I feel like a bit of a cheat reviewing dark milks, because they are, overall, my favourites. But I’ve been living under a thick cloud of stress and, you know, if you were stressed and locked in an office with 350 bars of chocolate, what would you do?
Mike & Becky’s (love the name, no nonsense, nothing to do with chocolate) 50% Mungamba Congo Dark Milk, £5.95/60g, is actually made up of 35% cocoa beans and 15% cocoa butter; the latter makes it ultra smooth. It also has some fibre content, 6g/100g, which isn’t bad (it’s not Bran Flakes, but then, thank goodness). Anyway, it’s stupendous. I was thinking of all the other dark milks I’ve raved about, but in terms of ‘mmm’ and creaminess the one – the only one(s) – to rival it, which immediately came to mind was Original Beans – Esmeraldas or Femmes de Virunga.
Mike and Becky, actually Julia Mikerova and Björn Becker, are a Belgian-based duo. Their chocolate is organic and the sugar used is from beetroot (still sugar, but let’s kid ourselves), plus their factory is 100% green-powered.
From the southwest I really enjoyed Chocolarder’s Cornish Sea Salt bar, £6.15/70g, limited edition. A bit more of a lively bean (from Sierra Leone), it’s fudgey and salty.
But I finish on a sharp, deep-noted dark: very fruity, almost a palate cleanser after all the milk I’ve been scoffing, M&S Collection Single Origin (Peru) 85% dark, £2.10/100g. Which, as we were talking about it, has a whopping 10.2g fibre per 100g. It has a sneaky base note of honey which stops it all being too grown up.
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