Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Fossa Chocolate - Honey Orchid Dancong Hongcha bar - June 5, 2019

Chocolate of the Day: 

Fossa Chocolate
Honey Orchid Dancong Hongcha bar
Good ++
Weight: .824 oz. (23.31 g.) / 1.23 oz. (35 g.) total bar
Calories: 123 calories (estimate) in 2/3 bar
Cost: $14.00 for 1 bar
Purchased from: Chocolate Covered, San Francisco, CA

Welcome to Day #13 of Chocolate and Flowers Theme Week.

Today's Limited Edition Honey Orchid Dancong Hongcha milk chocolate bar was crafted in Singapore by Fossa Chocolate.

It was a collaboration between Fossa and rare tea curator, Pekoe and Imp (a high-end tea shop that sources single origin teas and hosts tea tastings and workshops).

Earlier this week, we sampled Fossa Chocolate's Pistachio Rose Cranberry bar which was very good. Today's Fossa bar did not technically contain any flowers, but it was infused with the beautiful aroma of Dancong Hongcha tea, known for it's naturally sweet and fragrant fruit and floral notes.

The makers paired this lovely Honey Orchid tea with cacao from Tanzania (via Kokoa Kamili, a cacao farmers cooperative in Tanzania, Africa). This cacao was selected in part for its resulting "biscuity" notes. (Fossa's Maker's Tasting Notes read: "Lingering lychee sweetness with a biscuity undertone.")

Just to be clear, there was no biscuit or cookie added. (Ingredients list for this bar read: Organic cocoa beans, cane sugar, natural cacao butter, milk powder, tea leaves.) However, the resulting sweet milk chocolate offered a satisfying morning or afternoon tea and biscuit experience to be savored slowly, all in one bar.

The sweet chocolate had a very slight granular astringency in the melt/texture, likely due to tannins or other compounds in tea/chocolate, but it was not off-putting.

More about the tea
"Mi Lan Xiang (Honey Orchid) is a dancong tea cultivated in the Phoenix Mountain of Guangdong Province. This lot was hand-harvested from the Zhen Ya village in Spring 2018." This Hongcha tea would be considered a black tea in the West, and has "a characteristic lychee fragrance and red date sweetness."

Note: The photo, above, shows my hand holding a segment of today's bar in front of a website (screen) showing Honey Orchid tea leaves in the background. I used the Silk Road Teas (San Rafael, CA) website for the background. Silk Road Tea's website is highly recommended if you are a tea fan in the U.S., and includes interesting background and origin stories on many individual teas for sale.
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