Cadbury Bourneville Hazelnut: India

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Cadbury Bourneville Almond: India

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Casino White Caramelized Coconut: France

Less than two weeks ago, I was at a holiday party held by the hotel where my wife works. It was a Christmas party and everyone attending selected in advance a gift recipient at random out of a hat. My selection was a pastry chef. I went on the internet and did a little research about him ahead of time in order to discern what sort of gift he might enjoy. He described himself as a chocoholic, so I knew immediately that I could not buy him a chocolate collection.

At the party when I met him for the first time, I mentioned the Chocolate Republic. He wasn’t much interested. He kept a sort of chocolate blog himself, more like a food and lifestyle assessment. In conversing with him, I realized a pastry chef was no man to helm the Chocolate Republic. This man recounted the fine cacaos he used in his pastry confections, most of which I never heard of and would have no ready access to buy in the retail markets. He judged everything from a professional chef’s standpoint. He didn’t or couldn’t see it from the consumers’. First and foremost, consumers don’t care if chocolate is made from rare Arriba beans from Ecuador. They only delight in those obscure facts if the chocolate offers a unique taste treat and is sold at a price commensurate with its quality, and that’s only if they have any interest whatsoever in eating better quality chocolate. It’s only in the last twenty years there’s been a real market among the commoners for premium chocolates.

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Tesco Organic Ecuadorean 39% Milk Chocolate: UK

Since the Chocolate Republic’s inception fifteen months ago, I’ve watched the chocolate landscape change for the better in Thailand. Prices haven’t fallen for the Lindts and Guylians and Freys. In the luxury end, there’s really not more and better chocolates available. No, what’s changed is that the big retail marketing powerhouses in Thailand, with their headquarters in Europe, have started offering in-house brands at very attractive prices.

Carrefour started doing it before they leapt out of Thailand completely. Big C has started to offer their Casino bars. And now marketing mammoth from the UK, Tesco, through its Thai operations of Tesco-Lotus, is selling Tesco branded chocolate bars in Thailand at about the same price as Big C is selling Casino bars at its stores.

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Casino Dark Tanzania 85% with Split Almonds: France

Could it be because Casino is from France, the nation most closely associated with epicureans, that their food products take on a luxury air? Casino goes all out on this one, part of their Delices range. They’re offering a dark, dark chocolate, at 85% cocoa solids, with cacao sourced from Tanzania, and filled with 10% split almonds, an ambitious undertaking indeed.

Green & Black’s and Carrefour did quite acceptable jobs with their 80%+ bars. The reason you don’t see many 80%+ bars on the shelves, especially among mainstream producers, is that they’re not easy to pull off. The darker the chocolate, the more important the cacao that’s been sourced and the manufacturer’s chocolate producing techniques in dealing with the higher expected bitterness. Here’s a analogy that could better explain it. The quality and freshness of fish stands is more evident when that fish is eaten as sashimi. Served as a fried fish filet sandwich at McDonald’s and drenched in cheese, it’s not so easy to discern — or all that important — what grade dish you’re eating.

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Casino Milk Chocolate Caramel: France

I’d spun the roulette wheel once with this Casino, trying the French chocolate brand’s dark chocolate with hints of cacao bean, sourced from Caribbean cacao. The verdict from that bar (and a few Casino pizzas) was that retail behemoth Casino was using its sales clout to produce some decent quality home brands.

I picked up three chocolate bars that day I was strolling through Casino’s Thai-subsidiary Big C. Two were dark bars. My wife and step-son are anti-dark. Not as vociferously anti-dark as the white supremacists running South Africa in the 1980′s and before, but close. Milk chocolates are the name of their game, as they are of most amateur chocolate tasters. The little leaguers seem to have an obsession with caramel as well, all the more so if the caramel is mixed with milk chocolate. I love caramel as much as the next guy. Whenever we go to Swensen’s for a sundae, I’ll go out of my way to order a sundae drenched in caramel. But in the Chocolate Republic’s sphere of influence, I’ve found that caramel is usually added to chocolate to cover up the taste of inferior product. Caramel has such a tasty flavor and texture that the quality of the chocolate the caramel is packed into drifts into the background for consideration. I remember the Marathon bars I used to eat as a kid. They made better rulers than they did quality chocolate bars, and Mars discontinued them over 30 years ago, probably to save lives. At the time I ate them in the mid- and late-70′s, these braided bars were treated like fine champagne. My palate was distracted by the caramel. I didn’t get a chance to comprehend how bad the chocolate really was.

