Divine 70% Dark Chocolate

3.5 oz in 20-something small candies

Ingredients: Fair trade cocoa, ft. sugar, ft. cocoa butter, soy lecithin, ft. vanilla

11g sugar/41g serving (26.8% by wt.)

Corporate Info: I've written about Divine before, and while I didn't love the chocolate, the company is pretty amazing. It grew out of a Ghanaian co-op run by and for small-scale family farmers with a mission to buy the farmers' cocoa at fair prices, increase women's involvement, and work toward environmentally sound growing methods. The co-op eventually decided to produce its own chocolate, and in 1997 formed Divine Chocolate with investment capital from an assortment of socially conscious groups including for-profit corporations, nonprofits, and faith-based charities. The beans are grown in Ghana, the chocolate is produced in the UK, and subsidiaries distribute the finished product in North America and Europe. The investing organizations and the farmers' co-op all receive dividends from their shares in Divine—and the farmers' corporate presence means they're also part of decision-making processes. Everyone benefits in a fascinating globalized web of grass-roots organizing, international business, and social responsibility—it can be done! Divine is listed highly in both my sources of socially-focused chocolate producers, though while nearly all ingredients are fair trade, they are not organic.

Appearance: Dark, with a dull finish.

Smell: Dried fruit, like cranberries or golden raisins.

Taste: Very raisiny, just a little bitter, turning into something still concentrated and succulent but lighter, maybe like dates. Lingering dried fruit aftertaste. Texture is initially hard then melts into dense and creamy.

Conclusion: Divine 70% Dark Chocolate is good for those who like chocolate with a deep dried fruit vibe and/or want to support a really outstanding chocolate company.

New Zealand Chocolate: Whittaker's

So I haven't posted for the last couple weeks, and the reason is that I was in New Zealand! I brought home several chocolate bars, and today I'm reviewing three varieties of Whittaker's, a brand found in seemingly every supermarket and service station in the country. This chocolate is cheap, doesn't contain any weird fillers (except maybe “flavor”), and makes some crazy huge bars: The 72% and Mocha bars are 250 grams—most of the bars I review are 85 or 100g—the Peanut Slabs came in a pack of three chunky 50g bars, and if I recall correctly each item was under $5. Because I'm discussing all three varieties in one go, the photos and reviews appear after this introductory section.

Corporate Info: The original Whittaker started working with chocolate in 1896, and Whittaker's final product is made in Porirua, near New Zealand's capital of Wellington. But yes, as with other chocolate companies it sources its ingredients all over the world: Ghana (cocoa beans), Southeast Asia (cocoa butter), South Africa (peanuts), and so on. With the exception of one fair trade milk chocolate bar, you've still got the usual chocolate industry stuff to deal with, though they do say they're trying. In addition to what I've reviewed here, Whittaker's produces an intriguing assortment of studded slabs, flavored “blocks” (the giant bars), toffees, and single-sized servings.

72% Cocoa Dark Ghana

250g bar

Ingredients: Cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, soy lecithin, vanilla flavor

8.3g sugar/25g serving (33.2% by wt.)

Appearance: Big. Also glossy and medium in color.

Smell: Pleasant, nose-filling, chocolatey. Like hot cocoa and raisins.

Taste: Enjoyable. A little sour but not too much, kind of chalky but not weirdly, a little fatty but not unpalatable. The experience is like eating a Hershey's Kiss—it's mild but not impressively creamy or unpleasantly neutral, and if I weren't paying attention I could eat this all day.

62% Cocoa Dark Mocha

250g bar

Ingredients: Cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, soy lecithin, flavor, roasted ground coffee beans

9.4g sugar/25g serving (37.6% by wt.)

Okay, yeah, for this review I did cheat on the sugar level. I was in another country, people! The Peanut Slab below would be even worse if the sugar weren't drowned out by peanuts.

Appearance: Darker than the 72% above, dark like medium-roast coffee.

Smell: Coffee, but again nose-filling and pleasant. There's nothing challenging about this chocolate, but also nothing “off”--it smells like a coffee shop, like coffee beans that aren't too dark-roasted. Nice.

Taste: The coffee grounds give the chocolate a uniformly gritty texture, which is fairly fine and therefore interesting rather than annoying. Flavor still reminds me of walking into a coffee shop; if you like that sensation, you'll like this bar.

