Cacao Pajarito? Little bird… It’s a pretty name. But finding out more is difficult. Bios provides no details about the bar, and there’s nothing on their website either: it’s impossible to find any mention of the bar, even though it won a gold medal at the 2024 Ecuador Chocolate Awards. A Google search doesn’t turn up much more information either. Only Noel Verde’s website mentions it: it’s said to be a rare variety of Arriba cacao.
This chocolate is a mystery: on Paccari’s website, the Dark Shark Galapagos bar is described as flavored with coffee and salt. Yet the packaging makes no mention of coffee or salt, and neither flavor is detectable on the palate either.
Light, pure, almost ethereal. Notes of vanilla, caramel and bitter almond. And a hint of that cocoa flavor that reassures us, just when we were beginning to doubt: yes, this is chocolate.
Ishpingo, or Mespilodaphne quixos, is a species of tree endemic to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Its bark, known as “Ecuadorian cinnamon”, has a taste similar to that of common cinnamon - produced from the bark of a tree in the same Lauraceae family (to which laurel also belongs). It’s a spice used in Ecuadorian cuisine, and Anquria tries it here with their chocolate.
Hacienda San José comes from a line of cocoa-producing farms founded in the 1930s, during Ecuador’s cocoa boom. Renowned for its high quality cocoa beans (the best in the world! according to the text on the cover), it wasn’t until 90 years later that the owner family decided to produce its own chocolate.