The (long) hunt for the best orange dark chocolate
I’ve long wanted the high-quality, attentive-tasting-worthy version of Terry’s chocolate oranges—something that would reward greater focus with a rich, interesting, and pleasant experience.
It turned out to be surprisingly hard to find! I tasted twenty-two different orange dark chocolates over the course of three or four years, and named a sort of reluctant winner back in December of 2022, and only just now finally had that winner overthrown by a chocolate I feel I can properly endorse as The Right One.
I’ll put the tasting notes for those two up top, and then the notes for everyone else below for anyone interested in Going On An Orange Dark Chocolate Journey.
WINNERS:
Askinosie’s “Dark Chocolate + Orange”
Forté’s “Orange Jazz”
Highly recommended:
Mission Chocolate “Laranja”
Duffy’s “Orange”
To’ak Alchemy “Galapagos Orange & Salt”
Metiche “Cacao & Orange”
Hummingbird “Orange”
Highly recommended (but doing something a little off to the side):
Hogarth “Sarsaparilla & Orange”
Mirzam “Dark Chocolate with Orange & Cinnamon”
Apothecary Chocolates (Nourishing Ojas Collection) “Creativity”
Meh/middling:
Cluizel “Écorces d’Orange”
Dick Taylor “Orange Bourbon Pecan”
Madhu “Orange Clove”
Lindt “Intense Orange”
Not recommended:
Baianí “Dark Chocolate with Orange Zest”
Primo Botánica “Gold of the Incas”
Volo “Deep Dark Chocolate” w/ Candied Orange Peel
Theo Fair Trade Organic “Orange”
Equal Exchange “Organic Orange Infused”
Chocolove XOXOX “Orange Peel in Dark Chocolate”
Recommended for a fascinatingly awful experience:
Chocolarder 68% Dark Chocolate Smooth Orange Peel
Banished to chocolate hell for irredeemable terribleness:
Amano “Citrus Mélange Á Trois”
Askinosie “Dark Chocolate + Orange” (58%) ☆☆☆☆☆
(Trinitario beans from the Philippines)
Smell: Soooooo light and fresh and crisp and cool. Running through sprinklers on a bright warm spring morning, splashing in duck ponds, putting on sunscreen before a day at the beach or the pool (before it gets really hot). This is maybe like the most “promising” smell I’ve ever smelled from a dark chocolate.
First melt: Taste is more serious and down-to-earth than the smell, wood and soil rather than air and mist. Round and full. A little bit … hearty? Hearty like bacon? Requests chewing.
Definitely reminiscent of candied orange peel (this is a good thing). Lying in the shade with my head resting on a friend’s stomach. Renting a paddleboat on Lake Macintosh. Dappled shade and cooling breezes, wood hikes and parkour mornings. I feel fresh and invigorated and ready to become tired.
Wow. This is really good! It just has a sort of spring to it. Lively and happy and itching to get going. A very good Dementor recovery chocolate—unorthodox, and Madam Pomfrey gives Mad-Eye the side-eye for his inclusion of orange, which is definitely controversial.
Evokes bright, vibrant blue, Nickelodeon orange, fresh living spring green. Gonna have to work to not scarf all of it down right now.
Forte “Orange Jazz” (64%) ☆☆☆☆
(Cara cara oranges)
Smell: Cool, hollow, rindy, green and refreshing. I notice that orange dark chocolates often smell “green” and not “orange.” Makes me think of the leaf on a plucked orange.
Splashing in a pool in early summer. Cream on an orange milkshake. Doesn’t smell of chocolate at all.
First melt: Simultaneously smooth and a little grainy—makes me think of wet playground sand (or Squand!). Lives high in the mouth and the back of the throat. Sweet, rich, full. A layer of high citrus over top of hearty chocolate.
Very soft and yielding on the chew, turns almost instantly to thick mud. It’s light and bright and open. I think I can find “sour” and I think I can find “bitter” but it’s all smooth and integrated and pleasant.
If this were a ship, it would be a small sailboat, crewed by two or three, on a wide reservoir under blue skies with puffy white clouds. If this were a day of the week, it would definitely be Saturday. Putt-Putt Golf chocolate. Arcade chocolate. Orange soda chocolate. Carefree and happy and energetic. It’s named “Jazz” and I get it.
