get to try this bar at its absolute best. My apartment is not really a hospitable place for chocolate right now -- it's unspeakably hot during the day while I'm at work (I open windows when I get home), so it gets melty if I leave it out, but it gets chalky if I put it in the fridge. Any and all suggestions for the care and keeping of chocolate are welcome.

This bar gets a C.

Wonka Exceptionals: Scrumdiddlyumptious Chocolate Bar

I'm not kidding about the name of this bar. It's called Scrumdiddlyumptious Chocolate Bar, and it's made by the Wonka company, and I got it at CVS. But when I bought this chocolate bar there was also a post-Valentine's Day sale at CVS, so I also bought a box of chocolate eggs filled with peanut butter. Those, to be honest, were initially more compelling than this chocolate bar, so I've only Known this bar for the past few days. But I've come to know it quite well.

Wonka Exceptionals: Scrumdiddlyumptious Chocolate Bar
Cocoa content: Unlisted (guess: 35%)
Notable ingredients: toffee; cookie bits; peanuts
Origin: please!

I was originally a little disappointed upon opening this bar, because I was expecting there would be some sort of golden ticket gimmick or at least some sparkly foil. As it turns out, there was a golden ticket promotion for the Wonka Exceptionals chocolate bars, but now apparently the promotion has ended (according to the Wonka website) and I don't know how the company even sells these bars anymore without some sort of Willy Wonka contest shtick. Anyway -- I guess I bought it.

The ingredients make this bar sound like a big mess, and in some ways it is. It broke in about 15 places before I even opened it, and there are crags of an unidentifiable biscuity substance peeking out on the surface of the bar. I have to tell you: I tasted toffee, I tasted cookies, and I didn't taste peanuts at all. But the cookies were actually pretty delightful -- they're like buttery animal crackers, crumbled and strewn throughout a sea of mediocre milk chocolate and dubious toffee-like bits. The bar could have benefited from a more deliberate design (and less false advertising -- where were the peanuts?) but I won't lie -- it was a treat nonetheless.

Next week, we give the candy sandwich treatment another go -- this time, handcrafted. B-.

Jelina Chocolatier: Nougat au Miel

I purchased this extremely exciting bar at the Food Emporium Chocolate Shop on 68th and 3rd Avenue -- right near where Grandpa used to live, and I still have a reason to visit the neighborhood. The Chocolate Shop just started carrying Jelina Chocolatier products, and there is virtually no information about this company on the web so it's all kind of very mysterious and nougaty. This was an exceptional find.

Jelina Chocolatier: Nougat au Miel
Cocoa content: 36%
Notable ingredients: honey, nougat
Origin: n/a

Wowee Zowee -- both my reaction to this bar and the name of an album by Pavement, the greatest band of all time basically whom I saw perform in Central Park on the very same day that I bought this bar, thus rendering that day one of the very best of my life. Wowee Zowee -- this was delicious. Basically, we have a lot of little squares of decadent chocolate absolutely saturated with little shards of honey nougat, at once crunchy and chewy and sweet and nutty.

If you put a square of this in your mouth and let it melt, you're left with a solid conglomeration of tiny nougat pieces, which then slowly disintegrate, getting stuck in your teeth here and there, always delicious.

This was a near perfect bar. I am so lucky to have encountered this little chocolatier from Montreal, about which I know very little but whose packaging and product I certainly admire. A.

Berkshire Bark: Jumpin' Java

Here's another Berkshire Bark bar from Dave's Fresh Pasta in Somerville, MA -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? But there's actually a ton of great specialty food shopping in that little city, and many interesting little shopping districts that I never knew about in high school because they weren't on the Red Line. Behold: Jumpin' Java.

Berkshire Bark: Jumpin' Java
Cocoa content: unlisted (guess: 60%)
Notable ingredients: Brace yourself -- roasted almonds; espresso toffee; crushed coffee beans; caramelized nibs
Origin: n/a

Now, I'll forgive Berkshire Bark for the corny name "Jumpin' Java," which is perhaps even cornier than the last Berkshire Bark product I had -- "Pretzelogical" -- but, hey, at least this time I was prepared! And, to be honest, this bar was jumpin'. This was a monstrous hunk of chocolate filled to the brim with whole almonds, amazingly delicious homemade toffee, and lots of roasted coffee flavor. I'm not crazy about coffee-flavored things in general, but there was so much sugar happening here that the acidity I usually object to was neutralized.

