Fearless 70% Matcha Green Tea Peppermynt

 

2oz (56.7g) bar

Ingredients: Organic raw cacao, o. unrefined cane sugar, o. matcha green tea, o. peppermint

7g sugar/28.35g serving (24.7% by wt.)

Corporate Info: [Altered from 6/2/12] Fearless was founded in 2006 in California, uses recycled paper for the outer boxes, and makes bean-to-bar chocolate with organic ingredients and direct trade cacao from specific plantations in Brazil, with a special focus on raw cacao. All of this may or may not mean anything to you, but I think I can safely say that Fearless is full of good intentions, part of what I'm seeing as a young cohort trying to bring chocolate into the modern age more thoughtfully, with an eye toward (or blatant focus on) sustainability and treating growers well. The small-company, bean-to-bar model is one way of doing it (contrast with Divine, for example), and it's a fine option. Good for them. Fearless is also notable for its aesthetic, a combination of earthy-crunchy (recycled-looking paper boxes) and super cute, as the font is friendly, the logo is a tiny elephant, and the mold embosses the elephant and a bunch of stars on the bars and takes a “bite” out of the corner of the bar. I'd argue that the cute-ification of the raw, organic message is a great way to go, taking what might otherwise be perceived as a solidly hippie company and making it more approachable. As of last September Fearless only produced five bars, and now there are seven, so look for more from Fearless in the future.

Today's Bar: The same simple cacao and unrefined sugar, 70% like their other flavored/inclusion bars, with added matcha and peppermint. As you'll see from the link, since I bought this bar the packaging and logo have changed: The elephant now has wings, and the new bar is “Green Tea Mint.” I'm curious whether or not the bar's formula has changed as well.

Appearance: Very slightly glossy, in a pleasantly orange-ish brown, and of course Fearless's excellent molding.

Smell: A little mint, and something green-brown in not-too-strong chocolate.

Taste: Not quite my thing. The chocolate has a nice raw beaniness, but I'm not sure that's well matched by the low-level mint, and the matcha adds a sort of lingering, dusty, bitter flavor that doesn't work for me, though it might be very right for matcha fans. The texture is smooth and thick (though not ultra-smooth like many European bars), so the overall vibe is more complex than just “raw.” Still, I think matcha takes raw cacao's potential for bitterness and makes it a definite reality, and that's not the way I'd want to go.

Conclusion: Fearless 70% Matcha Green Tea Peppermynt emphasizes bitterness, and I don't think the matcha or mint bring out the best notes in the raw cacao.

Theo Dark Chocolate Peppermint Stick

3oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Organic fair trade cocoa beans, oft. sugar, oft. cocoa butter, o. peppermint oil, o. vanilla, o. corn syrup, water, sea salt, baking soda

11g sugar/42g serving (26.2% by wt.)

Corporate Info: I've written about Theo Chocolate many times, and in short, it's a great Seattle company making bean-to-bar chocolate and creative, often seasonal confections (you'll see more in-store than online) that are organic and fair trade. You can visit Theo's retail store, order online, or find a selection of Theo's bars at upscale and health food stores nationwide. My only beef with Theo is that I tend to find its usual 70% dark chocolate base too sour as a match for flavorings, but that's a personal taste issue.

Today's Bar: One of Theo's “holiday” bars, its 70% with peppermint candy.

Appearance: Theo's usual long, simply molded bar, in a very dark reddish brown.

Smell: Simultaneously dark and fruity and bracingly minty.

Taste: Chocolate combined with with tiny crunchy crystals of varying size. And it's not as minty as I thought! According to the ingredients list, the chocolate is what contains the peppermint essential oil, while the “brittle” is just sugar, corn syrup, cocoa butter, water, salt, and baking soda. Looking at the candy cane on the wrapper, you expect a rush of strong mint candy when you bite into the very distinct crystals, and it doesn't happen—they're just sweet and crunchy within a somewhat minty and fruity chocolate. That's not bad, especially if you don't want your chocolate to taste like a breath freshener, but it's jarringly counter to expectations. On the other hand, it's sweet but not too sweet, and not a bad match with the mint flavor or the candy's crunch.

Conclusion: Theo Dark Chocolate Peppermint Stick is a medium-mint, fruity chocolate with small, irregularly shaped, flavorless candies within.

Equal Exchange Organic Mint Chocolate With a Delicate Crunch

3.5oz (100g) bar

Ingredients: Organic fair trade chocolate liquor, oft. raw cane sugar, oft. cocoa butter, peppermint crisps (oft. cane sugar, oft. peppermint oil), oft. vanilla

14g sugar/37g serving (37.8% by wt.)