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Casino Dark With Bits Of Cacao Bean: France

I was moseying on through the local Big C supermarket to do some grocery shopping, and my eyes came across several of these Casino brand bars, all made in France. I’d only heard of Casino a month or two prior. My wife had come home from Big C with several Casino brand pizzas in hand, purchased for very reasonable prices by Thai standards. The quality of these frozen pizzas was superb, and we’d regularly serve them to guests as a snack.

It was only from doing research for these French chocolate bars that I discovered the Casino Group is a humungous food conglomerate, not just some small regional food producer.  Casino consists of 11,663 stores and 230,000 employees. In 2010, the Group had over €29bn in revenues and €1.3bn in trading profits.

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Ghirardelli Midnight Reverie: USA

Ghirardelli’s Midnight Reverie is the highest cacao content dark chocolate bar Burma Mike brought over to Thailand in his American chocolate parcel. It’s also the highest cacao content bar in Ghirardelli’s Intense Dark collection, and one of the three Intense Dark bars in Ghirardelli’s range that really counts as ‘intense’ and ‘dark.’

Intensity can be a good thing. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a very intense acting performance in Gangs of New York, and he’s the best thing in the movie. Who doesn’t like an intense coffee flavor in mocha almond fudge ice cream? But intensity can also be a bad thing. If fruit has gone rotten and has an intensely spoiled flavor, no one’s asking for seconds. Drew Barrymore gives intensely unconvincing acting performances. You’d rather she was less focused; the bad acting might not hurt so much to watch.

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Theo Ultimate Dark Chocolate: USA

Burma Mike brought over 29 American chocolate bars, most dark. Only two of the bars exceeded 80% cacao content, Theo’s Ultimate Dark from Washington and the Ghirardelli Midnight Reverie from California.   I saved them for last. Not because I saved the best for last. After reviewing stackloads of bars on the Chocolate Republic, I’ve noticed that extreme dark bars, with greater than 80% cacao, are not my favorites. I am a dark chocolate aficionado, but more in the semisweet range of 60-65%. These bars got stuck in the refrigerator the longest because they were the exceptions. The other bars were mostly 60-70% and could be compared amongst each other. These two bars stood alone.

Pulling off an acceptable ultra dark is tough. With 80%+ cacao solids, you have less percentage left on the ingredient list to cram in much else. Carrefour did a credible job with its 80%, and Green & Black’s deserves kudos for their 85% organic. Many a manufacturer won’t go above 70% because they know they don’t have the chops.

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Theo Dark Chocolate: USA

Theo and I had grown closer over the last month-and-a-half. I loved their commitment to organic and fair trade and their chocolate wrappers, while understated, conveyed the simplicity of the brand. If a manufacturer is only using all-natural and organic ingredients in its dark chocolate, the ingredient list is very, very simple: cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter, and ground vanilla bean. No unintelligible contents, Eurostyle, like “E153″ (artificial brown color, in case you, like the rest of Europe, didn’t know) and “E323″ (lactates).

I was surprised that this was one of the last three American chocolate bars left in my refrigerator. In a typical tasting, I would’ve sampled this bar sooner, before I tried Theo’s Coconut and Orange, both of which used this 70% organic dark as a base. I’d want to see how the base stood on its own before sampling it with additional flavorings and fillings. Burma Mike just brought over so much chocolate at once that there was no perfect way and order to sample it all. 

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