I think it’s only four stars instead of five, because of something like straightforward simplicity. But I’m pretty sure this is the thing I’ve been looking for—it’s just that the ceiling on the thing I’ve been looking for IS four stars. Some of the other chocolates have gotten five stars, but not as a version of a Terry’s chocolate orange. They’re five-star chocolates that aren’t Doing The Thing.
Mission Chocolate “Laranja” (70%) ☆☆☆☆☆
(Brazilian cacao + Bahia orange)
Smell: Strangely rubbery? Smells like the big inner tubes at a waterpark as you carry them on your shoulders up the ladder to go down the big twisty waterslide. Smells like a whoopee cushion. Doesn’t smell like chocolate or orange.
Has BIG HONKIN’ CHUNKS of candied orange or orange peel, they’re smaller than an almond but larger than a pea.
First melt (a section with no chunks): Smooth, has the “plasticy” quality that Carson complained about with To’ak, very slow and understated. Mostly chocolate, dry and cool, a little bit of surprising extra coolness high in the sinuses that I think is the orange contributing. This bite, at least, is much closer to a standard dark chocolate experience than most of the other bars, a kind of very quiet fairly dry bitter. If this were a ship, it would be a modern recreation of an ancient design, a Polynesian canoe or a Greek trireme, but built with modern tools and modern materials, an exacting marriage of past and present.
Second bite, chewing this time, along with the chunks … ooh, the chunks definitely change it. They blend pretty well, loud and sweet and cooling. Yeah, this chocolate needs to be chewed, eating just the chocolate part was like eating the chicken separate from the fettucine alfredo.
Soft, relaxing, joyful. A vacation to Florida in the late summer, beaches and Disney World, parents who are relaxed and happy and chill, children who are young and shrieking with delight as they sprint into the ocean. The ideal people think of when they think tropical vacation, that people usually fail to actually achieve because they are preoccupied with their expectations. Wading naked into the ocean with Robin at Palmcone, looking up at the stars and feeling the quiet tranquility of the moment.
Duffy’s “Orange” (65%) ☆☆☆☆☆
(Hispaniola beans from the Dominican Republic)
(lol it says on the front of the bar “NOTES: ORANGE” and nothing else, power move)
Smell: ooooh bright sour VERY citrusy orange, like candied orange peel or sour orange jelly beans. A little bit reminiscent of orange soda? Which I am realizing literally for the first time actually has quite a bite to it?
First melt: Slightly grainy on the melt (very very fine grains, like powder sand); almost … salty?? Salty, but with a definite aura of citrus. I dunno if there is an orange alcoholic drink with salt around the rim but I’m getting that sort of feel. Very … hm. Very sophisticated but also accessible? Like, it feels like the sort of experience that someone with Genuine Taste And Discernment promoted to the attention of the young teenager, to try to demonstrate to them what High Quality is. They chose it because it was the least subtle of all the subtle things, while still being good.
Wow, I really like this. I’m continuing to lean into this imagery of, like, a forty-year-old Cool Uncle who lives alone and has a lot of money, looking after his sixteen-year-old nephew, and they’ve just gone out and bought suits (the sixteen-year-old has never owned a suit before and now has one that’s tailored and DASHING) and now they’re in a high-class bar and the uncle is like here, have a little of this chocolate, don’t munch it, sink into it. The light in the bar is soft and golden; the surfaces all dark polished wood and velvet; there’s a tinkle of glassware and a quiet murmur of conversation; only every fifth table is occupied.
If this were a ship, it would be the uncle’s yacht, which he allows the teen to steer out of the harbor “for real,” leaving the boy alone in the cockpit. “It’s not that hard a boat to manage. I trust you.”
Five stars. Very pleasantly surprised. Yet another that barely counts as “orange,” but really extremely good in other ways. Might make it into the third Ultimate.
To’ak “Galapagos Orange & Salt” (65%) ☆☆☆☆☆
(Beans from Piedra de Plata, Manabí, Ecuador)
Smell: Jungles. The flesh of freshly-cracked nuts. Dark brown and pale brown and water steaming off the trees after the noon rain. Does not smell like chocolate. Does not smell like orange.
First melt: To’ak smooth on the bottom. A hint of fire and spice as I melt through the chocolate layer, SALT and ORANGE, very salty orange, water running down over a pitted stone plane at the foot of a volcano. Very barren and desolate, very Galapagos, very “the elements,” with life only barely hanging on in the cracks and crevices, a few hardy plants, a few bold lizards and insects.
