Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature "Taste Tests." Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at [email protected].
We here at The A.V. Club love us some chocolate, though our tastes have grown refined. A simple Hershey's bar will do when no other options are available, but it's the higher-end stuff–the Ghirardellis, Godivas of the world–that truly get us going. So we were naturally elated to receive a package from artisan chocolatier Chuao (pronounced chew-WOW, named after the cacao-growing region of Venezuela).
Its contents:
— Spicy Maya dark-chocolate bar with pasilla chile, cayenne pepper and cinnamon
— Earl Grey milk-chocolate bar
— ChocoPod (thin, diamond-shaped pods filled with caramel) in two varieties: Picante, cabernet wine caramel with pasilla chile and cayenne pepper; and Modena, strawberry caramel with balsamic vinegar. Spicy Maya dark-chocolate bar
The taste: The dark chocolate hovers around 60 percent cacao, which pairs well with the spices. They aren't spicy in an acutely hot kind of way, but more of a general warmth in your mouth and throat. Putting away one of Chuao's big bars in a single sitting would be tough, but maybe that's a good thing. Office reactions:
— "It's like chocolate drunk on Big Red."
— "You're totally right about the Big Red. Finishes well."
— "It's spicy, but smooth. I like it overall."
— "This is the best spicy chocolate I've ever had."
— "It doesn't really taste spicy; it's more like dark chocolate with cinnamon."
Earl Grey milk-chocolate bar
The taste: "Breathe in the restorative bergamot citrus tones of the Earl Grey bar, steeped and combined with our private blend of premium milk chocolate," coos the Chuao website. But the bar itself proved to be the most polarizing of the bunch, with some people really tasting the Earl Grey, and others who were simply baffled by it. The bar's creamy milk chocolate is pretty outmatched by the Earl Grey flavor, which elicited a host of odd comparisons at the A.V. Club testing lab. Office reactions:
— "It has kind of an ashy taste."
— "It's like eating a potpourri smoothie. Does that make any sense?"
— "I really like it. This is good."
— "It's like a twist on Andes [mint]; it's less intense."
— "It tastes like black licorice, or cough syrup. So it's either licorice or cough syrup, or black-licorice cough syrup."
— "Eww!" [Spits it out in the garbage can.]
Modena ChocoPod
The taste: Earl Grey chocolate? Strawberry caramel with "an unexpected hint of balsamic vinegar"? Is this how they do chocolate in Venezuela? Apparently. Although the vinegar association may scare away chocoholics, the flavor is really subtle, especially compared to the strawberry. The caramel itself is pretty runny; it looks and tastes more like a liquid filling than the caramel you usually find in chocolates. Office reactions:
— "I don't know what to say. It's way too subtle. It reminds me of really fancy restaurants with incredibly long descriptions of entrées."
— "The chocolate itself is really good, but the filling has an odd taste."
— "It's the kind of chocolate where you know somebody doesn't like you if you get as a gift."
Picante ChocoPod
The taste: Again, those Venezuelans get crazy, mixing a cabernet wine caramel and spices, with strange results. The chocolate is once again top-notch, but the caramel filling is off-putting. The effect is especially strong at first, but it at least finishes well. Office reactions:
— "I still have it in my mouth. It won't go away. It's like chocolate with Tabasco."
— "It's not as spicy as I thought it would be."
— "All of these are so well done; they complement the chocolate very well, as opposed to contrasting to it. I have to eat them all again to give you my exact thoughts."
— "I don't fucking like this at all. I like how when you bite into chocolate there's soft stuff in the middle, but that didn't taste good at all."
— "This is like a trick…"
"You think it's good at first, but then it's not."
"Exactly."
— "No me gusta." [Throws other half out.] Where to get them: Chuao cafés (eight locations in California), chuaochocolatier.com.