Alter Eco – Salted Caramel Truffle Thins
I think it’s safe to say I’m a fan of Alter Eco as a brand at this point. They’ve done some tasty truffle thin flavours, and their chocolate is generally quite tasty and to my liking. I know they market themselves with all these things like being organic, non-GMO, fair trade and all that cool jazz, but ultimately I’m trying to make sure it tastes good and stands on it’s own merits. Assuming it’s not poison. Although given how most dark chocolate is processed, technically there’s a bit of heavy metals all slowly killing us. But life is short, so let’s not think about that now!
Sandwiched between the two thin layers of dark chocolate is a layer of softer chocolate mixed in with caramel and salt. It wasn’t until a few years back that I got into truffle bars and truffle thins. In my mind truffles are round or square shaped and have a nice soft filling. It took a bit of adjusting to accept that they can also come in a flat form, though obviously the ratios would be very different. I can say that Alter Eco is one of the better ones at this, so trying this felt like a safe option.
The flavour is of a fairly decently dark chocolate, at least high 60s or low 70s. It has a strong, rich cocoa flavour with all it’s earthy, slightly bitter flavour. The caramel and the salt in that center layer helps to balance things out and make this a very easy to snack on bar even for people not crazier about darker varieties. The combination of salt, caramel and chocolate is a hard one to screw up, and this was a pretty well-balanced execution.
The texture is as you would expect, it’s pretty bang on for a truffle, where it is soft enough to melt in your mouth without much resistance. If you do choose to chew, you are met with a very soft chocolate that’s not at all brittle. The center layer of caramel and salt adds a little bit of grit to the experience, and makes it very tempting to just chew through. Because it’s a darker variety of chocolate, you do get a bit of that chalk mouthfeel afterwards, but not noticeable enough that it gets unpleasant or ruins the experience.
This will appeal to fans of chocolate across the spectrum. It’s not dark enough to really alienate anyone who doesn’t like the bitterness of a lot of dark chocolate, it’s not too sweet to alienate the dark chocolate lovers, and the caramel is not cloyingly sweet and hits the right balance with the salt. I would get this again, and would recommend people go give this bar a try.