This is almost savory. It’s 35% cane sugar but the salt and the orange and the dark chocolate are SO strong; it’s closer to eating pepperoni than it is to eating a Reese’s cup. The flavors are very well blended and balanced, imo, just STRONG. It is alchemical; it doesn’t taste like orange or salt or chocolate, it tastes like … like the way lava tastes to a salamander or a dragon, a fine wine that humans will never be able to taste because it burns them right up but ooooo, the other dragons are impressed with the vintage.
Also five stars. Also not “orange.” Dang.
Metiche “Cacao & Orange” (70%) ☆☆☆☆
(Forastero beans from Chiapas)
Smell: Dry, dusty, clean—the marble floors of a well-swept church, a fresh clarinet reed. Doesn’t smell of chocolate, doesn’t smell of orange.
First melt: Alive in my sinuses, not any scent in particular but definitely *there*, fresh and airy. Soft and dusty on the tongue, almost feels a smidge salty.
Taste slowly coming online. It’s subtle, muted, understated. Almost tastes green, makes me think of the leaf of the orange tree rather than the orange itself.
Sharp, snappy crack when chewed.
Gosh, who is this? Where is this? It’s definitely someone, it’s definitely something, but it’s like I’m experiencing tip-of-the-tongue syndrome even as I’m looking straight at it. If this were a ship, it would be behind me. If this were a person—okay, if this were a person, they would be softspoken, calm, perhaps a touch sad (wistful?). A young novice, perhaps. The word "demure" comes to mind, even though it's one I'm not 100% sure I know the definition of.
This chocolate is female. This chocolate is diligent. I keep returning to the sweeping metaphor, from the scent—I see someone slowly, lovingly sweeping, lit by soft morning light through the stained glass. They are alone, and do not know I can see them; they hum a soft lullaby to themselves, or possibly to the floor itself. They have left their shoes by the door so that they can feel the cool marble with their toes. They are garbed in pale linens and tend not to meet your eyes when you speak to them.
This is a very good chocolate, four stars. But it’s still not the thing I’m looking for in an orange chocolate, alas.
(I feel like the packaging deserves an honorable mention—it is very much in line with the notes above, white and gold and Hispanic and Catholic. Yeah, sure, priming, but there are many, many times that packaging has a very distinct character and my notes do NOT jive with that character, so I think what has happened here is that someone has in fact just done an outstanding job of finding packaging that matches the experience of the chocolate, which is enough to bump up another half star.)
Hummingbird “Orange” milk chocolate (60%) ☆☆☆☆☆
Smell: Quite promising, actually! Smells very much of “orange chocolate,” reminiscent of an orange chocolate ball. Clean, round, hollow, shiny, slightly green.
First melt: Water rushing down slides, a slightly salty pickup, becoming more and more savory as it melts. Rich. Thick. Fatty. Decadent. Almost greasy. Like pizza or bacon. There’s orange here, but it’s subtle, on the edges—like the tiniest spritz of orange flavoring into a stir fry.
Very smooth/soft/yielding crunch when chewed.
Echoing hallways, flickering candlelight. Adventuresome, but also quiet—the part of the adventure where the protagonists have to sneak. Protagonists, plural—this is not a lonesome chocolate.
I’m having a hard time pinning it down. It’s silky, creamy, salty, smooth, full-bodied. Like a desert made of cookie crumble and orange cream (yes, I meant desert, and not dessert). Open, expansive, cool, breezy.
An awkard, gawky fourteen-year-old who’s cleaned up and put on a suit for the band concert and looks surprisingly, disconcertingly sharp.
I think this is the chocolate that book one Neville Longbottom needs, to get him moving in the right direction. It’s an encouraging chocolate, a chocolate about simple childhood moral principles of courage and integrity and perseverance.
I’m gonna go with five stars. It’s still not quite The Thing I’m Looking For, but it’s much closer than most and also high quality on its own.
Hogarth “Sarsaparilla & Orange” (68%) ☆☆☆☆
(New Zealand (?))
Smell: Whoa. Smells rooty, like root beer, except instead of root beer it’s orange root beer. Like distinctly not “orange soda” but root beer (only orange). Fizzy and sharp. Grown-up, according to kids.
