A floral chocolate. It opens with a bouquet of jasmine, rose and orange blossom, followed by cherries and hazelnuts, enveloping a slightly bitter woody heart. It’s a great chocolate, provoking a firework display of flavors.
It’s hard to make good chocolate, even with Ecuadorian cocoa. That’s what this small, family-run company, based in the Amazon rainforest, is showing us. On the packaging of this bar, found at the Quito artisanal market, there are no details. I can tell by the taste that it’s milk chocolate.
This chocolate from Mindo tries to find a balance between the taste of chili, which modifies the flavor of the chocolate, and its spiciness. We feel a hesitation: to avoid that it stings too much, we don’t have much flavor. The result: a chocolate that looks a lot like (the excellent!) Mindo 77% chocolate, with a little spiciness at the end.
This is another tablet provided in preview by the store Cacao & Cacao, located in Quito on Juan Leon Mera Avenue. A big thank you!
A visit to Brussels was the occasion to visit several chocolate stores. The brand Pierre Marcolini is among the most famous, and not only for its bonbons: they also sell great grand crus. Surprisingly, no chocolate from Ecuador. So I wanted to try something else, that you don’t often see: an Indian cocoa, of the Amelonado variety.