Schneekoppe Bittersweet

Oh dear. I did a bad thing. I started taking chocolate blocks to meetings at work, breaking them up, and putting them on the meeting room table. My day job is heavily male-dominated, so it was interesting to see the reaction to this. The chaps who might say they don’t like / don’t eat much chocolate end up wolfing it down. What they say and what they do can differ a little.

So anyhow, after doing this for a while, the boss fella was travelling overseas and brought back a whole lot of chocolate from Croatia – not for himself but for putting on the meeting room table; one per week.

Of course, faced with something like that I threatened to bring in a camera to photograph the packs and take notes. I don’t think anybody took me seriously. Until last week. When I did. Unfortunately I missed doing this for the previous weeks sample of a really excellent lemon and black pepper chocolate.

The most recent sample is SchneeKoppe Bittersweet. The label is in English and what I find kind of amusing is that this is made in Germany, and it has an over-sticker applied by the Croation importer in Zagreb; just like all the imports I see here which need additional labelling to meet local regulations.

This one makes the claim of no added sugar (sucrose), and is supposed to suitable for diabetics. Such things make me dubious / suspicious. This one uses fructose instead of sucrose, to make it “healthy”. The trouble is, unless it’s one of those frankenfoods, fructose is still a form of sugar and something that diabetics need to be careful of. On the positive side, it is perceived as sweeter than sucrose (so you need to use less of it), and it has a lower Glycemic Index. Nevertheless – fructose is not a “Get out of jail free” card.

In spite of my dietary rant – what’s it like?

When a colleague broke this up into decent meeting-size pieces, there is quite a strong rich chocolately aroma. In spite of being only 54% cocoa, it is quite dark in appearance. The taste is a little slow to develop. There is a quite pronounced vanilla overtone, and the flavour and intensity develop if you let this sit on the tongue and slowly melt. Five minutes into tasting this, and I could not believe it was only 54% cocoa – it has a similar flavour to many chocolate that is in the 70% region.

The universal opinion around the table was that this is pretty good. The whole lot was scoffed down, and those not in the meeting hoping for the leftovers were both disappointed and slightly annoyed that a greedy bunch of pigs did not bring anything back.

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