The only thing that was decidedly unpleasant about this bar was that it's impossible to break off pieces of it. For those of us who eat chocolate in a civilized manner, bit by bit, night after night, with attention to the subtlest of details, the unsegmented design of the bar was kind of difficult to deal with. It's basically just a hunk of thick, densely packed chocolate, with nary an easy-breaking line in sight. Berkshire Bark should sell these snacks in little bite-sized pieces, all contained in a bag, but then -- alas -- I might never have Known it.

All in all, a delectable bar from a delectable state. B+.

Chocolat Moderne: Kashmir Spice

Readers: Is Whole Foods taunting you with gorgeous chocolate displays? My local Whole Foods has set up this nice little table by the coffee counter and on it they've artfully displayed some of the most beautiful chocolate bars I've ever seen, along with some other special treats like Herrell's chocolate fudge (of Boston!) And this is in addition to the quarter aisle that is already devoted entirely to chocolate -- which, in some towns, offers the best selection around. I've been taunted - and enticed - by this bar for weeks, so I finally decided to shell out $8 for it. Actually -- make that $40, when you take into account the other 4 that I needed to complete this photo. Just kidding -- camera is on the fritz.

Chocolat Moderne: Kashmir Spice

Cocoa content: 51%

Notable ingredients: toffee; cardamom; cinnamon; cloves

Origin: n/a

What is with me and chai spices recently? I feel like I am forever trying to relive the wonder that was that Montezuma's Nutmeg bar -- but, alas, none of these more recent chai bars contain nutmeg. This Chocolat Moderne bar was in fact a little different because it included toffee, too. Actually, the toffee itself may have been infused with the chai spices, which would mean this was a chai toffee chocolate bar.

At first, I didn't respect this bar. I left it on my desk during one of the hottest days of the summer when my AC wasn't on, and when I tried it for the first time it was obviously soft and chewy. Then I stuck it in the fridge for a few days, and when I tried it again the whole bar had shifted a bit, such that squares were no longer squares and the toffee stuck out in parts where the chocolate had thinned, crag-like.

So I felt like there was something wrong with the texture of this bar, but that might have been entirely my fault. I thought the toffee stood out too much from the other flavors, that it was too tough and hard for the consistency of the chocolate, and that eating it was a separate experience from tasting the chai spices. The chocolate tasted more or less like those Le Pain Quotidien and Dolfin bars -- the remains of which, by the way, I crumbled into a bowl of dough so as to make Chai Chocolate Chip cookies.

So I might have missed my chance to sample this bar in its prime, but as we've seen before on this blog, there are other spiced bars in the sea. B.

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-.

Kshocolat: Honeycomb & Vanilla

This is another aesthetically pleasing purchase from the Food Emporium Fine Chocolates shop on 68th and 3rd. I've never seen Kshocolat products anywhere else -- they're a Scottish company, and from the looks of their website they haven't extended into the U.S. very much so far. Kshocolat does some interesting flavor combinations, including lemon & pepper and orange & cardamom. They also make chocolate covered currants, chocolate covered "mint nuggets," and something called the "Party Hamper" which is really just a collection of chocolate gift items. Go figure.

Kshocolat: Honeycomb & Vanilla
Cocoa content: 30%
Notable ingredients: honeycomb
Origin: n/a

I didn't list vanilla among the notable ingredients, because it's indeed present here but notably not notable; vanilla -- and specifically bourbon vanilla -- is an ingredient in most chocolate bars these days. And of course I was drawn to this bar not for the vanilla but for the honeycomb. I haven't quite had honeycomb in a chocolate bar before, although I've had a lot of things like honeycomb: Brulee Crunch by Jacques Torres, Butterscotch by Butlers. Honey is a type of sugar that I endorse, and the textural experience indicated by "comb" can only help the situation.