Corporate Info: (Altered from 5/5/11) Massachusetts co-op Equal Exchange is serious about fair trade, organic growing methods, relationships with farmers, and everything that goes along with it. I'm actually overwhelmed by the extensive website, but suffice to say that the reason behind the company's founding was to do good via products that now encompass your usual array of tasty and potentially problematic foods from the tropics (chocolate, coffee, tea, bananas, etc) and a few other locations (almonds, olive oil). At this point they're well-established and respected (the Better World Shopping Guide gives them an A+), so if you care about “Corporate Info” enough to read this paragraph, this is the sort of company you'll love.

This Bar: Equal Exchange produces a bunch of different single-origin and flavored bars, of which I've only reviewed the orange in 65% cacao. Today's contains some sort of crunchy mint candy, and for whatever reason they've used 67% cacao here.

Appearance: Matte, greyish, with a little orangey undertone. Nothing special.

Smell: Not like mint exactly, but light and refreshing. Otherwise, nutty and sweet, not especially chocolatey.

Taste: Actually, that's really nice. The chocolate is crunchy melting to waxy, mild, and sweet, with just a little sour, and the little mint crunches are super tiny, adding fresh, sweet texture rather than tasting like separate candies. This isn't your super high quality stuff, but it's easy to eat and you'll be supporting a great company.

Conclusion: Equal Exchange Organic Mint Chocolate With a Delicate Crunch is fine, mild chocolate with itty bitty mint crunchies that offer texture and refreshing flavor.

New Zealand Chocolate: Scarborough Fair

Corporate Info: Auckland-based Scarborough Fair offers a small range of fair trade coffees, teas, and chocolate bars, so when I saw the brand's espresso and peppermint chocolate bars in a grocery store, I snatched them up. Turn-offs: The chocolate has silly names like “Decadence” and “Enigma” (not to mention “Sinless,” “Adore,” and “Sublime”); Scarborough Fair is actually owned by corporate-sounding Lighthouse Ventures Limited, for whom the bars are produced by some unnamed manufacturer; and the website is pretty drab. Turn-ons: I bought fair trade chocolate for a reasonable price while visiting another country. So hey.

Decadence Dark Espresso Chocolate 70% Cocoa

120g (4.23oz) bar

Ingredients: fair trade cocoa liquor, ft. organic cane sugar, ft. cocoa butter, soy lecithin, vanilla, espresso flavor

6.8g sugar/20g serving (34% by wt.)

Appearance: Dullish, grayish brown.

Smell: I can't smell any coffee here. There's a slight roasted beaniness that could be either chocolate or coffee, but it's not distinct or strong. Most of what I get is sugary and a little musty.

Taste: Texture is creamy and slightly chalky, which isn't a bad thing. The flavor is weird, though: mostly over-sweet and creamy with just a hint of coffee, like cheap coffee ice cream.

Enigma Dark Peppermint Chocolate 70% Cocoa

120g (4.23oz) bar

Ingredients: fair trade cocoa liquor, ft. organic cane sugar, ft. cocoa butter, soy lecithin, vanilla, mint flavor

6.8g sugar/20g serving (34% by wt.)

Appearance: Redder and a little glossier than the espresso bar.

Smell: Mint extract, distilled and thin, and a musty, saccharine sweetness. It doesn't appeal to me.

Taste: Texture is great, first with some bite but then creamy and melty. But the taste is still weirdly over-sweet, which surprises me since this is all cane sugar. The mint doesn't merge well with the chocolate, as though the chocolate is too sweet, the mint is too sweet, and the two kind of co-exist in the bar rather than melding. The aftertaste is similar, with a thin, menthol-y flavor predominating.

Conclusion: I like Scarborough Fair's fair trade goals, but the chocolate feels like an afterthought, with a thin, sweet, and not very chocolatey taste. If customers are spending more for a fair trade product, I think they'll be disappointed.

Amber Lyn Sugar Free Dark Chocolate & Mint

1.2oz (34g) bar

Ingredients: Chocolate, maltitol, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, vanilla, mint extract

0g sugar; 15g maltitol per bar

I'm wary of sugar free chocolate because I've had bad experiences with it: Too sweet for my taste, overwhelming sweetener flavor, low-quality chocolate, and...well...gastrointestinal side effects. Occasionally I'm tempted to give it another shot, in this case because of a gift from a gracious relative who bought some from an enthusiastic Amber Lyn representative at Costco. It's a sampler of 15 bars in seven flavors, so I'm either in the money or saddled with a lot of junk. For tasting purposes, I've selected a mint bar. Yes, I could try the plain dark chocolate or dark chocolate with nibs to get a purer sense of what Amber Lyn has to offer, but I wussed out and went with something that, if need be, might better hide lousy flavor.