First melt: Tried to get a bite that included the Bits. Melting sharpsour so much like root beer whaaaaat. It’s like a root beer float, but orange. I can’t even taste chocolate, just fizz and orange and BITE. The Bits are not adding to the experience; I’mm’a chew them up and get them out of the way.
Okay, when I chew it it’s more like just Regular Orange Dark Chocolate. The weird fizzy sharp quality is much less present when chewing.
If this were a ship, it would be a drugstore where the chemist is unveiling his brand-new invention, orange root soda, for the first time, to an unsuspecting and unprepared public who are swept away by it because it is the year 1904 and this is the most amazing thing they’ve ever tasted. My experience of this chocolate is like “a scene shot in sepia tone, except the orange drink glows brightly orange.”
Man, I wish this were a hard candy. Guess I’m going to have to try to find a … sarsaparilla hard candy? It’s four stars, but not in the “chocolate” category.
Mirzam “Dark Chocolate with Orange & Cinnamon” (62%) ☆☆☆☆☆
(Ghana)
Smell: Smells like hugs. Smells like hugs at Christmas. Smells like when Mom took me to Southpoint Mall and bought me the Abercrombie scarf that was in Gryffindor colors even though it was too expensive and (strictly speaking) we weren’t there to get stuff for me. Smells sticky-sweet and sprinkled with cinnamon and dripping down the sides and fingers and lips all scruppy om nom nom
First melt: Coming on so slowly. Taking so long. First thing I get is a kind of hollow glassy “candy” feeling. Sharp, like Christmas gumdrops. Spicy, like pine or basil. There’s grit and grain in this, flecks of cinnamon maybe. The flecks feel right and appropriate, somehow, like they signal some kind of roughness. They’re like the sparkles in the sparkly syrup.
The whole thing is much more warm-fuzz than orange, which I think of as high-clear. The cinnamon and the orange have merged into a thing that is different from each. I like it a lot; this is the property I was after when I made the Hint ice cream. Tastes like coming in out of the cold, like rosy cheeks and wet hair and maybe tumbling Drew straight into bed for a quickie before coming out to play cards with everyone else for the rest of the evening (this is in a cabin at a ski resort apparently) (this is not a thing that ever happened but it’s a thing I wanted)
I like it.
Apothecary Chocolates "Creativity" (70.5%) ☆☆☆☆☆
(From the “Nourishing Ojas Collection” (Sacral Chakra, Svadhishthana), blood orange wrapped in dark chocolate infused with Alma berry powder)
Smell: The smoke and crackle from a campfire some 30 feet away; I glance over my shoulder at the rest of the group lounging and chatting as I forage for more wood. It is dusk, in spring or early summer, and the air is full of life and color, berries and fresh leaves and fallen petals. Peaceful. Content. A separate belonging. I have never spent this long smelling a chocolate when “smelling” was not itself the assignment. I want a candle of this.
First melt: Dry and cutting, unwrapping a new knife that I bought over the internet in 2003. A sort of fungal underlay, overturned boulders and things clinging and wriggling. That time I took LSD and climbed the nearby hill and got down into the mulch with my whole body.
“The breath of the forest god.” The early pages of Roald Dahl’s The Minpins. This is amazingly full and alive while also being so soft and smooth and understated. A boy’s sixth time having sex with his first girlfriend—he’s starting to believe it’s not a dream and not going to fall out from under him.
I could keep going for ten minutes. I’m definitely tasting this one again. “Goes into the fifth Ultimate” but lol, NO FIFTH ULTIMATE (that’s a rule). Five stars tho. “What if they served a dark orange chocolate at the Portland Japanese tea garden?”
Cluizel “Écorces d’Orange” (70%) ☆☆☆
(Ecuador)
Smell: Dry. Dusty. Tastelessly clean. …scoured? An oven, something that was burned to clean it but now it’s cool and you have to scrape off the char.
First melt: Oooh, I like the melt. Perfect archetypal “chocolate” melt, not too smooth, not too thick. “This is chocolate.” Not much taste but there’s a definite Flavor in the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat, more nasal than tongueal. Has a dry, reedy quality, like hay bales. Not particularly sweet. Not particularly refined. (The rough chunks of candied orange peel probably contribute to this).