This bar was definitely a success. The chocolate was dense and creamy -- not fibrous or dusty like expensive milk chocolate can sometimes be. And the creaminess was punctuated by little crispy bits of honeycomb, which appears to be a combination of honey and milk solids. It wasn't really so different from the other bars that I named above, which leads me to believe that honeycomb, butterscotch, and burnt sugar are all kind of the same thing. Discuss?

Also, though the Fine Chocolates shop at the Food Emporium still has 4-6 bars I've never tried, I have to start looking around for the next inspiring chocolate store that will keep this blog going. Let me know if you have any suggestions in New York! This bar gets an A-.

Berkshire Bark Chocolate: Pretzelogical

Upon the recommendation of a friend, I checked out the chocolate selection at Dave's Fresh Pasta (in Somerville) during my last visit to Boston. Dave's specializes in homemade pasta but it's also an impressive specialty foods shop. They carry a lot of nice local chocolate, and an interesting selection of beer and cheeses. Also, they had a bowl of fresh cherry peppers by the cashier. This chocolate bar, which was made in Sheffield, Massachusetts, stood out because of the name. I can't resist the promise of pretzels.

Berkshire Bark Chocolate: Pretzelogical

Cocoa content: unlisted (my guess is 30%)

Notable ingredients: pretzels, sea salt caramel, peanut butter

Origin: n/a

What do you expect, from an entire bar of chocolate-covered pretzel? And if it were smothered with peanut butter and pressed with chips of salty, hardened caramel? Sometimes I feel it's unfair to put a bar this ambitious on my blog and, in doing so, compare it with other chocolate bars. This is really like a block of fudge: about a centimeter thick, and spilling over with chunks of pretzel, shards of sea salt caramel, and smudges of peanut butter. It is a solid, unsegmented bar and it crumbled upon breaking.

Milk chocolate, pretzels, caramel, and peanut butter. I couldn't make it up if I tried. Peanut butter, the dark horse candidate for this bar's third piece in the salty trifecta: it added a perfectly creamy note to the otherwise jagged assortment of things. The pretzels were appropriately crunchy and the caramel was neither too sticky nor too salty.

And what I like about Berkshire Bark -- other than the fact that they're based in my beautiful home-state -- is that they carefully source the ingredients that they use in this excellent chocolate bar. The caramel is homemade and flavored with really nice sea salt, and the peanut butter is entirely natural: just peanuts, oil, sugar, and salt, which is how peanut butter should be. The pretzels come from a century-old Pennsylvania pretzel maker -- it doesn't guarantee their quality, but it shows that Berkshire Bark is interested in all the parts that go into their chocolate bars, and not just in the end result.

As it turns out, though, the end result is pretty much perfect. A.

B.T. McElrath Chocolatier: Prairie Dog Chocolate Bar

I recently enjoyed a short little piece in the Spring Fashion issue of New York Magazine called "Give Me Sodium or Give Me Death" -- written by Gabrielle Hamilton, chef at Prune. She was writing about salt as a sort of response to Bloomberg's recent crackdown, and her justification of her liberal salting policies can be summed up by this line: "Salt makes everything it touches taste more like itself -- from an egg to a steak to a tomato." So, given that this bar, given to me by my friend Christopher, is basically bathed in salt, I kept Hamilton's lesson in mind throughout my week of consumption.

B.T. McElrath Chocolatier: Prairie Dog Chocolate Bar

Cocoa content: 40%

Notable ingredients: toffee, almonds, sea salt

Origin: n/a

This bar, like last week's, was made by a company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So, yes -- that state actually does exist, and people seem to be eating chocolate there. The bar is called Prairie Dog, but it seems to have another name, sort of sheepishly printed on the side of the box: "Silky Frisky Almond Pal." I think almonds were actually the least present flavor in this chocolate -- salt being the most present and butter toffee coming in second. Salt is obviously laced throughout, but the bottom of the bar is actually dusted with gigantic, visible crystals of sea salt, such that when you put a piece in your mouth it's the first thing your tongue encounters -- unless you eat chocolate upside down, in which case stop reading because I'm not here to fuck around.

