Seeds of Change 61% Cacao Dark Chocolate With Mango and Cashew

2.99oz (84.8g) in three 1oz bars

Ingredients: Organic chocolate, o. cane sugar, o. cocoa butter, o. milkfat, o. soy lecithin, o. vanilla, o. cashews, o. mango

9g sugar/28g serving (32.1% by wt.)

I bought Seeds of Change's 61% Mango and Cashew bar at the same time as the coconut bar, because I found them on sale and hadn't tried the brand before. My opinion of the coconut chocolate was mixed: I thought it was mild and fatty, permeated with a tanning-oil coconut sweetness that was too much for me but might work for others. I've used the extra in hot cocoa and had the same problem, the coconut flavor overwhelming the chocolate and making the drink taste sickly and artificial. Nevertheless I said I'd like to sample another flavor, and there's no chance that the mango cashew bar will have the same Eau de Mounds.

Corporate Info: Seeds of Change is...complicated. The company was founded in 1989 on one very well-intentioned product, organic seeds, but in 1997 sold to mega-corporation Mars, Inc., makers of everything from M&Ms and Skittles to Pedigree dog food. Despite Seeds of Change's sustainability claims, UK-based Ethical Consumer Magazine now rates the chocolate at 2.5 out of 20 on their scale of ethical chocolate consumerism. (By contrast, they rate Divine at 14.5, Lindt at 11, and Mars' own M&Ms at 1.5.) Mars says it's striving for economic, social, and environmental sustainability in its chocolate production, but those goals don't yet seem to have made it into the product. With all that's involved in the long processing chain of chocolate production, I suspect there's some good and a fair amount of bad. Your conclusion may vary.

Appearance: Like the coconut bars, the mango and cashew bars come in three individually packaged, stubby bricks. They're a light to medium, orangey brown, and a cross section reveals small pieces of chopped mango and cashews.

Smell: Fresh, sweet, and tropical. Not at all sour or pungent.

Taste: Soft and smooth with a few tiny hard, chewy pieces of mango. Quite sweet, with sweet-tart mango; cashew contributes to the overall tropical vibe rather than having any distinctive flavor or texture.

Snooty Reviewer Stuff: I definitely get the extra cocoa butter and milkfat in here, as it has the same fatty texture as the coconut bar, but the slightly tart mango and lack of coconut flavor makes that texture less off-putting. I wouldn't call it recognizably mango—it could almost be apricot or weirdly sour cantaloupe—but the fruit works as a flavor contrast, though it does stick in my teeth long after I've swallowed the chocolate. Not much more to say...this is not a complex chocolate.

Conclusion: Seeds of Change 61% Cacao Dark Chocolate With Mango and Cashew is sweet, fatty, and just okay.

Chocolate Shops: Chocolopolis

Several months ago I visited Seattle's Chocolopolis and bought several interesting-sounding items including Venchi's intriguing absinthe bar and Amedei's subtle red fruit bar. I also bought a hazelnut bar from famed Valrhona, and when I finally got around to opening it, it tasted “off.” I thought it might be rancidity; though the expiration date gave me another month and a half, perhaps the hazelnut oil had gone bad. Valrhona ain't cheap, so I hoped I could return the bar. I called Chocolopolis and they told me they would allow me to exchange it, but when I finally brought it back in, I realized I'd forgotten the receipt!

Fortunately, Lauren overheard me mentioning my predicament. She remembered my call and had opened another bar from the same batch for quality control purposes. She compared it to my bar and found that it tasted the same. She suggested that Valrhona might just not be to my taste, but she wanted me to be happy with what I bought from the store, so she offered me a trade anyway. I swapped for a new-to-me bar from Olive and Sinclair, and out of impulse and goodwill also bought two of the chocolate confections behind the counter. (I don't remember the brands, only that one was a caramel-truffle hybrid and the other a ganache-filled and chocolate-coated fig.)

Chocolopolis is somewhat sterile, with no dishes of samples and only a limited selection of some brands, but what's there has been tried and approved by a knowledgeable staff. The shelves are labeled by origin and separated into plain bars versus those with inclusions, and as mentioned there is a counter containing high-quality confections. In Seattle it is one of only a few excellent multi-brand chocolate shops, a destination for those willing to splurge and looking for quality and expertise.


[Update: See Lauren's comment below for more on the confections I tried as well as Chocolopolis's free tasting sessions.]

Format Changes

Thus far I have written in a free-form style, discussing whatever I want to about a bar and always addressing only smell and taste. While I enjoy this writing process, I'm changing it for two reasons.

The first reason is that I'd like to make a habit of discussing the company behind each bar. Chocolate is an amazing product, in which corporate backing can mean anything from child slave labor to community-owned farms with fairly paid employees. It's also fascinating in how frequently small companies are subsumed by larger ones, often huge international conglomerates, which might leave the product alone or might change everything but the name. Your choice in chocolate can involve personal taste, environmental effects, several countries' growers and processors, and a complex corporate history in a knot of often hidden ethical implications. It's worth a little research, especially for such an unnecessary luxury product. I'm not promising dissertations here, but rather a short, dedicated entry on the corporate background of each bar.

