Whoa, Cocoa!

I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I'm a great fan of high coca chocolates, more commonly known as Dark or bitter chocolates. Recently a friend abroad bought me a bar of an amazing (and terribly expensive at 4 Euro a bar) chocolate, the “Lindt Excellence Cocoa” with over 80% cocoa and I relished every bit of it. Now it so happens that our regular bar of chocolate contains not more than 5-10% cocoa so you can understand how rich this was.

So once again when another friend asked me what I wanted, I was not undecided: Lindt Excellence with as much cocoa content as available. So he got me the Mother of all Dark Chocolates; the Lindt Excellence Noirissime with 99% pure virgin cocoa, and I was only too delighted.

I was a bit surprised though, because even though the elaborate packing (with pull-out tray and flavor-lock sealing) was expected, this was the first I’ve seen with a “Tasting Advice” on the peel-up foil cover. It soberly stated that in order to ‘fully appreciate all the flavors and bouquet of aromas’, we had to ‘progressively develop our palate through the tasting of other high cocoa ranges’ and taste with ‘a small piece left to melt in the mouth’. Humph, some build up for a miserable chocolate, I decided and popped in a piece in my mouth.

The next few minutes were kind of hard to describe.

The next day I threw out the rest of it out the window and vowed never to touch bitter chocolate again.