"A hint of sea salt," reads the back of the bar, in the understatement of the century. But why does salt work here so well -- and, believe me, it does -- while in other circumstances there is a thin line between perfection and excess? I think the heft of the bar in a way makes up for what could be perceived as over-salting in a thinner, more delicate bar. There's no snap to speak of: the pieces are big and chunky and basically bursting with shards of butter toffee. I approached it more as a candy bar -- kind of like a cleaned-up Butterfinger, I guess -- than as a bar of chocolate, so I really enjoyed the decadence.

Did the sea salt make the other ingredients taste more like themselves? Well, it's kind of hard to tell. Everything blended together in salty, decadent majesty. I think the reason it all held together was that the chocolate was so good and so plentiful. The state of Minnesota has fed me well this winter, and for that I'm glad to have known the Prairie Dog. A.

Lindt: Irish Coffee

The reason -- the sole reason -- I bought this bar was because I'm not sure if you can find it in the United States. In any case, it's distinctly Irish! I didn't even really know what Irish coffee was until after I bought the bar. Someone I was with ordered one this past weekend. It's basically just hot coffee mixed with Irish whiskey and a bunch of sugar and cream. It's a dessert cocktail, I think. I had no expectation that I would like this bar, and that lack of expectation was sadly confirmed -- it was nasty! But it merits discussion, as all bars do.

Lindt: Irish Coffee

Cocoa content: 30%

Notable ingredients: whiskey and coffee

Origin: n/a

I'm not sure if I've ever blogged about a Lindt bar with fillings before. I don't just mean ingredients, but rather liquid fillings that are actually poured into and contained by the chocolate casings. These bars are usually too sweet and messy for me, and the actual quality of the chocolate is totally immeasurable. Still, I've found that Ghirardelli does a pretty good job with it -- mostly because they don't use very much filling.

The Lindt bars are not composed merely of squares containing fillings -- the squares are more like capsules, flimsy chocolate edges around a bulging, dome-like chocolate container. There's really not much chocolate to be had here, and a whole lot of Irish coffee. You couldn't even bite halfway through one of the pieces without releasing globs of the filling that would then slide down your chin.

And as for the filling, it was just as you'd expect -- sickly sweet, unpleasant in texture, and overflowing with some weird, unidentifiable gelling agent. This was all very disgusting but, as I said, expected. Curse you, McCambridge's of Galway! D+.

Butler's: Butterscotch

As you can probably tell, I did not take the above picture -- that's right, I did not arrange a cascading pile of Butler's butterscotch milk chocolate pieces in front of the box against a white backdrop. Basically, the internet in Ireland is a crap-shoot and I can't consistantly upload photographs onto this website -- unless they're from the internet? Go figure. Anyway, I got this bar from a Butlers chocolate shop in Galway. Let's discuss.

Butlers: Butterscotch
Cocoa content: Unlisted -- I'm guessing 30%
Notable ingredients: butterscotch pieces
Origin: n/a

The Irish -- actually, Europeans in general, I think -- are obsessed with butterscotch. It pops up everywhere -- even in a Green & Black's bar that isn't available in the States to my knowledge. It's been so interesting, spending enough time here to learn about the different kinds of flavors that do well in one part of the world and are (comparatively) unpopular in another. Like butterscotch, for instance -- I can't think of many popular candies in the states that make use of it. Even the butterfinger bar is more of a crispy butterscotch alternative than the real thing.

Butterscotch is pretty tasty, if a bit low-brow. It's made mostly with brown sugar and butter -- nothing wrong with that -- but it gets very sticky and gummy pretty fast once in your mouth, and it hardens onto your teeth like no other. Taste and texture-wise, it's pretty similar to honeycomb, which is another popular flavor over here.

Butlers is a nice chocolate company, and one of the few purely Irish chocolate companies I've come across. They started in Dublin in 1932, as I gleaned from their website. Anyway, this is a really nice tasting milk chocolate, sort of on par with a Ghirardelli bar with filling -- only slightly better than Cadbury, which has a Hershey-like monopoly here on bars. The butterscotch chunks, however, I took a slight issue with. This is really the kind of candy that needs to be subtly integrated into a chocolate, or else it overwhelms the milk texture. The pieces were big enough to get all stuck in my teeth, which made the overall bite more difficult to enjoy. Still, the prevalence of butterscotch flavoring in this country intrigues me, and I'm sure I'll be back for more -- probably to sample the Green & Black's bar soon. I give this bar a B.

