Ritter Sport – 81% Extra Intense Dark Chocolate

It’s been some time now since Ritter Sport started their cacao selection line, and for whatever reason it’s taken me a while to get through all of them. Given that they’ve been around for a while, I can only assume it’s selling well and makes me feel better about not getting to all of them in a timely manner. In fact, I’m not sure how many I still have to try, but I’ll assume I’m close.

This one is 81%, and is the darkest variety I’ve tried. This particular cacao is sourced from Ghana. Not that I can tell the difference between sources – I just taste em and let you know what my simple brain tells me. What I can say is these smell very rich of cocoa flavour, and that’s usually a good sign.

Similar to the other Cacao selection bars, while the total bar size is standard, this one is sectioned off into a five by five bar, instead of the standard four by four. My guess is as good as yours as to why that is other than a stylistic choice, though I imagine there’s benefits to having more, smaller sections. Given it’s just straight up blocks of chocolate, proportions don’t matter too much so there’s no need I guess. Or maybe it’s a surface area thing? Anyways….

So like most darker chocolates, these are more brittle and less creamy than a milk chocolate. Darker varieties also leave a chalky feeling in the mouth as well so you can’t have too many in one sitting. The texture definitely lends itself to be more like a hard candy where you leave it in your mouth to slowly melt, than it is as a chewing or snacking chocolate. The chocolate also has a lot of little nibs and bits of the actual cacao, so that’s a nice touch.

The flavour is very rich and surprisingly not very bitter. I mean it has a bitter tone to it like most darker chocolates, but it’s got more of a smoky, rich chocolate liqueur flavour to it. Almost like you could imagine drinking this in a wine or spirit. It’s got a very subtle and subdued sweetness to it, but not to the point you would think that it’s sweet on it’s own. The entire time having this, I kept thinking how great this would be in a cake to enhance the rich chocolate quality.

I am not usually a hopeful person, but a small part of me hopes they continue this product line. While my palette has yet to (maybe never) be able to discern cacao source based on sampling chocolates, I do like that they explore this idea in a bid to deliver new and exciting flavours of chocolate. This is the darkest flavour, and I loved every moment of it.