Mmm, more balanced and blended when I chew. Heavy crumble, like breaking rocks apart with a sledgehammer. I haven’t had much in the way of visuals or metaphors for any of these. My brain says … my brain says “if this were a burly lumberjack dressed in flannel with a hat pulled down low over his eyes, speaking mostly in noncommital grunts, then what kind of etc.”
Interesting that the first visual I came up with was so non-fancy when I think the chocolate is tryna be fancy. But it’s so thicc, tho; what did they expect?
Rugged. Unrefined. Frontier chocolate. Chocolate hacked out of the chocolate mine, a rare and exciting vein of Orange Ore chocolate that won’t make the miners rich, exactly, but will mean they make twice as much this season than they expected to. A fifty thousand dollar windfall.
Dick Taylor Orange Bourbon Pecan 65% ☆☆☆
Smell: Rich, nutty, creamy, roasty. Barely a hint of orange; much more reminiscent of pecan pie or roasted nuts at a ball game.
First melt: Sour! Sharply sour, but not loudly so. A stiletto of sour. Has a thick, bready sort of emanation. I feel it heavily in the back of my throat. Almost no taste of chocolate, almost no taste of orange. Thick, pulpy, crunchy from the pecans.
There’s something very familiar or recognizable, not about the taste but about the sort of mood. But I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it. I get images of, like, Standard Americana™? A slightly overweight middle-aged dad with a five-o’clock shadow, leaving work at the docks or the mine early so that he can come drive his two tow-headed boys to the baseball game. This feels super middle-class Boomer to me, in the good way. Like, the parts of the Boomer vision of how-life-ought-to-be that are actually pretty great, the stuff immortalized in The Sandlot and A Christmas Story.
Very hefty and substantial, but doesn’t feel heavy post-eating. Like a hearty but healthy meal.
I like it all right, but it doesn’t qualify as an orange chocolate.
Madhu “Orange Clove” (65%) ☆☆☆
(Tumaco, Colombia)
Smell: PONCH u in tha fuckin FACE with clove. What does clove smell like? sharp tickles turning into languid scritches just this side of owch. soup almost too hot, milkshake almost too cold, bike going so fast it scares you just a little.
First melt: (got a piece with no physical candied orange in it) Swift hot wind, sand blowing. Mosquitos. Bright soccer field lights, a game that started in dusk and ends in night. It’s all fast and reddish orange and scarcely chocolate at all. Lightning, foxes, copperheads, avalanches, quicksand, sulphur, flintlock rifles. Dust that coats your teeth and turns your sweat to mud.
Chocolate for a magical desert creature that absolutely loves eating cactuses, needles and all.
Chomping a piece with orange in it; it definitely Changes it but it doesn’t change the bottom line. Just the same experience with orange icing on top. You’re still sunburned but you have an orange milkshake so at least there’s that.
If this were a boy he’d successfully peer pressure me into doing drugs. I don’t know anybody like this. A dark hybrid of Vaniver and Jack Carroll? Alex Ray except instead of being obviously good but tinged with moral gray he’s obviously bad but tinged with moral gray? I want this person on my apocalypse team for sure but I’m not sure he fits into Actual Society. This is maybe like an extremified version of me.
Lindt “Intense Orange” (47%) ☆☆☆
Smell: Bright, sour, slightly rindy. A little bit wild and underripe. Definitely smells like a chocolate orange.
First melt: A sort of round hollow beach-ball sensation, or like inner tubes at a waterpark … a feeling of something like a big fun chamber. Sort of chemical and fermented when I focus on it (I think this is supposed to be a snacking experience and exposing it to tasting-level scrutiny is like looking too closely at someone wearing a lot of makeup).
Chewing the second bite. It’s cool and tangy and very sweet and pretty refreshing; it almost has the cleanliness of sherbet versus the dirty/opaqueness of chocolate ice cream. It’s rather unlike both chocolate and orange; has a reasonably well-blended/alchemical property. But it’s much much better when I don’t pay attention. When I pay attention, it’s alternately too vegetal and too artificial by turns.
I’m vacillating between about 2.5 and 4 stars.
Baianí “Dark Chocolate with Orange Zest” (70%) ☆☆
(Brazil)
Smell: Hhhhuh. If you’d asked me to guess, I would’ve guessed this is a chili chocolate. The smell is mostly just chocolate, but it’s the red/fiery side of chocolate, like the heat radiating from a piece of white-hot metal. I can’t smell orange at all.
