I have, at any one time in my office, about 50 bars of chocolate or chocolate products. I am remarkably restrained. Every day I take one out of one box, photograph it, unwrap it, taste it, make notes on it and then put it in another box for redistribution to friends.
However. Some bars don’t make it into the second box for very long, or at all. Some chocolate is so to my liking that I use up all my daily ration in eating it, instead of testing new bars.
So this is my list of chocolate you absolutely mustn’t buy.
Hotel Chocolat’s 50% cocoa slab in either Walnut and Coffee or Cornflakes and Milk, £3.95. Both are the perfect mix of milky but high-percentage cocoa and in thick format so you can’t just break a tiny piece off (this is a feature of all the chocolate mentioned today which tells you something).
François Pralus’s Infernale Barres – any of them, but the orange version, £14.95, makes a mockery of any willpower I may have; even the 75% cocoa therein can’t stop me. Please don’t anyone give me this ever again. One of the best chocolates ever made.
Soon to join this list might be a part of Me Chocolate’s range, but more on them another week.
Last is Tony’s Chocolonely 42% cocoa Toffee Pretzel bar, £3.50. This never even made it home, let alone into the second box. I opened the bar in the car park of Sainsbury’s and that was it (sugar is the first ingredient, what did I expect my dopamine receptors to do?). It’s a bar that can never be allowed anywhere near me ever again.
