Wednesday 19 March 2014

The Raw Chocolate Company: Pitch Dark 70% and Vanoffee

These two 44g bars from The Raw Chocolate Company are retailed at around £1.99 each, with their cocoa being Fairtrade, organic, from Peru and processed with low maintained temperatures. The Raw Chocolate Co. have a nice selection of unique chocolate bars, as well as being winners of 2 gold stars in the 2013 Great Taste Awards! I believe The Raw Chocolate Company have a clear established target market: those interested in healthy-living opposed to the indulgence and luxuriousness of chocolate 

The Raw Chocolate Co. use "minimal additional ingredients so that the cacao can sing out", but also maybe because the hype of raw-anything is at it's highest right now? But okay, with all seriousness, I'm sure they are passionate about chocolate! 


Pitch Dark - Raw Chocolate - 72% Cacao
Ingredients: cacao mass, coconut palm sugar, virgin cacao butter. I was pleased to see there being no vanilla, seeming likely that maybe these Peruvian beans taste so good that vanilla is just not necessary, am I right? And no emulsifier!

A coffee bean aroma, reasonably dark... an ideal roast. This chocolate had a dark, intense yet sweet taste, and with my second piece; opened up to lots of subtleties. Several times I picked up on lemon, tiny bursts of it coming through that darker fruity body!

Wow. A VERY smooth, long melt. This melt was incredibly impressive. A slight bitter finish, but pleasant... I feel as if I must mention the melt of this chocolate again, just absolutely beautiful

Vanoffee - Raw Cacao Confection
It looks like milk chocolate, yet contains no cocoa mass... I then considered it to be white chocolate but then I saw it had no milk. So, I guess this is just simply a cocoa confection, like the packaging says. But no doubt I was eager to try

This Vanoffe is a blend of  ingredients from four exotic plants: cacao butter, lucuma, coconut palm sugar and vanilla

It was a toffee aroma, but after a while I thought it to be quite strange, it was almost bark-like. It was a scent that I recognised, but just couldn't quite put my finger on it; basically; I've smelt better chocolate (oh yes, but this isn't chocolate...). But hats off for this smelling natural! 

The taste mimicked the aroma, but the only difference being that the longer I was exposed to it...the nicer it got. It was sweet, tasting like cake batter (yum) and actually had a similar texture of it too. There were delicate notes of sweet spices, creating this tingling sensation on the tongue. I much preferred the chew of this chocolate opposed to the melt of it, as the toffee flavour was more prominent this way! 

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