Cadbury: (Dairy Milk) Turkish

I'm approaching my third week spent in Europe (this time around, at least) and I'm wondering why I didn't pounce upon all the chocolate I saw in France and Germany. It's not that Ireland doesn't have chocolate, and it's not that I've exactly looked hard yet, either, but in my limited search I have found little other than Cadbury.

It's not really a bad thing, because Cadbury is delicious. But it might mean that this blog will see a lot of Cadbury in the coming months. That, and Nestle, too. And maybe once I get my bearings about me, I'll find a health food store or a more upscale food shop where they sell more unusual things. For now, I'll just have to deal with same old delicious Cadbury bars.

Cadbury: (Dairy Milk) Turkish

Cocoa content: 21%

Notable ingredients: Turkish delight jelly*

Origin: n/a

*Turkish delight jelly. What is it? Well, we'll start with: what is Turkish delight? Turkish delight is (usually) small cubes of thick, firm, sugary jelly, dusted with sugar and often flavored with lemon or nut flavors. It does indeed come from Turkey, but is now equally popular throughout all of continental Europe. If you've eaten it before, you probably ate it out of a tin.

Now this chocolate filling, of course, is not the same dense jelly dusted with sugar. This is a softer, more melty jelly that is engineered as a filling for the chocolate casing as opposed to a stand-alone confection to be held between the fingers and bitten into. And basically, I've determined that the jelly here is entirely sugar and emulsifiers. It's just gooey, pink sugar. It has a slightly medicinal taste, like the good cough syrup -- the light pink one?

And the chocolate is delicious. It's creamy, thick, and melty -- never chalky or stale. I have to give this bar a mediocre grade because of the creepiness of the Turkish jelly, but for a bar of this ambition the chocolate sure is good. B-.

Chocolate Bar: Raspberry Jam

I got this at the same chocolate store I was talking about last week -- Chocolate Bar -- but this one is actually from Chocolate Bar, whereas the dreaded rose water bar came from Chocopologie and was merely distributed out of Chocolate Bar. This is a really cute place that I recommend everyone go to. Here is the info:

Chocolate Bar: Raspberry Jam

Cocoa content: 65%*

Notable ingredients: raspberry filling

Origin: n/a

* The bar doesn't indicate cocoa content and the website doesn't, either. The woman behind the counter told me that 65% is standard for their dark chocolate bars. 

I'm loving the packaging. As far as Chocolate Bar's selection goes, this was one of the simpler bars. Many were crowded with mix-ins: rum, banana cream, marshmallows. Some of it looked appealing but I opted for this one out of preference for a simple, dependable combo. 

The truth is, a few things went wrong with this bar. Firstly, I let it sit on my desk over a stretch of sweltering days, so it got a little soft. Being filled with jam, it was already hard to break along the perforations: one mis-snap and the jam would ooze through the cracks. What with the heat-induced softness, breaking this bar proved to be a pretty messy endeavor.

Furthermore, the jam just wasn't that great. I was hoping for sweetness, tartness, maybe even seeds. Instead I got a gummy, bland puree of corn syrupy fruit filling. It tasted not so much of raspberry as of some generic, indistinct Smucker's. As for the chocolate, I didn't feel that it was so great either. Maybe Chocolate Bar is the kind of place where you want to stick to the truffles and the drinkables. I'm not ruling it out yet, but so far everything I've gotten there has been only ok at best, and deplorable at worst. B-.

Jacques Torres: Brulee Crunch - Milk Chocolate

Whole Foods just started selling Jacques Torres chocolate, it seems. Welcome to West Orange, Jacques!! My mom bought this bar for me. In fact, I should warn you -- I expect postings to speed up for a little while because I received a great deal of chocolate recently. Brace yourselves. Here's the info on this bar:

Jacques Torres: Brulee Crunch - Milk Chocolate

Cocoa content: unlisted; my guess is 35%

Notable ingredients: butter; sugar

Origin: What do you think? Should I get rid of this category? 