Bittersweet Peanut Slab

50g bar (three per pack)

Ingredients: Sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter [47% total cocoa solids], soy lecithin, flavor, roasted peanuts

17.1g sugar/50g serving (34.2% by wt.)

Appearance: These stubby little bars are the size of an outdated candy bar-style cell phone, the size of the palm of your hand (my fairly small hand, anyhow) and thicker than what you're used to, but they're totally packed with whole roasted peanuts.

Smell: Mmm, chocolate and peanuts, a classic.

Taste: A great ratio of chocolate to peanuts. Lots of textural interest with the whole nuts and slightly chalky chocolate. At 47% cacao this is definitely sweeter than the 72% bar above, but eating them separately they don't taste all that different: Same Hershey's Kiss texture and quality, and I suspect a less dark chocolate works better with the peanuts. Again, I could eat the whole 50g (nearly 2oz) bar in one go.

Conclusion: Whittaker's is good mass-market chocolate: Simple, cheap, and addictive. There's nothing virtuous about it, and if I lived in New Zealand I'd be searching out the fair trade options (I've got some for next week), but for now I'm enjoying my Whittaker's.

Olive and Sinclair Mexican Style Cinnamon Chili

2.75oz bar

Ingredients: Cocoa beans (Ghana), sugar, cocoa butter, organic Ceylon cinnamon, salt, cayenne pepper

I really enjoyed Olive and Sinclair's salt and pepper bar, so when I returned an item at a local chocolate shop, I exchanged it for Olive and Sinclair's Mexican chocolate bar.

Corporate Info: One appealing feature of Olive and Sinclair's chocolate is that the young company is small and American—in Nashville, to be specific. They make several plain and flavored bars using stone-ground beans and brown sugar, both of which are relatively uncommon (though not unheard of) in the chocolate game. I can't find anything on the bars or website about their bean sourcing and so on, but they do seem to be making an effort with certain organic ingredients (see ingredients for this bar), some well-intended environmental initiatives, and possibly a foray into fair trade (there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention in this video). All in all, at this time Olive and Sinclair is a company I'm happy to support.

Appearance: Unlike the Salt & Pepper bar, the Mexican Style has the spices mixed in, so there's no photo of the speckled back of this bar. Again it's thin, flat, and sharply molded, and the color is glossy and vivid.

Smell: Fruity, something juicy like cherry or currant. Aside: I've called a lot of chocolate “fruity” lately, which either means I've eaten a lot of fruity chocolate or I have a limited olfactory palate. Probably both, though I'm working on the latter. Anyway, whether this bar is “fruity” or not, the smell is pretty pure, not roasty or sour or sweet or in-your-face, just a fresh, slightly caramelized scent.

Taste: Whereas some “Mexican” chocolate can be one- or two-note, in this bar the chocolate, cinnamon, cayenne, and salt merge with surprising complexity. It doesn't just taste like cinnamon or overwhelming spiciness but instead is infused with warmth and flavor; I wouldn't have been surprised to have seen other spices listed in the ingredients. The chocolate itself is subtly fruity with an additional, interesting sweetness, like toasted marshmallows—perhaps from the brown sugar. Texture also helps, as stone-ground beans give the chocolate a fine, uniform grittiness that makes mouthfeel and chew intriguing but not to the point of being distractingly annoying.

Conclusion: Olive and Sinclair Mexican Style Chocolate Cinnamon Chili is balanced and complex, just excellent stuff. 

Divine Mint Dark Chocolate

3.5oz (100g) bar

Ingredients: fair trade cocoa mass, ft. sugar, ft. cocoa butter, peppermint crisp 5% (sugar, peppermint oil), soy lecithin, peppermint oil, ft. vanilla.

15g sugar/50g serving (30% by wt.)

As I increase the number of reviews on this blog, I find myself needing more ways to describe chocolate. It's not that all chocolate tastes the same, it's quite the opposite: I've eaten bars that I would describe using the same basic terms but that taste rather different, though it took a few reviews before I'd encountered enough similarities and differences to know that. I'm going to begin the in-depth review process by experimenting, sharing not only what I'm experiencing with a bar but also how it differs from other bars and other flavors.

With Divine's mint bar, let's start before I've taken my first bite. The bar looks smooth and glossy but not shiny. Its color is medium brown, like the shell of a nut, touched with white and yellow rather than the almost black purple-brown of super-dark chocolate. It smells sugary-minty, reminiscent of candy cane, not fresh mint or mint tea or Oreos.

