Thursday, December 3, 2009

RL: A tiny little rant about chocolate.


I bought this bar of chocolate the other day: Ghirardelli's Dark Chocolate with Raspberry. It's not great. (In fact, it's not even remotely as pleasurable to eat as the back label would have you believe.)

Don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed the Ghirardelli brand. Some of their candies have, at times, made me woozy with delight.

I love dark chocolate. I love raspberry. There should be a frenzied chorus of orgasmic angels blowing out my ears when I eat this. But there aren't.

This is a boring candy.

The chocolate is pretty unwieldy even by dark chocolate standards. (And again, I love dark chocolate.) The texture is hard and unmelting, the flavor dull, dirtlike, and uninspired. This is fine if you like dirt.

The filling is okay. It's not the concentrated raspberry goodness I thought it would be. I was hoping for "silky, tangy, sun-ripened summer fruit" and got... well, I think it would be fine on its own. It's mostly freeze-dried fruit mixed with sugar and fat, a little gritty if you're paying attention, but the flavor is nice. Unfortunately, the chocolate utterly overwhelms it, going well beyond "subtle" territory and deep into the realm of "somewhere in the tread of this dirty leather boot is the crushed remains of a raspberry".

I've eaten medicines that were more interesting. Vitamin C tablets, for instance. Or these chewy, chalky little mint-flavored things my mom used to give me when I had indigestion.

I give it a 3 out of 10: Fit for Emergency Chocolate (hormonal) and gifting to strangers you don't really care about.

2 comments:

  1. You were expecting something more than "sugar and fat". Perhaps you would be satisfied if Ghiradelli were to sprinkle a little coke in their mix. I know it may be a little difficult for someone with such unrefined tastes to understand the superiority of these chocolates in comparison to vitamin c tablets, but the rest of us rational people know a delicacy when we taste one. My opinion is obviously superior to yours.

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  2. Vitamin C tablets are tart, sweet, and have a pleasant gritty texture.

    Good chocolate is as much about pleasant texture as it is about the subtle flavor and aroma of the cacao variet(ies) used. This was lacking on both fronts.

    Also, I know you, so I believe you have never tried this candy and are just rebutting for fun!

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