Taza Chocolate 70% Dark Stone Ground Organic Chocolate

3oz (85g) bar

Ingredients: Organic direct trade cacao beans (Dominican Republic), o. cane sugar, o. cocoa butter, o. vanilla beans

Corporate Info: Taza Chocolate is pretty lovely. The bar I'm holding comprises only organic ingredients, sources its cocoa beans using a variation on fair trade principles called Direct Trade, was made in the U.S., and is wrapped in recycled paper. What Taza produces is interesting too. Rather than being smooth throughout, the chocolate is made from stone-ground cocoa beans and not conched, both of which make for a gritty chocolate with discernible sugar crystals. In addition to bars, Taza produces Chocolate Mexicano Discs that are just sugar, cacao, and flavorings as well as baking chocolate and other items, including a neat Chocolate Mexicano Extract.

Appearance: Reddish.

Smell: Rich and complex, beany, fresh. “Together”: Yes it's complex, but there's nothing that stands out as particular sharp or dominant.

Taste: The texture is dense with a fine graininess; it reminds me of homemade fudge—the crumbly kind, not the soft kind you often buy in tourist shops. Flavor is indeed fresh, with a pleasantly tart beginning that fades into a light bitterness, like a light red wine. To my taste the chocolate and sugar balance each other well, as more sugar would be too sweet and less would make it just sour. I'm not sure I'd want this tart flavor profile every day, and for what it's worth, ten minutes later my tongue still tastes bitter...but it's very good, and I'd like to try some of Taza's other products.

Conclusion: Taza Chocolate 70% Dark Stone Ground Organic Chocolate is tart and complex, with interesting flavor and texture. Worth trying. 

Colorado Chocolate: Enstrom Candies' Toffee Petites

I recently visited a friend in Grand Junction, Colorado, home of Enstrom Candies and its “World Famous Almond Toffee”. We checked out their factory store, which carries not only Enstrom's chocolate covered toffee but also behind-the-counter chocolates, an assortment of boxed confections, some fun candies from other companies, ice cream, and a few baked goods. I bought myself a tiny box of their dark chocolate toffee “Petites,” some imported salty licorice, and a few interesting confections like dark chocolate mints (basically fancy Andes) and a tasty chocolate-dipped coconut caramel. Aside from the house-made toffee, prices are fairly reasonable; the confections aren't super-upscale molded and printed confections with creative fillings but rather homey dipped turtles and chews.

As for the Toffee Petites, they're fine but not my personal ideal. FYI, Unless you're the type who eats a Snickers in under a minute, the fat “petites” are really two or three bites. The crushed almonds on top don't stick well and end up getting everywhere. The dark chocolate in the coating is fairly forgettable, is thicker than I would have wanted, and tends to flake off the toffee, so it mostly gets in the way. I'd prefer a thinner coating of chocolate, as in Enstrom's regular toffee product (at least that's how it looks in the picture), and of course I would like it to be darker. The toffee nuggets, though, are pretty darn good, all butter and sugar. Next time I would eschew the Petites and go for regular toffee.

Enstrom has three stores in the Grand Junction area and two in the Denver area. If you're visiting Colorado and have a hankering for sweets, you might find what you're craving at Enstrom Candies.

Chocolopolis Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt

This smallish house-brand bar from Seattle's Chocolopolis has no label other than the store's, so I don't know anything about it, including the ingredients, how dark it is, or what brand they use, though it includes "vanilla sea salt." I was in there anyway and have been wanting to try more salt-topped chocolate, so there you go.

Appearance: Smooth, medium-brown, and blocky.

Smell: Subtly fruity, not at all intense. Maybe dried fruit, not caramelized like raisins, more like dried cherries or dates, or a light honey.

Taste: They know what they're doing over at Chocolopolis. This is a pretty dark chocolate, with a percent cacao somewhere in the mid-70s (hope I'm not wrong about that!), and it's well balanced: not over-roasted or weirdly sweet or challenging with smoke or sourness or any other pungent flavors. A very medium bar with just enough salt to make things interesting.