Now to taste. An unexpected surprise! The mint isn't merely flavoring the chocolate, it's also distributed in a dense scattering of tiny mint-flavored sugar crystals. They provide a crunchy counterpoint to the chocolate that is a lot of fun, though I'm not sure the “candy” element is what I usually want out of my chocolate. (Unlike everyone else, I apparently no longer think of chocolate as candy.)

The chocolate itself is also subtly minty, as well as mild, a bit earthy, and not especially complex, a flavor and texture that I immediately associated with Endangered Species' mint bar. In my review I called that bar “chalky,” though that's not really accurate, it just seems less rich and chocolatey than, say, the Newman's Own Organics bar that is similarly mild and sweet but less insipid. Comparing the Divine bar to the Newman's Own one, they have similar levels of fat (about 44% by wt.), soy lecithin as an emulsifier, and vanilla for flavoring, and though this one has a bit more sugar, presumably the mint-sugar crystals account for that. I guess the difference must be something in the cacao processing.

On the plus side, Divine is unusually progressive for a chocolate company. While its chocolate is not organic it is fair trade certified, and the company is jointly owned by several non-governmental organizations and the cooperative of Ghanaian farmers who supply the cocoa beans. The chocolate isn't particularly expensive either—in the range of Endangered Species and Green & Black's—so Divine seems to have a workable model of large-scale, non-luxury chocolate production that treats farmers with respect. It's a great goal, so I'd really like to give the chocolate at least one more shot.

Conclusion: Divine Mint Dark Chocolate's mint crystals make it more interesting than the everyday mint bar, and the company is admirable, but the chocolate is too one-dimensional for my taste.

Blanxart Dark Chocolate origin Ghana 80% Cacao

1.7oz (48g) bar

Ingredients: Chocolate liquor, sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla, lecithin

10g sugar/48g serving (20.8% by wt.)

[Note: Blanxart’s website isn’t the most user-friendly, so most of the links here are to outside sites (none of which I necessarily endorse).]

I’ve found Spanish chocolatier Blanxart’s products intriguing in the past, so I bought three different bars to review. One, the Chocolate a la Taza bar intended for making hot chocolate, turned out to be clearly mislabeled in terms of sugar content (among other things), so while I like it, it will have to be eaten by someone else. Said Someone Else polished off the entire bar of Dark Chocolate 85% with Nibs before I had a chance to taste it and then asked me to buy another.  Take from that what you will, and I’ll officially review the bar another time. I did still have most of the small Dark Chocolate origin Ghana 80%, which also comes in a full 3.5oz (100g) size, so by default it’ll be my first review of Blanxart’s chocolate.

Unfortunately, the fat little 1.7 oz bar presents a problem right off. It’s a dense, hard chocolate molded into what are essentially scored blocks (rather than thin tiles), so how do you eat it? You could chip away at it with a knife or chocolate chipper, as from a big block for baking, but it doesn’t seem like that was what this bar was made for. It’s not waxy, so you can’t bite through it cleanly; it fractures and comes off in crunchy chunks. I did resort to this option (trying to avoid the alternative, sloppy gnawing), but “crunchy” isn’t an ideal texture for plain chocolate, and with each brittle bite I got little chocolate crumbs on my shirt. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and consider that perhaps it’s just too chilly now, and this bar might soften up in the summer heat.

Flavor-wise, I want to be a fan, but I can’t. To my taste buds this bar is just too sweet, even given the relatively low amount of sugar on the label. Bars with milk, or perhaps a different balance of flavors, seem to meld chocolate and sugar well. Here the two seemed separate, with a thin but sickly sweetness hitting me right away, staying throughout, and even hanging around minutes after I’d swallowed. The chocolate underneath tastes like it must be interesting, not de-fanged ersatz chocolate, but I had a hard time appreciating it because the sugar was so dominant. Adding to the problem slightly is the texture: Once crunched, the chocolate at least melts quickly in the mouth, but it’s very creamy in a way that adds to the sense of syrupy sweetness.

I’ve had some great bars from Blanxart (often with too high a sugar content for me at present) and I hope to review more. I’m sorry to say I didn’t like this one, but hey, at least I didn’t spring for the full size!

Conclusion: Blanxart Dark Chocolate origin Ghana 80% Cacao is too sweet and difficult to eat.