I haven’t done a ‘curious product’ post in a while; I guess I haven’t been as adventurous lately.

Today’s product isn’t really a curious product, it’s chocolate from Ghana; Dean and Deluca’s single origin 60% dark.
I’ve been curious about single origin chocolates for a while; they seem to be everywhere these days. 
These chocolates are marketed by chocolatiers for being made from beans from a specific country, region or farm.

They’re packaged and sold as sets in most specialty supermarkets.
It looks like while I wasn’t paying attention single origin products became hip. 
It’s not limited to wines anymore; it’s coffee, chocolate, tea, honey etc. 

The idea is that food tastes unique to the region it is grown and perhaps that differing taste is lost when we mix it up.
With this bar I also wanted to see if it tasted anything like the other made-in-Ghana bars I’ve tried.
I assume those are made from wholly Ghanaian beans.

Chocolate from Ghana tastes different.
For years people have tried to determine why chocolates made in Ghana tasted different from those made in… say… Hershey, PA
But I really picked up the bar at Dean & Deluca because I liked the earthy brown and bright yellow packaging.

It doesn’t say on the package whether the beans are from a specific farm or region in Ghana, so the claim of single-origin is still a tad vague.

What I liked most were the ingredients…. simple and few; dark chocolate, sugar, vanilla and an emulsifier.
The taste was surprisingly similar to the other Ghanaian cocoa bean bars I’ve had, the texture is smoother.
It’s firm with a bold cocoa taste, it has slight fruity notes and a mellow nutty flavour.

It also has the same deep hints as Divine Chocolate’s 70% dark, except the Divine bar is richer (taste wise).
It wasn’t too bitter or too sweet except for a mild bitter aftertaste that lingered.
In all, it’s a delightfully centred bar; smooth, rich, dark with nutty hints.
Maybe the proponents of single-origin-beans are on to something after all.

My Other Chocolate Posts:

• Mink Chocolate
• Terra Nostra Ricemilk Chocolate
• Kingsbite Chocolate
• Kras Dorina Chocolate 

I miss the excitement of US Thanksgiving.

I miss the rush of preparation and the travel leading up to the day, the food, festivities, gathering and cheerful gratitude of the day, and the retail madness that follows the next day.

The Canadian version somehow doesn’t quite manage to evoke all that, but I’m grateful for a holiday in October.

For our Thanksgiving last month we got some Mink chocolate bars.

Mink is a chocolate café here in Vancouver; their chocolates are handcrafted here using the finest Belgian chocolate.

The bars come in beautiful arty packages with fun catchy names.

I tried two; The Girls’ Favourite and Mermaid’s Choice.

The Mermaid’s Choice is a dark chocolate with ganache filling of burnt caramel and fleur de sel with a hint of rosemary.

The taste is amazing! The sweetness of the caramel and the salt makes for a very flavourful combination.

The dark chocolate shell is smooth and creamy and has a nice crunch.

The Girls’ Favourite is a 30% cacao milk chocolate with French hazelnut and almond praline.

It’s smooth and nutty with just the right amount sweetness to it. It’s rich and decadent.

Since today was a normal working day for us, I went by Mink Café on my way from work and got the Dream and …By Any Other Name bars.

We had them for dessert after our lovely dinner while pondering the things we’re thankful for again.

I was quite pleased when I found Terra Nostra Ricemilk Choco Bars; they appeared out of nowhere and it seemed they would solve my chocolate (dairy) milk dilemma.

I was so determined to like them I bought two bars outright. I’d never seen a dairy-free alternative to a milk chocolate bar before, yet seeing these, it all made sense. Of course, if we have soy, almond, rice and all those other substitutes to dairy, it only makes sense that you could make chocolate “milk” bars from these. I wonder why more companies aren’t producing this.

I first tried the Ricemilk Choco with Almonds bar; a 100g bar with 57% cocoa , ingredients include raw sugar cane, cocoa butter, rice powder, roasted almonds and hazelnuts – all organic ingredients. Even though all the ingredients are vegan, I wouldn’t necessarily call the bars vegan since it’s manufactured in a plant that produces dairy products.

The bars overall has a nice rich creamy taste, I couldn’t tell it was rice milk, it tasted rather like dairy milk. It doesn’t have one overpowering flavour, it’s mellow and not too sweet, the cocoa taste really comes through. It’s rich, velvety and nutty.

It reminds me of those tiny semi-sweet chocolate chips. The texture is smooth. The almond bar is my favourite, the crunchiness of the almonds balances well with the creamy texture of the chocolate, a rich nutty flavour with hints of vanilla.

Terra Nostra (a fifth generation chocolatier) is a Vancouver based company, (a plus for me!). The company is also part of Equitable Trade, an association which goes “beyond fair trade”.

I discovered these bars at Urban Fare, they retail a little higher above regular chocolate bars at about $4.50CAD.

I wanted to like these bars and I’m glad I wasn’t disappointed.

My friend E. sent me a box of Kingsbite chocolate bars last month. He brought these back from his visit to Ghana last year. He’s gone back again vacationing and I hope he brings more and this time, they get to me sooner.

Kingsbite is manufactured by the mostly state owned Cocoa Processing Company under the Goldentree brand name. Ghana is one of the leading producers and exporters of cocoa and thousands of its citizens are cocoa farmers. My grandmother had a cocoa tree in her yard when I was a kid and what I remember most about it was that each bean was encased in a sweet pulpy substance.

I haven’t had Goldentree chocolate in a while but I’ve had other bars produced from Ghanaian cocoa beans. Divine Chocolate uses Fair Trade Ghanaian beans and makes pretty good chocolate too, I highly recommend their products.

There were three varieties of chocolate in the Kingsbite box; dark chocolate and two milk – I couldn’t really tell the difference between the two milk chocolates except for the wrapper colours.

The texture is matte, not shiny or glossy like other bars. It doesn’t melt in your mouth easily; it melts slowly. The consistency is slightly coarse, a little hard – you can’t break a piece off easily.

It has a uniquely strong cocoa-y taste and a wonderful sweet aroma of cocoa and something else – light and sweet but not vanilla.

I really enjoyed the bars because they were a little different in flavour and texture. A friend called them exotic; I like to think of them as unique.

Just thought I’d share.

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