First melt: Smooth, thick, almost muddy. I pick up the orange right away, like a thin layer or sheen sitting atop the ocean of chocolate. High, sweet, chirpy, piccolo. Very bitter/sour underneath. Little bits of orange peel for texture; I wanna scrape my tongue against them.
I think I’m not liking it. It has a bit of a cheap or artificial tone, like it’s plastic trying to convince me that it’s orange chocolate. Like it was made with malia, which I suspect will be a go-to metaphor from now on (“how much malia is there in this?”).
Shivery crumbly soft on the chew, like thick fresh-fallen snow. Tastes greener, somehow, when chewed; more like gnawing on a fresh orange blossom or something.
Yeah, too … too raw and green, like this is an excellent orange dark chocolate but it was harvested too soon and is underripe. Bears precisely the same resemblance to orange dark chocolate as a green banana bears to banana.
Primo Botánica “Gold of the Incas” (70%) ☆☆
(With lucuma, orange, pink salt, and caramelized cacao nibs)
Smell: Hot, dry, ashen, a harsh wind blowing across a desert landscape, holding the fabric of your shirt over your eyes and mouth. A puddle of brackish water at the oasis, covered with a film of dust—you drink anyway, the grit filling the spaces between your teeth.
First melt: exactly like the smell. Unfun, “ritual,” serious; cacao as the Incans experienced it and not the sweet indulgence we’ve come to expect. Dark, dusty, ashen, just a hint of sour (but even that is muted because too sour would be too alive).
A poison made from the ground-up bones of a chupacabra corpse found dessicated in the desert sun. The rattling of a necklace made of teeth as the shaman dances in the entrance to the underground cave. You will be sent forth for the coming-of-age ritual, and the odds are three to two that you will not find your way back out. Already the hallucinogen is taking effect, and the stalactites seem to tremble.
I dislike it, I enjoy it immensely from a Type II Fun perspective, and again think it does not qualify as an orange chocolate. I think this might actually be a good chocolate to eat in a ceremonious or ritualistic fashion at the onset of hallucination the next time I consume a hallucinogen.
Volo “Deep Dark Chocolate” (73%) ☆☆
(with candied orange peel)
Smell: Hmmm, not super promising. Has a dusty, leathery property that feels familiar from other orange chocolates that did not pan out. Slightly chemical, like car seats that have recently been wiped clean.
First melt: Smooth and glassy, a little bit slick and sour but not overwhelmingly so. Like drinking a somewhat tart fruit juice, apple or similar. Very little sweetness at all, mostly just a strong adultish sort of taste, dark and serious. The candied peel chunks are flaking off as it melts; I think I’m supposed to chew this and not savor it in the normal way.
Second bite, chomping: nice fun romple roughhousing texture, like playfighting with it in my mouth. Blends a little better when chewed, but still more sour and tart and not at all sweet or high. Like if orange were a vegetable, almost.
Not into it. Not gonna leave more thoughts. Two stars, “it’s fine if you like wine and are looking for a version of orange chocolate that is closer to the experience of drinking wine than to either orange or chocolate.”
Theo Fair Trade Organic Orange (70%) ☆☆
Wow the serving size/bar scoring on this makes me think it wants me to eat a LOT of itself. Remember Duncan: it’s gonna be way less sweet than the previous.
Smell: Smells like dark chocolate of the ash tray variety, no hint of orange at all. Chocolate if chocolate were gunmetal gray instead of brown.
First melt: Smoky on the breath, like I’m approaching the burned ruins of an orange chocolate factory. Dry and a little bit harsh on the tongue; bitter dark chocolate taste. I’m not sure whether I’m getting any citrus at all or whether I’m placeboing it—if it’s there, it’s quite subtle and hinty.
The chocolate is smooth and has a decent texture. It’s just very one-note, and that one note is not really my favorite. I think I’m picking up more on the orange now, but it’s got a sort of ghostly rindy melony quality rather than the full burst of sweetness I’d hoped for.
Not bad; I imagine there’s someone out there for whom this is their very favorite. But I don’t think that person and I get along very well. They wear suits and think that going to the movies on a Friday night counts as having an adventure.
