Chocolate of the Day:
Venchi S.p.A
85% Organic Lamas - Sisa bar
Good
Weight: 1.23 oz. (35 g.) / 2.46 oz. (70 g.) in total bar
Calories: 226.1 calories in 1/2 bar
Cost: $8.95 for 1 bar
Purchased from: Chocosphere.com (online order)
Welcome to Day #8 of Chocolate and Peru Theme Week.
Today's 85% Organic Lamas - Sisa bar was from Venchi S.p.A (Castelletto Stura, Cuneo (CN), Italy) was made with cacao grown in the Lamas District, Lamas Province, in the San Martin Region, in northern Peru.
This Venchi bar came with two easy-to-decipher visual scores printed on the packaging. It showed us that this bar was rated a 2 on a scale of 5 for Intensity, and 3 out of 4 on a scale for Aromaticity.*
This rating system might be helpful to buyers, but without knowing what other chocolate bars they are comparing this to, it loses some of its utility. For example, this bar was way more intense than a blander commercially popular bar and still was fairly bold and acidic. (I wondered what a 5 would be like on this scale.)
The organic and gluten free deep, dark, slightly acidic bar had a slightly reddish color. It had an even, deep roast "feeling," a smooth cocoa butter** melt and texture and an even, dark flavor.
There was, surprisingly, a fleeting floral note. (The maker's tasting notes read as follows: "Note(s) of white flower, dried fruit and honey.") The floral note was surprising because, generally, smooth dark flavor and texture in an ultra-dark bar like this comes from longer conching/grinding times and the addition of lots of cocoa butter, meaning that more volatile floral notes are usually lost or masked in the process.
*Aromaticity is a term that refers to the properties of an organic compound that gives off an aroma. More specifically, this term is used in organic chemistry to describe certain molecules that have a "ring of resonance bonds" that exhibit more stability than found in other configurations.
**Ingredients: organic cocoa mass (from Peru), organic cocoa butter, organic cane sugar
This Venchi bar came with two easy-to-decipher visual scores printed on the packaging. It showed us that this bar was rated a 2 on a scale of 5 for Intensity, and 3 out of 4 on a scale for Aromaticity.*
This rating system might be helpful to buyers, but without knowing what other chocolate bars they are comparing this to, it loses some of its utility. For example, this bar was way more intense than a blander commercially popular bar and still was fairly bold and acidic. (I wondered what a 5 would be like on this scale.)
The organic and gluten free deep, dark, slightly acidic bar had a slightly reddish color. It had an even, deep roast "feeling," a smooth cocoa butter** melt and texture and an even, dark flavor.
There was, surprisingly, a fleeting floral note. (The maker's tasting notes read as follows: "Note(s) of white flower, dried fruit and honey.") The floral note was surprising because, generally, smooth dark flavor and texture in an ultra-dark bar like this comes from longer conching/grinding times and the addition of lots of cocoa butter, meaning that more volatile floral notes are usually lost or masked in the process.
*Aromaticity is a term that refers to the properties of an organic compound that gives off an aroma. More specifically, this term is used in organic chemistry to describe certain molecules that have a "ring of resonance bonds" that exhibit more stability than found in other configurations.
**Ingredients: organic cocoa mass (from Peru), organic cocoa butter, organic cane sugar