Because this isn't a very sweet bar, it doesn't have the same salty-sweet, caramelized vibe as salt caramels or caramel corn (though I love those too); to my mind, the salt enhances the flavor of the beans here, not the sugar.

Conclusion: Chocolopolis Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt is very well balanced. I'd be curious to find out whose chocolate they use for their house bars.

German Chocolate: Two Pink Peppercorn (Rosa Pfeffer) Bars

REWE Dark Chocolate 66% Cacao Pink Peppercorn (Rosa Pfeffer)

 

75g bar

Ingredients: cocoa mass, sugar [translated as either “cane sugar” or “sucrose”], cocoa butter, pink peppercorns

37.3% sugar by wt.

Leysieffer Dark Chocolate with Pink Peppercorns (Rosa Pfeffer)

 

100g bar

Ingredients: sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, pink peppercorns, soy lecithin

The last two of my German chocolate bars share an inclusion uncommon in the U.S, pink peppercorns. Pink peppercorns come from two non-pepper plants from Central and South America, and while I've seen them here in spice shops and peppercorn mixes, for whatever reason they seem to be more popular in Germany. One of these bars was my first random chocolate buy, a funky flavored, inexpensive store brand from a big chain supermarket called REWE (“RAY-vuh”) that was near one of our hotels. Later, when I was selecting flavors at Leysieffer, I decided to buy one of their rosa pfeffer bars for comparison's sake. The REWE bar is 66% cacao, and the Leysieffer is their usual 55%.

Both bars mostly smell like chocolate, but they certainly taste like more! The REWE bar is thin, with crispy, slightly chewy peppercorns. The chocolate is pretty mild, of the creamy/chalky variety, and the peppercorns have a little pepperiness, but it's not strong—herby flavor, no bite. The Leysieffer chocolate is thicker, sweeter, and waxier, and its peppercorns have more spice and maybe more crunch to them as well. FYI, the shiny, crisp peppercorn skin doesn't really taste like anything; it's the crunchy little UFO-shaped seed inside that has the bitter, resiny flavor that feels like a super-light cousin of spicy black pepper or numbing Sichuan peppercorns.

For me, the REWE bar was kind of insipid, and the Leysieffer chocolate's sweetness didn't do anything for the herby peppercorns the way they did for elderflower and rose. Contrary to expectations, I ended up finding pink peppercorn chocolate boring, and I wonder if I wouldn't like this better with a darker chocolate and maybe a small amount of another type of peppercorn, upping the intensity of both chocolate and inclusion. For what it's worth, my co-taster thought the Leysieffer was pretty good.

Pink peppercorn + chocolate conclusion: For me, the mild chocolate and complex but relatively quiet pink peppercorn flavors just weren't enough, but I could see how others might like the combination.

[Note: I traveled with these and also moved them around a bit before opening them, so both the chocolate and peppercorns are more broken than when I first bought the bars.]

German Chocolate: Leysieffer Dark Chocolate with Rose Oil (Rosenöl)

100g bar

Ingredients: Sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, “spices,” rose oil extract

Today we're back to Leysieffer for another odd-to-me flavor, rose. Like last week's cardamom bar, this one has a big ol' fragrance, smelling just like rose-scented lotion, perfume, and of course roses, plus a little chocolate underneath. That's how it tastes, too, albeit somewhat less overwhelming. It's not a bad combination, actually, heady rose and mild chocolate melding into the same sort of heavy sweetness that polarizes people who use perfumes and home fragrances—you'll love it or hate it, depending on how you feel about rose in general.

Also, I suspect Leysieffer's relatively mild dark chocolate is a better match for rose than a darker, more intense chocolate would be, as the latter's usually sharp edges might compete with the powdery floral. As with the elderflower bar, though for totally different reasons, Leysieffer's 55% base is a good pairing.

Rose + chocolate conclusion: For rose lovers and adventurous eaters.

German Chocolate: Leysieffer Cardamom Dark Chocolate (Kardamom Schokolade)

100g bar

Ingredients: [I forgot to write these down, but I believe they were just sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and cardamom.]

