Ritter Sport – 61% Fine Dark Chocolate
There’s been a big push in the last decade or so (or so it feels that way) to go for ethically sourced, and sustainable cocoa. In particular, there has been a lot of focus on ethically sourcing cocoa and getting it from sources that treat their workers fairly and don’t rip off the farmers. It’s all admirable and such, but what it means is usually an increase in price for certain products. Some other products won’t see much change since they were doing the whole ethical sourcing thing before it became a buzz word. Kind of like how certain products that never had any gluten to begin with now are marketed as gluten free. As a wise man once said, it’s free real estate!
Ritter Sport has an entire line of products that are varying degrees of cocoa %, as well as sourcing from different regions. This particular bar is single origin cocoa sourced from Nicaragua. These is fairly interesting in the sense that it also only has three ingredients – cocoa mass, sugar and cocoa butter.
Something that caught me by surprise is that each block is a bit smaller than the standard 4×4 bar that has 16 pieces once split apart. This one is actually 5×5, giving us 25 potential individual pieces. Being that this is dark chocolate, it’s a bit more of the firm and brittle side. I’d probably recommend breaking these apart into individual bricks instead of trying to do so you with your teeth.
The flavour of the dark chocolate is slightly bitter, but has a nice rich cocoa aroma to it. I’m not sophisticated or experienced enough to really tell the difference between cocoa sourced from Nicaragua vs. elsewhere, so I can’t really tell you if it makes a difference. Maybe I’ll be able to tell when I try the other ones. Or maybe not. What I do know is it has that rich distinct cocoa flavour that works really great along with the texture.
Speaking of which, the texture is fairly standard from what I typically expect from a bar of this % – it’s its a bit more on the brittle side as opposed to the melty texture of a milk chocolate. These would stay solid for longer in your hands, I feel. While it is a bit firmer, it still has a nice, slow melt to it if you leave it on the tongue. My experience with dark chocolate in this range is that it’s generally versatile in that you can either chew it like lower percent milk chocolate, or you can let your tongue savour it like you would on a darker variety that’s more brittle and not as melty. I don’t know how much “finer” these are than standard bars, but there isn’t much grit, if any so that’s another thing that works in the favour of this when it comes to mass appeal.
