41% cacao

Aimee’s Review:
This chocolate is very creamy and heavy; it melts into a thick, smooth liquid on your tongue. It’s a softer chocolate, not so crisp when you bite into it. The cacao flavor is immediately noticeable and slightly nutty, not overly bitter. The sugar and milk give the chocolate a full, luxurious feeling.

Mandy’s Review:
This chocolate tastes darker than its 41% label would indicate. As such, it has that pleasant, slightly bitter taste that accompanies a dark, though the bar has the fine creaminess generally associated with milk chocolate. The scent of the chocolate is very rich and warm, no bitterness in the smell. The color is medium to dark, with a good glossy sheen to the outside of the bar. The texture upon first biting into a piece is very smooth, without the crispy texture of some dark chocolate bars. For chewing, it’s a medium hardness that doesn’t crumble in the mouth.

The initial taste of the chocolate is one of fullness. The tang of the cacao hits first, a faintly citrus taste with a slightly woody flavor. As the chocolate melts in the mouth, it retains a certain thickness, rather than just turning into a thin ooze. The flavor lingers on the tongue after the chocolate is swallowed, mostly in the back of the mouth. The slightly bitter, tangy flavor lasts the longest. A small piece is satisfying because of the endurance of the flavor.

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One benefit of having a pretentious local chain of grocery stores is that it means that they carry a wide array of chocolate bars.

Aimee’s Review:
This bar is just very nice, even for those who aren’t normally into dark chocolate. The color is a rich, dark brown color. The flavor is strong, rather bitter… there’s something in it that tastes the way the ground smells after rain. It’s not overwhelmingly sweet, just enough to balance out the cacao. The texture is very smooth… it seems slightly cool against your mouth and leaves your tongue feeling almost dry.

Mandy’s Review:
While 70% tends to test my limits of dark, this surprisingly smooth dark is one of my favorites. It’s a bit of a meltaway; one piece tends not to last long in the mouth. The bar itself is thin and the pieces spread evenly on the tongue.

The color is a deep chestnut brown; the edges break very sharply when a piece is snapped off. It’s a crisp chocolate with a slightly appley subtlety in the rather long-lasting aftertaste. You know, those bitter little apples that have more the promise of sweetness than of sweetness itself. This chocolate is good by itself; the appley, bitter, slightly sticky taste stands on its own.  I would absolutely love to make a hot cocoa with this chocolate. I wouldn’t even sully it with marshmallows.

Overall, fantastic color, texture, and evocative simple (orange!) packaging made this an excellent choice, even though it was tucked into obscurity on the chocolate shelf at the store.

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52% Cacao

Endangered Species Chocolate donates 10% of their net profits to helping endangered wildlife. According to their packaging, they are an environmentally conscious chocolate maker and only acquire their cacao beans from small family-run farms.

Aimee’s Review:
This bar, milk chocolate with cherries, is mild. The initial flavor is weak… and to really taste the chocolate, you really need to draw it back toward your soft palate. The flavor itself is pleasant, but not overly complex. The texture is slightly chalky, almost dusty feeling and slightly filmy. The dried cherries add a pleasant tang and a chewy texture.

Overall, it’s not a bad chocolate bar… but not really one that I’m going to go out of my way for.

Mandy’s Review:
This would be a bar not to write home about. The cherries were a good flavor enhancer, but they couldn’t save the otherwise bland chocolate they were immersed in. Honestly, the dried cherries were the tasty thing about the bar.

The color was a rather pale brown compared to other chocolates of this type. While the molding was cute with the criss-crossed bars, but the surface didn’t have a particularly good sheen.

The taste overall was rather bland; I could barely taste the cacao over the sugar. The texture was very soft as soon as it hit the tongue and there was no lasting flavor. Not a bar I’d really try again.

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Vosges Haut Chocolate - Goji Bar
41% cacao

This chocolate bar is considered a “dark milk chocolate” by Vosges and contains Tibetan goji beries and pink Himalayan sea salt. The initial taste is slightly salty, followed immediately by the rich, chocolate flavor. After the salt and chocolate, there is a slight, raspberry-currant sweetness from the Goji berries.

The bar is marked with occasional tiny airbubbles, each with a tiny crystal of salt at the center. This gives an interesting texture… and the salt granules dispersed throughtout bring out the sweetness of the berries and depth of the cacao. The Goji berries themselves are chewy with a small, crisp seed at the center.

In general, this is a really great chocolate bar! The sea salt might sound a bit unappealing… but it’s not overwhelming. And if you like sweet-salty combinations (like chocolate covered pretzels), it’s a really nice addition to the chocolate.

Other pictures:

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The top image comes from a short photoshoot I did with a box of Godiva chocolates that we bought.  To my annoyance, the girl at the shop just shoved everything into the box and scratched and scuffed the shiney pieces… and crushed the edges of the more delicate pieces.

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