The second reason is that the casual reader might not care about the history of a company or what I was thinking when I bought a bar. Thus I want to deconstruct my mushy paragraphs into several easily perused categories. Here's my current thinking:

• Size/Ingredients/Sugar Content: same as before
• Introduction: how I bought the bar and any other personal musings
• Corporate Info
• Appearance
• Smell
• Taste: texture, general overview (sour/bitter/sweet etc)
• Snooty Reviewer Stuff: my attempt at analyzing subtleties of scent and flavor
• Final Thoughts, if applicable
• Conclusion: same as before

One more thing: I'll be posting more on individual chocolate shops. I've generally avoided such posts because they're usually specific to my town (Seattle) and I don't want to hold myself to any particular reviewing standards, but I recently had a good experience at a local shop and want to write about it. Shop “reviews” will still be relatively infrequent.

Describing Chocolate

As I rack up the chocolate reviews, I frequently encounter bars whose scent and taste I can't accurately describe. Some flavors are obvious to me, like dark red berries and raisins, tropical fruit, or red wine, but those don't always fit the bill. Other times I might use the same term, like tart, to characterize two bars that are indeed tart but in different ways, so my description is lacking.

With these weaknesses in mind I'd like to try a more rigorous vocabulary, and this chart seems like a good place to begin. I can think of two potential downsides. First, it might not help you as a reader to hear that a given bar smells of mushroom, or tastes of cedar. I'll try to minimize the over-description by first noting that the chocolate is mild, or bitter, or whatever else you might experience as someone who just wants to eat chocolate that tastes good. The second problem is that I don't entirely know what I'm doing. Chocolate doesn't usually come at you with a strong punch of vodka, ashes, or grass, so I'll be reaching for what are often very subtle flavor distinctions. I apologize for any confusion this may generate, and I hope you enjoy the process nonetheless. I think it'll be fun!

Dagoba Xocolatl Rich Dark Chocolate Chilies & Nibs

2.83oz (80g) bar

Ingredients: Organic cacao beans, o. cane sugar, o. cocoa, o. cocoa butter, soy lecithin, o. cacao nibs, o. chili powder, o. maca, o. vanilla, o. nutmeg oil, o. milk

I admit I've already made up my mind about Dagoba. First, there's the history. You won't see much of it on Dagoba's website, just the founder's name and the company's sustainability goals. Let's try Wikipedia... Ah, I see: Founded in Colorado and later moved to Ashland, Oregon, Dagoba was bought by Hershey in 2006. There's still a retail store in Ashland; I've been there, and it was small, quiet, and dull, the only company presence a woman who seemed to be office staff. I can't tell if production remains there or somewhere else. The vague, minimalist website lists the retail store address with no phone number, online orders direct you to San Francisco, and a general (866-) number has Eastern Standard Time office hours. Hershey wants to elicit your organic/sustainable warm fuzzies while standing behind an opaque, soulless wall.

Second, the taste. I've tried to like Dagoba chocolate. It's organic, it's often on sale (something big companies like Hershey can afford), and it comes in lots of flavors. But in my experience, it's just not good. Take the Xocolatl bar here. It's pretty and smells like raisins, which can be nice. The texture is of dense, chalky-type chocolate rather than creamy or waxy, and there's that subtle crunch of nibs. But the flavor comes on sour and harsh, without much complexity or interest besides. In some of the bites, I taste something “off” in the back of my mouth. There is a nice afterburn in this subtly spicy chocolate, but the chocolate itself just isn't good. I ate my last piece ten minutes ago, and I'm still tasting sour.

As I've said before, I understand why small chocolatiers sell to large companies. If those large companies act transparently, and absorb the brands' standards as well as their names, it's hard to be critical of the merger. I'm certainly not seeing transparency here. What about the chocolate? To be honest, I don't remember how Dagoba chocolate tasted before 2006; maybe this is how it always was, and presumably some people like it. Personally I'd like to think it was better once upon a time, because this really isn't doing it for me.

Conclusion: Dagoba Xocoatl Rich Dark Chocolate Chilies & Nibs is harsh and sour, albeit with a nice chile afterburn.

P.S. That “maca” in the ingredients is a Peruvian root. Based on a quick Google search, it sounds like it has a bitter and polarizing flavor. Dunno if that made any difference in the chocolate.

Askinosie: Three Dark Chocolates

70% San Jose Del Tambo Ingredients: Cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter

8g sugar/42.5g serving (in full-size bar; 18.8% by wt.)

75% Soconusco bar not currently available

77% Davao Ingredients: Cocoa beans, organic cane sugar, cocoa butter

7g sugar/42.5g serving (in full-size bar; 16.5% by wt.)

