Läderach Absinthe Truffle

Having been quite literally bitterly disappointed by the Absinthe bar from Venchi I tasted last year, I was hoping for better things from this truffle bar I found in Berlin.

Rudolf Läderach is a Swiss chocolatier and this is a 60% cocoa bittersweet chooclate with a truffle filling containing 3% absinth. Now if you know absinthe you also know that it’s not usually a drink one associates with delicate flavours. Indeed, it’s usually drunk pretty quickly, with added sugar or possibly having just been set on fire. It’s not a drink you savour, in other words. The Venchi bar managed to come out tasting like aniseed – very strong aniseed – indeed, looking back at the review I remember just how strong the smell of that bar was.

I’m happy to say that this bar has a much more subtle aroma about it – much more in the way of chocolate and a mere hint of potential alcoholic nastiness. Break open one of the squares and you can see the dark, creamy filling.

This is where the flavour lies, so when you start to taste this bar, the chocolate introduces itself first. Soft, delicate cocoa flavours, slightly sweet with dark undertones give way to the richer absinthe truffle centre as the shell disappears. Then the centre takes over, flooding the mouth with the mildly alcoholic, aniseed like flavours of the absinthe. In spite of the strong flavour of the centre, it didn’t overrun my palate, and a few minutes after tasting all I had in my mouth were the flavours of the chocolate with a whiff of the alcohol.

All in all, I rather enjoyed eating this chocolate. I have to retract my comment that some things were not meant to be paired with chocolate, because this bar mixes absinthe and chocolate and pulls it off rather well. Obviously this isn’t a flavour that everyone’s going to love, but as far as alcohol and chocolate combinations go, it’s a pretty good one.

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