Dark Chocolate Taste Test!

What’s a Girl to Do When Her Trainer Tells Her to Avoid Sugar?

Cheat and eat it anyway?

NO, silly! Instead, my family did a dark chocolate taste test to see how high of a cacao percentage we could tolerate while still enjoying the chocolate. We sampled three different brands all with different percentages:
Valrhona 71% Cacao Le Noir Amer, Equal Exchange 80% Cacao Organic Panama Extra Dark Chocolate, and Godiva 85% Cacao Extra Dark Santo Domingo Chocolate.

I was excited to try the Valrhona bar because this brand is considered by many chefs be the finest chocolate in the world. It contains no added fat or butter oil, resulting in less calories than most chocolate–woo hoo! The Valrhona 71% Cacao bar is made of refined blending of selected cocoa beans from the Trinitarios and Criollos origins, enhancing their rich flavors and redwood colors. This sweet bitterness reveals a fruity and floral taste, with exceptional long lasting aromas.
The Results: This chocolate was definitely the sweetest, but not by much. My sense is that once you develop a tollerance for a certain cacao threshold (let’s say 80%), the lesser percentages don’t seem that much different (and so why not just eat 80%). The disappointing part about this chocolate was that it lacked even the slightest bit of creaminess. In fact, it was chalky and dry. I wonder if I bought an old bar. Boo!

Equal Exchange’s 80% Cacao Organic bar is the darkest they sell. Unlike many high cacao content bars that are dominated by a bitter or sour note, this bar is perfectly balanced in a way that allows the true chocolate flavor of the Panamanian beans to shine. It’s vegan (yay, Jake!) and gluten-free, too!

The Results: WINNER! This bar was delicious. It’s dark, very dark, but it was creamy enough and did not have a bitter taste. I could eat a couple squares of this and be satisfied without ruining all the hard work put in at the gym. I also can tell when I am eating this organic product that it is of high quality–it held it’s own again two very reputable brands, which is pretty cool!

The Godiva bar is made from the darkest chocolate in the range — 85% cacao from the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo. It’s a robust dark chocolate with hints of spicy, berry top notes. Smoothest of textures. It delivers a densely complex dark chocolate.

The Results: While this bar did live up to its “smoothest of textures” claim, it was way too “densely complex” in flavor that I found it to be pretty bitter. I would not recommend this bar to another gal with a sweet tooth, although I would be interested in revisiting this bar after restricting my sugar intake even more (perhaps a week without sugar or fruit).

My next chocolate tasting will include 80% only from different brands.
What have other people been doing to stave off sugar cravings?
-Lauren, the Lunch Bunch