This week I bring you two bars for two different moods.
The first one is a chocolate to unwrap, break off, and contemplate while perhaps daydreaming out of the window. It is by the (I think) superb French chocolatier François Pralus, whose pastry-chef dad, Auguste, invented a praline- stuffed brioche (the praluline) in 1955 that was so successful it’s still sold today.
Praline features highly in Pralus Jr’s chocolate creations. But not this bar, made with trinitario beans from the Dominican Republic (£4.30/100g, chocolats-pralus.com).
This is a simple bar with complex flavours. Although it has a 75% cocoa content, it’s not bitter or hard going (the cocoa butter helps) and the flavour develops. This really is one of those chocolates where you should allow a single piece to melt slowly on your tongue and see where it takes you.
The next bar could not be more different. Solkiki’s frankly bonkers So Woke (£8/56g, solkiki.co.uk) is ‘chocolate from the future’: 2073 to be precise, in an imagined world where animal milks are banned in 2055. It’s a white chocolate – but you wouldn’t know it to look at it or taste it – and contains just three ingredients: 37% undeodorised cocoa butter, sugar and coffee. It’s a sweet (but not too sweet), creamy bar with a perfectly judged coffee hit. The wrapper is worthy of a lunchtime read in itself, albeit with some strange sentiments on mother’s milk. Despite that, this is a great bar for an indulgent treat when life feels a bit too big.
