Alter Eco – Dark Salted Brown Butter
Alter Eco has been doing some real interesting stuff lately. Or maybe they always have been and I just didn’t realize it until I discovered them not too long ago. Whatever the case may be, they seem to have enough interesting and novel ideas to keep me coming back for the next while, so let’s see what this one is about.
When it comes to food there’s an old saying where sugar, salt and fat make everything taste better. A variation of that old saying is that butter makes everything better. By that logic, it stands to reason that the combination of salt, sugar and butter would make something even tastier. And it’s precisely that which interested me in this flavour. Salt and chocolate has established itself as a good combo, and butter to along with the chocolate just seems like an easy win.
The smell upon opening the foil is a very noticeable butter and dairy aroma. I mean I guess that’s a good thing. If you opened this up and it didn’t smell like butter, you best be checking the ingredient labels first, and the expiration date right after. There’s an old saying that butter makes everything taste better, and I tend to agree. While it can be overdone, it’s hard to argue with the magic of that slippery, fatty ingredient. Hell, the Yankees love it so much they have an actual item called deep fried butter. Eat your heart out, literally.
The combination of salt along with the distinct butter richness give it an almost savoury quality to it. The bar is a fine line between rich, smooth and dairy, while also being contrasted against that 70% dark chocolate. The salt helps to finish things off with another dimension that really makes this bar easy to eat and hard to kick like an addiction. Salt being added to chocolate was something that was a tried and true method to enhance it’s flavour in other parts of the world, but it seems to have cemented itself in the last decade or so in the North. Unlike most fads or trends, this is one I can get behind and I see no reason it doesn’t stick around.
The texture is serviceable as a chewing bar, but it really shines when you let it sit on your tongue and let all those flavours slowly melt away in your mouth. I have to agree with them on this one, butter really does make this one better. It brings out the flavour of the salt and the chocolate and elevates everything. It’s like a natural MSG enhancing everything.
This bar is certainly tasty, and I see no reason that I wouldn’t do it again. Well, apart from the fact that it’s still quite unhealthy being a chocolate bar and all. But hey, quality over quantity at this point in my life. And this hits enough notes to fall into the quality category in my books.