I'd never heard of Askinosie until I found these single origin mini packs at my local chocolate specialty shop. As high-end chocolate isn't cheap, I thought it might be fun to do a sort of tasting flight with these little bars, and I picked three of them more or less at random. I ended up with the following “Itty Bars”: 70% San Jose Del Tambo (Ecuador) Nibble Bar; 75% Soconusco (Mexico) Bar; and 77% Davao (Philippines) Bar. I've since looked up the various bars on Askinosie's website, though the Soconusco chocolate isn't currently available except as white chocolate.

Before I try the chocolate, who are these Askinosie people? The complex website is a bit of a pain (just try perusing the news section) and could use a copy editor, but basically the company was founded in Springfield, Missouri by ex-lawyer Shawn Askinosie, his wife, and a business partner. They try to work with the cocoa farmers in person, pay them fair wages, and share a percentage of the profits with them to encourage high quality. Aside from specialty items their chocolate is just beans and sugar—no vanilla or soy lecithin—and they try to be as organic as possible short of going through the certification process. (See the FAQ for more.) They sound like lovely people.

Back to the Itty Bars. Each gives you two wafers of plain chocolate, with the Nibble Bar having nibs on the back. Let's take them one at a time...

70% San Jose Del Tambo with nibs has an underlying tropical scent, like bananas. The texture is dense and thick, coating the mouth with cacao, and the flavor is dark with minimal sweetness, but not harsh...like bitter chocolate with some of the bitterness removed. Nibs add texture and more of that tropical banana vibe, something I've tasted in other nibs too. Aftertaste is light, tropical, and short-lived.

75% Soconusco has a minimal smell, quiet and banana-free. It's dense but not so mouth-coating, more bitter, almost like chocolate distilled to its essence: just enough sugar to get past the wince factor and on to the cacao, not especially fruity or tropical or rich, just chocolate. The aftertaste is a bit sour, but it's more like intense chocolate than free-floating acid. Overall a neat experience.

77% Davao also doesn't smell like much to me, so perhaps I'm not especially creative today. It tastes sweeter than the Soconusco, probably because it has that red wine quality, tannic but also fruity in a way that speciously reminds me of sugar. It's not berries or cherries or raisins; my co-taster says fresh currants, which I've never eaten myself, but perhaps that'll be helpful to you. Either way it's not overwhelming or off-putting, though there is a long, lingering bitter finish that isn't the most pleasant.

All in all, this was a fun way to compare three subtly varying bars. My favorite was the 75% Soconusco, though I didn't love it enough to pay for this premium chocolate. If you feel like spending a little cash, you could do worse (and support worse companies) than to pick up some of Askinosie's chocolate.

Conclusion: Askinosie's 70% San Jose Del Tambo with nibs is tropical and thick; 75% Soconusco is the essence of dark chocolate; and 77% Davao is winey and somewhat bitter.

Seeds of Change 61% Cacao Dark Chocolate With Coconut

2.99oz (84.8g) in three 1oz bars

Ingredients: Organic chocolate, o. cane sugar, o. cocoa butter, o. milkfat, o. soy lecithin, o. vanilla, o. coconut, natural flavor

8g sugar/28g serving (28.6% by wt.)

I bought Seeds of Change's coconut bar for several reasons. 1. I'd seen the brand in the grocery store many times but somehow hadn't tried it yet. 2. I finally caught some of it on sale. 3. I was curious whether someone could combine flavorful dark chocolate and mild coconut in a balanced, worthwhile way.

While this is a common tall, 3oz brick, it's not a single bar but rather a card-stock envelope containing three individually wrapped 1oz bars. The copy's a little silly (“The Seeds of Change mandala is an ancient symbol of abundance and vitality...”), but the bars are pleasantly stubby and scored into the usual rectangles with a nice little imprint on top. The chocolate isn't especially light or dark and is just barely glossy, and it smells rich and coconutty, vividly reminiscent of suntan oil, Mounds bars, and other sweet, perfumy coconut products.

That's just about how it tastes, too: Sweet, rich, only mildly chocolatey, and with a lot of coconut. Compared to Theo Seeds of Change actually uses less sugar per serving, but this chocolate tastes sweeter. That's probably in part because it has a significantly lower cacao content, which means less intense chocolate to compete with the coconut. Lower sugar, lower cacao...what makes up the difference? Milkfat, and possibly a greater percent of added cocoa butter. Fat can mellow sharp flavors—strong spices plus coconut milk create curry that is complex but not overwhelming; parmesan or blue cheese tempered with cream makes a mild sauce. I also wonder if the “natural flavor” in the ingredients infuses the chocolate with coconut flavor, because I don't think the suntan oil/Mounds vibe is coming from the shreds of coconut alone.

I'm not sure this is for me. The richness reminds me of the center of a Lindor Truffle, sweet and fatty, and though I used to love them my tastes have changed. But it definitely doesn't overwhelm the coconut, and if that appeals to you, by all means try this bar. The company is pretty neat too, and they have other interesting-sounding flavors (albeit in the same chocolate) that I'd be interested in trying if I found them on sale again.

Conclusion: Seeds of Change 61% Cacao Dark Chocolate With Coconut is sweet, mild, coconutty, and very rich.