Madagascar 65%

This African chocolate has a lighter, rich, and honey-like sweetness mingled with a spicy finish and the taste of red berries and raisins is immediately apparent. It tastes like a dark milk chocolate with a lot of flavor, but all the uniqueness just comes from the cacao bean just like all our other chocolate ingots. You will be surprised it isn't a milk chocolate. It could be called a dark chocolate for milk chocolate lovers. And its only 125 calories per bar. Milk free.

When I was reviewing chocolates for our mix of single origin chocolates this variety clearly stood out. I remembered thinking that it not only looked red but it smelled red. It smelled like red currents and raisins so you could imagine how curious I was to try it. It tasted like there were ground up berried in it. The Madagascar Criollo 65% was light and sweet and delightful. The flavor and mouth feel was so unique that it I just laughed out loud when I ate it. Then I ate another piece.

It must take a pretty unique and rare chocolate to make a grown man laugh out loud but it reminded me of when I was a boy. My father, Richard Smith, would go out and buy a pretty big imported chocolate bar that had raisins and nuts in them and he would throw them in the freezer. Then, when it was hard, he would take it out and smack it on the counter yelling, "Die! Die!" then we would tear open the package as if it had an antidote to poison and we would pick out the broken pieces of the frozen chocolate eating them and laughing.

The Madagascar Criollo is actually pretty rare as the Criollo bean is the rarest variety in the world. I think that once you taste this variety you are going to laugh too because it is so unique and delightful. Can you imagine that a chocolate bar actually tastes like fruit all by itself with no further assistance? It's just the way God made it. Some things are great just the way they are.

Couverture chocolate: This is the highest quality of chocolate that usually has more than 30% cocoa butter. It has a richer and more sophisticated taste and is really designed to give the maximum flavor with the least amount of chocolate and is used for covering candies like truffles. I chose this quality of chocolate not because it was the most profitable (it isn’t) but because it has the maximum amount of taste.

Wine Pairings - Wine and chocolate naturally go together

Light bodies Fruity Reds: Low Tannins, Beaujolais, Pinot Noir, Merlot
Fruity Whites: White Zinfandel, Saveuenon Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Reisling
Sweet Dessert Wines: Ruby Port, Vintage Port

Flavor pairings: Dried Fruit, Cherries, Stone Fruits, Hazlenuts, Pistachios, caramel, Honey, vanilla and Teas.

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