B.T. McElrath Super Red Chocolate Bar

3oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Chocolate liquor, sugar, cocoa butter, butter, soy lecithin, vanilla, tart cherries, strawberries, raspberries

12g sugar/43g serving (27.9% by wt.)

Corporate Info: [Copied from 5/26/12] Minneapolis's B.T. McElrath was founded by a chef, and accordingly seems to focus on creating unusual flavored bars and interesting seasonal confections. No organic/fair trade here. B.T. McElrath's Chile Limón Bar is one of my favorites, and while I was less enamored with the seemingly popular Salty Dog, I'm always up for more of the company's fun flavor combos.

Today's Bar: 70% cacao with cherries, strawberries, and raspberries. I'm not hugely into berry bars, but that's just a matter of personal taste, and it's always interesting to see how different companies approach the fruit in terms of size, sweetness, consistency, etc.

Appearance: Semi-glossy with yellow undertones and, on the reverse, bumps from chocolate-covered fruit pieces.

Smell: Mild, though a broken bar reveals the scent of light, dried raspberries and strawberries, with the freshness of freeze dried fruit (a la Just Tomatoes) rather than than fruit that is sweet and moist or artificial and overpowering. I should note that I opened this bar long before I had a chance to review it, and sometimes that means a lot of the scent is lost.

Taste: The chocolate is B.T. McElrath's usual, mild and creamy (see the extra fat in the ingredients). The small, copious berry pieces add a punch of tart, fruity flavor and a slight crunch and chewiness, and the red flecks look nice in a broken bar, as you can see accurately on the box. As a co-taster said as he grabbed for another square, “This is such good chocolate!” Because berries aren't my thing I won't go out of my way to buy this bar again, but if the description sounds good to you, you probably won't be disappointed.

Conclusion: B.T. McElrath Super Red Chocolate Bar is mild and pleasant, with tiny punches of flavor from fresh-tasting fruit.

B.T. McElrath Ginger Toffee Chocolate Bar

3oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Chocolate liquor, sugar, cane sugar, cocoa butter, milk fat, salted butter, soy lecithin, vanilla, ginger, sodium bicarbonate, cayenne pepper, natural flavor, sea salt.

13g sugar/43g serving (30.2% by wt.)

Corporate Info: (Altered from 12/17/11) Minneapolis's B.T. McElrath was founded by a chef, and accordingly seems to focus on creating unusual flavored bars and interesting seasonal confections. No organic/fair trade here. B.T. McElrath's Chile Limón Bar is one of my favorites, and while I was less enamored with the seemingly popular Salty Dog, I'm always up for more of the company's fun flavor combos.

Today's Bar: Continuing a ginger theme is B.T. McElrath's bar of both ginger toffee and candied ginger in 70% cacao. The complex-sounding flavor, which includes cayenne pepper in the toffee, sounds right up my alley.

Appearance: Shiny, rich brown with tiny light flecks under the surface and intermittent, barely-perceptible bumps on the back.

Smell: Rich, sweet, nutty, and mild, but with a bitter-sour undercurrent for chocolatey realness.

Taste: Not nearly as gingery as I thought it would be! I can see little toffee and crystallized ginger pieces, but the ginger here mostly adds candied complexity and texture to a mild, pleasant chocolate, with the cayenne contributing a super-subtle (and quite nice) burn at the end. As the smell demonstrated, the chocolate isn't flavorless, it just doesn't have any standout flavors: It's balanced sweet/sour/bitter/beany with no sharp edges and a smooth (save the inclusions) texture, a very easy 70% cacao. Kind of boring, but nice.

Conclusion: B.T. McElrath Ginger Toffee Chocolate Bar is a nice, mild dark chocolate with textural interest and just a hint of ginger and cayenne.

B.T. McElrath Salty Dog Chocolate Bar

3oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Chocolate liquor, sugar (in the chocolate), cane sugar (in the toffee), cocoa butter, soy lecithin, butter, bicarbonate of soda, natural flavor, salt (in the toffee), sea salt (on the back of the bar)

17g sugar/43g serving (39.5% by wt.)

Corporate Info: Minneapolis's B.T. McElrath was founded by a chef, and accordingly seems to focus on creating unusual flavored bars and confections like Sweet Potato Pavé and Buttered Toast. B.T. McElrath's Chile Limón Bar is one of my favorites, and now that I'm eating a little more sugar, I can venture into the other 70% bars, including today's Salty Dog.

Appearance: Very glossy, richly hued reddish-brown with pale flecks under the surface and sea salt evenly sprinkled on the back.

Smell: Not strong, but with a hint of roasted beans and nuts.

Taste: Creamy chocolate, a lot of salt, toffee is more subtle in very small bits of crunch and low-key caramel flavor. The chocolate is mild, so even though it's 70% cacao the sweetness of the chocolate (not the toffee) stands out. Additionally, the salt doesn't seem to have a good counterpoint, which makes me wonder about the whole salt-sweet concept. I'm thinking that it's not just sugar and salt that work against each other, it's burnt sugar/caramel specifically that's so wonderfully enlivened by salt. Thus, I'd say there's too much sugar in chocolate form and not enough in toffee form to really play off the salt here. I've seen this bar many times and have the impression that it's pretty popular, but to my taste there's a balance issue that the Chile Limón bar didn't have. It's all very interesting, and I'd love to try more B.T. McElrath products.

Conclusion: For me, B.T. McElrath Salty Dog Chocolate Bar has too much sugar and not enough toffee to balance well with the mild chocolate and abundant salt.

B.T. McElrath Chile Limón Chocolate Bar

3.0oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Dark chocolate (chocolate liquor, sugar, cocoa butter, soy lecithin), milk chocolate (cane sugar, full cream milk, cocoa butter, cacao beans, soy lecithin, vanilla beans), dried chilies, lime.

14g sugar/43g serving (32.6% by wt.)

I've mostly stopped buying chile-flavored chocolate. The trend was interesting in the Mexican-chocolate vein, but much of what I found was spicy in a way that overshadowed the chocolate and didn't have much flavor of its own, so it just didn't taste good. Thus I was wary when the clerk at a specialty chocolate shop recommended B.T. McElrath's Chile Limón bar. It seemed to be more than the usual over-cayenned bar, though, a combination of lime-flavored dark chocolate and chile-flavored milk chocolate swirled together and molded into a variegated bar. For the chance of something novel, I went ahead and ponied up $2 an ounce.

First off, this bar is actually quite beautiful, as you can see here. The taste is also new to me, in terms of both the citrus and the chile: The first element that hits me is the lime, bright but not dominant, while the subtler chile simmers instead of searing. The dark and milk chocolates form something of a mosaic, so it takes effort to distinguish the two and it's more enjoyable to enjoy them as one. This bar is light and sweet, a fun social gathering of four disparate flavors—tart, spicy, creamy, dark—that don't all know each other well but then surprisingly get along swimmingly, and the party just hums along.

Conclusion: B.T. McElrath Chile Limón bar is a good time.

[Update 7/21/12: Today I noticed that the link to this bar isn't working. When I looked at B.T. McElrath's site, I saw that the Chile Limón bar is no longer listed. I hope they start making it again!]