How to eat Unsweetened Chocolate

Most chocolate is sweetened with sugar or in our case Stevia or Xylitol. It is possible to make chocolate with no sweeteners in at all.  This is called 100% chocolate or pure chocolate.  Willie Cocoa popularised this style of chocolate in the UK via a Channel 4 TV series.  We do not sell this product but it is one of the nicer 100% chocolates we have tasted)

Because the chocolate is aimed at a specialist market,  most of the products are identified by the country they come from.  We are stocking  a chocolate made from Peruvian beans which is very typical of the 100% chocolate as the sophisticated bitter taste hits you straight away.   The bars made from beans grown in Ecuador  make a slightly more mellow chocolate where you can enjoy the complex flavours of the chocolate from the first mouthful and it is a bar I would recommend if you are venturing into the world of unsweetened chocolate for the first time.  It is good to go for a thin bar as the the heat from the mouth starts to melt the chocolate so you can really enjoy the flavour unlike traditional milk chocolate where nice chunky bar is best.  These bars even come with a slip with instructions on the best way to eat them to appreciate the flavour.  How to eat chocolate?  This is a first for me  - I thought I already knew how to eat it!  

It above may sound a bit silly but tasting  unsweetened chocolate has made me appreciate just how sophisticated chocolate can taste.

Unusually the range we stock also includes a unsweetened milk chocolate that is 75% cocoa solids which more than some high quality dark chocolate.  Like all unsweetened chocolate it does not contain Soy lecithin so can be eaten by those with a soya allergy.  This is my favourite as the milk brings a richness to the chocolate that enhances the complex flavours of the chocolate with just a hint of vanilla.

If you read about Zotter , the company that makes that makes the pure chocolate we are stocking, you will see that they really care about the product and take a lot of care to source the product ethically not just the cocoa beans but the milk as well.