Paul A Young Brick House Sourdough

This is a bar I’ve heard people talking about lately, so I decided I had to try it for myself. It’s a collaboration between Paul A Young and Brick House Bread. That’s right. Bread.

Brick House is a bakery in East Dulwich that specialises in sourdough bread. Apparently the bread is slow roasted to intensify the flavour and give it a nice crunch, before being mixed with chocolate and moulded into bars.

The bar is standard format for Paul A Young. It’s 50g and costs about £4 (it was marked at £4.50 but I was charged £3.95 in Paul’s Soho shop).

The chocolate is a blend of Madagascan and Dominican Republic origin, and has an incredibly intense, fruity flavour. It’s difficult to get a handle on how much of the flavour is coming from the chocolate and how much from the crunchy bread pieces which are scattered liberally through the bar, but it’s intense, chocolatey and delicious.

But the real highlight of this bar is the texture. The bread feels like tiny biscuit pieces and make this just about the crunchiest bar of chocolate you’re ever likely to experience. Somehow the crunch itself seems to intensify the chocolate flavour, making this a bar that’s very difficult to put down.

But as delicious as this bar is, I’m still not completely convinced that I want to have to crunch, munch and chew a bar of fine chocolate. I’d much rather let it melt slowly, but if you do that you do end up with a mouthful of toast when the chocolate has melted.

This is a chocolate that demands to be crunched. If that’s your thing, then you’re unlikely to find anything quite as crunchy or packed with flavour as this. For me, it’s more of an interesting experiment rather than something I would buy regularly.

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