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Notes on chocolate: 100% cocoa bars are 99% utterly horrible

Some would say I’ve been eating rather too much chocolate lately so, in an attempt to slow things down and retune my palate, I decided to try 100% cocoa bars. (As I said a few weeks ago, technically you can’t call a 100% cocoa bar chocolate as it has to contain sugar for that, but I’m going to play a bit fast and loose.) Because no one can eat more than a piece at a time from a 100% cocoa bar. If that.

I can comfortably say I hate the stuff

100% is what I think of as really grown-up chocolate for connoisseurs who want to be able to taste every nuance of the cocoa bean and shut their eyes, much like wine and whisky drinkers do, and say, ‘I can taste the sea.’ I tasted about 20 bars, ranging from high street to super posh and I can comfortably say I hate the stuff. My tasting notes ranged from ‘like licking an ashtray’, to a simple ‘no!’, to ‘like falling asleep face down, mouth open, on a leather sofa’.

At the recent Craft Chocolate Canopy Market in London’s King’s Cross I got chatting to a chocolatier who confessed to me that he can’t stand the stuff either, but that it’s one of his bestselling lines as his customers buy 100% in bulk because ‘they see it as a health food’.

There was one bar, however, which beat all the others: it was Firetree’s Solomon Islands Guadalcanal. It was the only bar I could eat two pieces of. It managed to stay smooth and kind while retaining its credentials as a terribly serious bar of not-chocolate. All the other bars were just too mean.