The bar is simply molded, quite glossy and in a medium brown. There's no percent cacao on the wrapper, but by weight it's about 56% non-sugar, and since there isn't much else in there I'd say we're talking a 50-something-percent cacao bar. It smells minty and sweet, without a strong chocolate scent, like most lower-cacao chocolate. When I tried to break a piece off in the chilly room I'm writing in, it snapped hard down the middle, so to taste it I gnawed along that edge. Moment of truth...it's actually quite pleasant. The mint is bright and fun, the chocolate is dense and sweet, and while the sweetener doesn't taste like sugar, it's pretty inoffensive.

For my purposes I won't be eating too much of this chocolate. I don't want my palate to get used to sweets again, and I don't want to bring on maltitol's side effects. But if I could tolerate the maltitol and I were reeling from, say, a diabetes diagnosis, I might be happy to keep a big ol' Costco box of Amber Lyn's chocolate around—though I'll have to taste the plainer varieties to be sure.

Conclusion: Amber Lyn Sugar Free Dark Chocolate & Mint is a fine substitute for low-cacao mint dark chocolate.

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.

Theo Organic Fair Trade Mint Dark Chocolate 70% Cacao

3oz (84g) bar

Ingredients: Organic fair trade cocoa beans, oft. sugar, oft. cocoa butter, o. mint oil, o. ground vanilla bean

11g sugar/42g serving (26.2% by wt.)

Theo is one of my favorite chocolate companies. It’s based right here in Seattle, and while I haven’t yet been on the tour of their Fremont factory, one of my regular stops in that neighborhood is the storefront where visitors can sample most of their bars. (Most local stores carry a decent selection of Theo bars, and several are available nationally.) In addition to the bars the company makes delicate truffles, caramels, and other confections in a wide variety of interesting flavors. Most of their ingredients are certified organic and fair trade, they’ve partnered up to produce a vegan line, and they change some flavors seasonally. (Again, this is Seattle.) All those credentials do come at a price, but it’s a relatively reasonable $4 for the 3oz. bars in their Classic Collection, which includes the mint bar.

The reason I’m reviewing Theo’s mint bar this week is to compare it with last week’s Endangered Species dark mint. That bar had a similar cacao and sugar content, but otherwise the two diverge. Recall that the Endangered Species chocolate was very middle-of-the-road, a little chalky, and with only a touch of mint. The Theo chocolate is rich and creamy. Its darkness isn’t the sort of depth you get lost in but rather a sweet-tart juiciness like rose hip or hibiscus tea. The mint is much brighter than that in the Endangered Species chocolate, though it’s not at all overwhelming. The large, thin, smooth bar breaks up easily without bending or shattering, and all the flavors linger for a while, which isn’t necessary but is interesting. This isn't my favorite chocolate ever, but it's a very good mint bar.

Conclusion: Theo’s dark mint bar is an excellent option when you want your fix of mint.

Endangered Species Chocolate Dark Chocolate with Deep Forest Mint 72% Cocoa

3oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Bittersweet chocolate (chocolate liquor, beet sugar, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, vanilla), mint flavor

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

For me, Green & Black’s 85% is intense, perhaps too much in large doses but also loyal and worth returning to again and again. In that context I’ve found the Endangered Species bars to be affable filler: appealing at first glance, easy to keep around, a pleasant diversion, but never delivering more than expected--and sometimes less. To their credit they are available all over the place and at a reasonable price point (often on sale), come in several strengths and flavors that fit my requirements, and taste good enough. I often buy two or three at a time and keep them around for when I want to choose from a variety of flavored bars. Where they fall short is simply that there’s better out there: more interesting, more vivid, more whatever.

The mint flavored bar is a typical example. It’s sweet but not saccharine, a bit chalky, with a mild but not faded chocolatey-ness. There’s only a hint of mint, barely enough to cool your breath. I’m not saying a bar should wallop you over the head with its mix-ins--if you’ve read my other posts you know I’m sensitive to balance (albeit based on my personal tastes)—but there’s something to be said for having a mint bar taste of mint, you know?

Still, it’s perfectly fine, and I think sometimes it’s okay to pass on the challenging and passionate and fill out your dance card with the ready and amiable.

Conclusion: Endangered Species Dark Chocolate with Mint 72% Cocoa is over-mild, but it will do.