Last week I introduced Leysieffer; today's question is about the combination of chocolate (in this case a mild, somewhat-dark chocolate) and cardamom. I usually associate cardamom with Indian curries, where their cool, spicy intensity is combined with a host of other spices, so I don't spend a lot of time with just cardamom. This should be interesting!

Here's a little background on cardamom: Cardamom is related to ginger, but the spice we use in cooking is a seed pod, not a root, so you won't notice any similarity aside from strong flavor. Two varietals are cultivated widely, one small and green and one bigger and brown. The oblong seed pod or ground seeds are used in many different types of preparations—food, drink, medicine—in India, the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and some Northern European countries (presumably a colonial remnant). I couldn't tell you which type is in this chocolate, but the picture on the front is of stylized brown seed pods.

So, cardamom in chocolate.... It smells great: bright and spicy. Here the cardamom is front and center, and the chocolate is more of a foundation, filling out the scent's complexity. The flavor is similar, not shying away from the cardamom at all, with the chocolate playing backup. I'm not sure I'd say cardamom's piney (wikipedia says “resinous”) flavor is a total natural with chocolate, but it's not a total mismatch, and to be fair I'm also not accustomed to cardamom as a standard sort of ingredient.

Cardamom + chocolate conclusion: For cardamom lovers and adventurous eaters.

German Chocolate: Leysieffer Elderflower Dark Chocolate (Holunderblüten Schokolade)

100g bar

Ingredients: Sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, elderflower extract

Leysieffer is one of those brands I mentioned in this post that has its own shops, and I saw a few of them in various cities. Unbeknownst to me, the place where I finally bought several bars, an off-the-tourist-path, small city called Osnabrück, is also the place where Leysieffer began in 1909 (though they didn't begin working extensively with chocolate until 1936), and the production facility sits outside the city today. The history isn't all that interesting, mostly for the pretty positive reason that Leysieffer is still owned by the family that started the company; it just grew and developed. At this time there are 16 chocolate shops and six “bistros” as well as a lot of “partner shops” that I'm guessing sell Leysieffer products along with other brands.

What made Leysieffer so exciting to me is that it uses all sorts of interesting flavors and inclusions, like Darjeeling tea, poppyseed, and ground black pepper. Unfortunately only a few plain bars are verydark, so I compromised and bought several super-keen flavors in Leysieffer's 55% cacao dark chocolate base. I'll review them over the next few weeks with an eye toward how well their unusual flavorings work in chocolate.

Today's bar is Elderflower (Holunderblüten). You may or may not have tasted elderflower before, as it's not used much in the U.S., but it's not uncommon in parts of Europe, and on a walk in Germany I was able to smell a cluster of the tiny flowers on a nearby tree. (Note: Elderflowers come from the same plant as elderberries, which are also found in various food preparations. If you're looking for the flavor I'm discussing here, make sure you've found the flower!) How to describe it...well, I bought a bottle of “elderflower drink concentrate” from Ikea a while back, on a whim. That syrup also includes sugar and citric acid, but aside from the sweet-sour flavor of those two, the syrup has a lovely floral fragrance that isn't super-perfumy like rose but more light and refreshing, an easy match for candy.

On to the chocolate. It sure doesn't smell like anything aside from chocolate, but it tastes quite nice! For starters, Leysieffer's dark chocolate base is very mild, sweet but not too sweet, more waxy than chalky—not interesting on its own, but a good match for delicate flavors like elderflower. The elderflower is a great addition...I keep wanting to use words like nice, lovely, and delightful, which indicate a sweet, refreshing, light treat, nothing challenging or cloying.

As in the syrup I own, the elderflower works well in something sweet, which makes the flavor more than just flowery. Can you imagine a sugar-free strawberry, peach, or cantaloupe? Sweetness helps luscious fragrance become fruity flavor, and I think it really contributes to what elderflower does when combined with chocolate.

Leysieffer's 55% dark chocolate conclusion: Mild, not overwhelming in any way; a good base for light flavorings.

Elderflower + chocolate conclusion: If used well—not too much, not too little, in the right base—elderflower is floral, light, and refreshing in chocolate.