Inquiring minds want to know: what is brulee crunch? What exactly is creme brulee and what does it have to do with this bar of chocolate? What are butter crunch bits? The blurb about this bar on Torres's website refers to its "barely noticeable caramel crunch." What is caramel? This bar begs a lot of questions for a piece of candy! First of all, one thing should be clear: we are dealing with the crunchy top surface of a creme brulee here, and not the custardy interior. We'll call this crunchy top the "brulee crunch." This surface is made of burnt, buttered sugar -- also known as caramelized sugar -- also known as caramel. So, brulee crunch, caramel, butter crunch bits: SAME thing, same delicious thing. 

Creme brulee, that classic tawdry delicacy. I don't like it and I never order it. I've also expressed how I feel about its cousin caramel; see here. But if you take just about anything and make it very subtle, it will probably taste good in a sea of creamy milk chocolate. And this is seriously good milk chocolate. My only complaint would be that it was a little too buttery, almost like butterscotch -- it gave me that feeling in the back of my throat that I associate with ice cream, like I really need to drink water. 

An added point of interest: this is one of the best looking chocolate bars I've seen -- not the packaging, but the actual bar itself. It looks like it was poured into a mold in which Jacques Torres's name is spelled out in raised cursive letters. It was really pretty, and then I ate it. A-.

Christopher Elbow: No. 6: Dark Rocks

This bar cost me a whopping $6.99 (before tax!) at Food Emporium, Union Sq. But since I don't spend money on anything else really, and because this bar has POP ROCKS in it, I thought: why not? Here is what this bar is all about:

Christopher Elbow: No. 6: Dark Rocks

Cocoa content: 61%

Notable ingredients: "popping candy (sugar)"

Origin: Not at all. Blend, American company

This bar is funny in a way that the Ritter Sport Cornflakes bar was not, because Christopher Elbow is one of the classier American chocolatiers. Elbow, who usually works with high-content Venezuelan beans and sensual spice blends, dips into the low-brow scene with this, his bar no. 6. 

Make no mistake: popping candy means Pop Rocks, those flaky little carbonated crackling candies that, if consumed with Coke, would kill you or give you an abortion or something -- I don't quite remember. Anyway, those were eaten out of a bag, and these have been mixed into some of the finest chocolate made in the country. The result is mixed. The pop rocks themselves were unevenly dispersed: in my first few bites, I felt only a subtle crackling post-chew. In some bites to follow, I heard and felt a loud, satisfying pop almost instantly upon biting into the chocolate.

I cannot tell a lie: it was mad fun. But the suspense that the popping candies created kind of distracted from the chocolate, and when I made a point of paying attention to the chocolate, I was still annoyed by the crackling: I've always been unusually sensitive to carbonation, but I feel like even those who enjoy fizzy soda would agree that the popping sensation is incompatible with fatty, thick, or melting things. 

That said, what I enjoyed about this bar is what I enjoyed last time I ate one of Christopher Elbow's creations, his no. 2. The snap is sharp and the beans fruity, sweet. The packaging is really beautiful and everyone I gave a piece to enjoyed it: fun times all around! I give it a B.

Nirvana: 72% w/ Sea Salt & Caramel

I started this bar last night. I have never tried this maker -- Nirvana -- before. I bought it at Whole Foods in West Orange, NJ. Here are the stats:

Nirvana: 72% w/ Sea Salt & Caramel

Cocoa content: 72%

Notable ingredients: sea salt; caramel

Origin: Belgium

My interest in this bar was entirely based on the inclusion of sea salt. Caramel is a vulgar, low-brow confection. It doesn't move me. But sea salt goes wonderfully with chocolate, as the Chicago-based chocolate maker Vosges knows.

Luckily this bar doesn't taste much like caramel; it is, however, remarkably salty. I would say it's almost too salty, insofar as the intense edge interferes with the pleasure of the melt. It had a great snap to it, though. I got the sense that Nirvana actually makes wonderful chocolate, and just added too much salt to this recipe. The packaging was not special. B-.

A note about the tags on this post: I am creating a new tag for Salt, and another called "Sugars" which will include the caramel in this bar as well as other added sugars.