Foursome of Chocolate Bars from Chocion

Today we have our first German chocolate feature for you all, Sisters and Brothers, and I hope you are as excited as I am.  The wonderful Andreas whose interview went live on Wednesday sent us a lot of Chocion's creations so they will be repeatedly on our calendar from now through May 2015!  To start this off we are going to look at four of their Schokolade bars that come in 50g, clear wrapped rectangular bars.  We're going to look at these in order of increasing cacao content.  Please note that I am keeping the names of the bars as printed on label but do not let the German worry you. Because the bar's labels differ slightly from the website please use the enclosed links for each product to check it out. Apologies to my German readers (7th largest readership is from Germany) for errors in the words themselves for lack of an appropriate font for some letter.

Each bar is made only from the most simple ingredients -- cocoa butter, chocolate mass, vanilla, sugar, an emulsifier, and then any additional components needed for the particular flavor such as whole milk or krispies or coffee.  Each bar is about 3X4 inches and 1/4 inch thick (7.5X10X7 centimeters) and has a very uniform basic look with nine etched off sections underneath a section with the brand name; I'll note any other visual differences below.  The bars were all a bit challenging to break off along the etched off sections in case you want to share -- remember Moderation is one of our guiding principles here on The Chocolate Cult.

We're going to start with what I think will be the simplest flavor of the white chocolate. Feinste Weisse Schokolade mit Knusper Crisp is 28% white chocolate with crispy something in them.  You can see the krispies on the back side of the bar only.  This has a strange creamy vanilla fragrance when I took a whiff of it.  This makes a very soft sound when I take a bite into only the chocolate part but the krispies do make a fairly loud crunch when I bite into or crew them because they are nice and firm as you would hope.  The krispies really add more texture than flavor but I only get a buttery creaminess with less of the vanilla kick than the scent suggested.  I'm not a big fan of white chocolate in general but I think white chocolate lovers would really enjoy this.

The second white chocolate bar from Chocionis the Peinste Weisse Schokolade mit Kaffee is also a 28% white chocolate but this time with coffee.  I didn't try this at all because, as regular readers know, your Chocolate Priestess dislikes even the scent of coffee.  This is what our volunteers reported about this particular bar.  The bar is a creamy color with flecks of black. All three testers felt the scent was waxy and creamy; one said it smelled like cheap coffee.  The white chocolate makes a soft snap when you take a bite and the coffee flecks crunch a bit.  Our three testers differed a bit on flavor and texture though all agreed it was a bit buttery, as we expect from German chocolate.  One felt it was waxy tasting and found little coffee.  Another agreed that the coffee was slight but found the the white chocolate to be primarily buttery in flavor.  The third found the coffee to be unevenly mixed with the white chocolate and thus he got bursts of coffee or creamy butteriness in different bites.  None of our testers thought the two flavors -- white chocolate and coffee -- worked very well together.

Our third bar from Chocion is the Feine Praliné Schokolade is a 38% milk chocolate bar so it does have whole milk in it.  This bar also has a strong vanilla scent but oddly no really cocoa fragrance.  I create no noise when I take a bite and the immediate flavor I get is a saltiness that is very surprising followed by a cocoa and vanilla flavor with a buttery creaminess.  I let the second half of the section I'm testing melt in my mouth to see if that changes the flavors.  Yes, it does as it slowly melts into a creamy pool.  The saltiness is more a tanginess that fades into a light milk chocolate with a hint of vanilla that is the final flavor on my tongue.  This was less intense than I expected from a 38% bar and I wonder if that reflects the whole milk used.  It does match some other German milk chocolates I've received as gifts in the past so in that sense is it exactly what I thought it would taste like which is great.

We end this particular feature with Chocion's Edle Zartbitterschokolade, a 62% cacao bar that is quite dark compared to the previous three bars.  As you know, your Chocolate Priestess loves darker chocolates but I do try to be fair and just describe my experience.  This has a solid dark chocolate scent to it with an undercurrent of vanilla.  It makes a loud snap when I bite off a section and I get a hint of vanilla, a flood of dark cocoa that gets darker with each chew.  The cocoa rush up into my head begins almost immediately making my pupils dilate a bit so that the room seems brighter. Letting a piece melt takes some time, this melts slowly, and it dampens out the bitterness that I actually really like in darker chocolate by letting the sugar and vanilla out more strongly.  I can feel my blood vessels in my head opening up and the tension ease out of my shoulders; this is one of the reasons I love pure dark chocolate.  I really don't want to share this one but I'll be a good role model and share.... maybe.

There you go, Sisters and Brothers, our first feature on German chocolate submitted by a German company.  For the purity of ingredients and the quality of the chocolate these these are awesome bars but not all of them thrilled our testers; not uncommon really so please do read their thoughts and consider each bar.  There are a lot more varieties of the three basic schokolade -- white, milk, and dark chocolate -- that you can find on the Chocion website.  Of course I can't recommend any that we didn't try but you should definitely check out the ones we tested and revealed to you today.  If you have tried these four bars or any of the other varieties please leave us a comment and tell us what you thought.