Sugar Savvy

The best way to describe the taste of Green & Black’s Organic Milk Chocolate with Toffee? Thick. Like drinking-a-pint-of-Guinness thick.

After eating a few squares, I had to stop. It was enough. You know how people say you should have really good sweets in moderation? Green & Black’s makes that very easy to accomplish. Normally, you might be able to scarf down a Hershey bar or some other comparable, mass-produced chocolate item quickly and without much contemplation. It’s simply not possible with this chocolate. The flavor is intense without being overwhelming and it is lusciously thick. My surprise with this bar came from the discovery that the pieces of toffee were finely distributed throughout the chocolate and were, therefore, nearly imperceptible by sight, although not by taste.

The company sent a sample and made available its head of taste, Micah Carr-Hill — a chocolate sommelier of sorts who came to his current position after working in the wine industry and studying food science. I wanted to find out more about how these thoughtful, precisely tailored flavors come together. The usual suspects are available — mint, caramel, almond, white, milk, and a couple of different permutations of dark chocolates (70 and 85 percent) but its more creative offerings include Maya Gold (its flagship item), ginger, hazelnut and currants, and cherry; all of these are paired with dark chocolate.

I asked Carr-Hill about where his flavor inspirations come from, and the answers suggest a foodie whose taste buds never shut off. He cites everything from cooking at home, eating at good restaurants and taking inspiration from there to attending trade shows, researching recipes, and “an innate understanding of food and what flavors are likely to match.” He also mentioned good old-fashioned experimentation — “playing about with different ingredients and chocolate in my kitchen at work and at home.”

I was particularly curious about the choice for milk chocolate, rather than using dark or white, especially because the whole world seems to be obsessed with dark chocolate these days. Carr-Hill said, “The molasses flavor of the toffee recipe I’d developed really stood out in the milk chocolate, but not so much in the dark.” And as for the stellar taste? Carr-Hill said that the cocoa beans for this bar are known as Trinitario, “one of the rarer ‘fine’ or ‘flavor’ beans, as opposed to the ‘ordinary’ or ‘bulk’ beans of the Forestero variety.”

Indeed, there’s nothing ordinary about this incarnation of flavors.  This is not your average Heath or Skor bar. With a commitment to organic, sustainable cocoa sourcing in Belize and the Dominican Republic, Green & Black’s name reflects qualities–green for organic and black for the darkness of chocolate. (There is no Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Green and/or Black). It is a premium chocolate bar, retailing around $3.49, but the more I eat well-crafted chocolate, the more I’d rather have a premium experience. The taste buds have awakened.