A work meeting today gave me the opportunity to investigate for free the rarefied world of PREMIUM CHOCOLATE. Green and Blacks? Bendicks? Strictly middlebrow. Try Michel Cluizel, whose 1er Premier Crus de Plantations bars go for £3.50 per 100g. Not the kind of thing I’d ever buy but I was curious to taste them.
Naturally as un Anglais sans couth I thought the chocolate would be some kind of rip-off but actually it was really delicious. I sampled the ones from Papua New Guinea and Madagascar. The Madagascar one was initially disappointingly flakey but tasty enough and then had a fantastic aftertaste which moved gradually from mild sweetness to a comforting spicy heat. The PNG bar was sweeter and had a hint of violets but again, terrific aftertaste, this time somewhat cinnamon-y or even, yes, CLOVES-ish. The meeting proved to be a good venue for the chocolate tasting as propriety meant I couldn’t just scoff a load down so I got the chance to savour it.
The consensus was that this stuff won’t catch on in the UK – we like our chocolate milky not bitter, and the premium sector is a bit tiny. But there’s always room for super-premium products for a certain segment of the market, or for valentine’s day gifts, and the Cluizel bars definitely fit the bill. (Of course the question is whether the flavour differences I detected are anything whatsoever to do with the plantations the cocoa beans in each came from.)
sometimes you really do have the best job ever.
the apparent success of Green & Blacks (nowhere 4 years agom blummin’ everywhere now) suggests that the UK’s choc tastes may be shifting slightly at least.
i really liked that one i had in France with the bits of apple in (but then i like any food that you can put bits of apple in. Apple Lucozade doesn’t count because that is clearly not apple in there). Have Toblerone ever tried fruit variants? (perhaps they have and are well known in Yerp).
I failed to get my paws on the tantalising (and also expensive at £2.59/bar) “SPICY BAR” though apparently it wasn’t very spicy.
G&Bs apparently have wide distribution but are still very niche in terms of sales.
my mother’s mother loved BENDINCKS BITTERMINTS
Anyone who fancies this kind of thing should check out the chocolate tasting sessions at L’artisan du Chocolat on Sloane Street. It’s kind of pricy but you get a whole heap of exquisite single-origin chocolate and a lot of food-industry gossip and bitchiness to boot.
you can get G&B all over new york, too