(I only ate one of the two Giant Squares, i.e. 1/8th of the bar)
Equal Exchange “Organic Orange Infused” (65%) ☆☆
Smell: Sour and cheap, made me think of the cheapest toys one gets in exchange for tickets at an arcade, plastic spiders and bouncy balls and little rings and so forth. Also made me think “pennies!” somehow.
First melt: More green and yellow than proper orange. Melt is smooth and very thin, not muddy or coating my tongue much at all even though there’s a nice plush texture like thick rugs. Brightness coming in, mostly at the back of my mouth. The brightness feels divorced from the chocolate itself; it’s very “chocolate and”
Nice soft yielding crumble when chewed, a little easier to find the combination when I’m mixing them up with my teeth. Overall sort of boring—a little sour, a little underripe, chocolate unremarkable. An eight-year-old’s toy tool set, when I’ve already graduated to using real saws.
Chocolove “Orange Peel in Dark Chocolate” (55%) ☆☆
Smell: Sharpish, lightly sour, bright. My brain says “like hayfields.” Images of a bright and beautiful cold day in October.
First melt: A clear taste right off the bat, as if the chocolate were wrapped in a thin clear layer of … something. It’s not chocolatey at all. Nutty? Bready? Makes me think of the shatter of frosting atop a cinnamon bun that’s been sitting for a little while.
Very cronch on the chew, like it’s got rice krispies in it (that’s the peel, which seems to have been puffed or fried or something). This is pleasant, sort of like eating a chocolate orange biscotti? It’s got a sort of wholesome satisfying feels-more-substantial-than-mere-candy quality. Makes me want to chew and keep chewing.
Not very orangy at all, though. Not very chocolatey either. Closest thing I can think of is Milano dark chocolate orange cookies. It’s gone more toward honeycomb and away from What It Is. Feels sort of inauthentic as a result, and also now that I’m on my third bite a sort of malia quality is seeping in and can no longer be ignored.
Acceptable for snacking. Does not want to be Tasted™.
Chocolarder “Smooth Orange Peel” (68%) ☆
(Sierra Leone)
Smell: My brain says … the sea?? Like, the smell of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a distant seaweedy salty clean-air seagulls hawking smell? Doesn’t smell much like chocolate. Smells greener and bluer and clearer than chocolate.
First melt of orange side down (this chocolate had orange-colored sections and brown-colored sections): rough like textured plastic, like the dashboard of a car. Orange creeping, stocking feet whispering, grainy and muffled and drowsy, an orange sleeping spell. Thick and chemical in the back of my throat, like off-brand cookies. Not a fan. Poison. Poison made to taste sufficiently good to children that they’ll eat it all before they realize what’s wrong.
First melt of chocolate only: Same texture (fascinating). Same overall feeling except … hollow? The same sponge-shape but this time not infused with orange. Not infused with anything. Maybe a hint of—oh, okay, there’s the chocolate. Wow, this chocolate is weird. Tastes like woodchips, tastes like burnt pens, tastes like licking the bottom of a box that has held nickels and pennies, tastes like business suits, tastes like burnt plates, tastes like bus stops. All flickering flavorlessness and ashen shadows. Tastes like a snowman made of coal, with two snowballs for eyes. Tastes like death if you are actually friends with death. Wild.
Chewing a bite that has both: “Yeah, no thanks.”
This is like the sad version of what I might turn out to be, if I make mistakes in my holding-on-to-boyhood. Hollow and empty and Goodhart-y and cargo-culty, hitting all the representative tropes and missing all of the substance. One star for being fascinatingly awful.
Amano “Citrus Mélange Á Trois” (55%)
Smell: Whoa not promising. High and extremely taut/sour/green/shrill, like THREE EXTRA STEPS along the vector that takes you from cucumbers to celery. Smells almost weaponized. This could be used as a Duncan-repellent in the way that bear spray doesn’t just deter bears, it can make them flee.
First melt: Oh no more of the “hella celery” vapors in my nasal cavity. Celery celery celery celery celery. Distilled essence of celery, celery extract. Please dear god let the chocolate itself start melting so I can—okay, getting a little bit of chocolaNOPE, NOT ENOUGH, I’m tapping out. Logan can have the rest forever. Zero stars. Amano, you have betrayed me; I didn’t think you’d ever make a chocolate I would hate.
