The craze the past few years has been to get away from the sweet, cuddly candy bars we grew up with. Candy bars like Hersey’s and Mounds and Milky Way are far too unsophisticated for the mature palate. So we now have a number of companies making gourmet dark chocolate bars that are just a step above baking chocolate in taste and texture.
But hey, I like baking chocolate.
One of my recent finds, ok, one of my wife’s recent finds, was a gourmet chocolate bar made by Hachez called Cocoa D’Arriba. A 77% Cacao Superior Mild Dark Chocolate bar flavored with Strawberry and Pepper. I do like dark chocolate covered strawberries. But if this bar is mild, I shudder to think of what a strong one would be like. The flavor is slightly bitter with a warm aftertaste and just the faintest hint of strawberry floating around in the background as the dark, hard bar slowly melts in the mouth. Just a few bites had me looking for a tall glass of milk to cure the parched tongue and bland filled taste buds.
This is not a bad bar, as far as these high cocoa content bars go, but it is not all that great either. My favorite of the odd flavored gourmet chocolate bars has to be one I found that was Absinthe flavored and no longer available at my local Central Market. There is something so wonderfully shocking about the taste of black jelly beans mixed with the taste of a Hersey bar. Oh that was a good gourmet chocolate bar.
The Cocoa D’ Arriba bar lists only green pepper in the ingredients, which could be just about anything. The illustration on the wrapper shows a sliced strawberry and several small round green balls nearby. Does this mean it is green peppercorns? Or bits of green chili pepper? It is not hot enough to be pequins, which is the only small round chili pepper that I know of. After another taste, I think it is green peppercorns like you put in a pepper mill. But it really doesn’t matter, the overwhelming flavor is dark, dark chocolate.
