Chocolat Frey AG was founded in 1887, and is presently the number one chocolate in the Swiss retail market. Like all good chocolatiers these days, Frey is environmentally and socially conscious, which extends not only to its procurement of raw materials, but to its conservation-minded manufacturing and shipping.
Strangely enough, out of the hundreds of products listed on the Frey website, I couldn’t find Chocobloc 72% Dark, so I’m going to wing it with this one.
Sure enough, the first ingredient listed is unsweetened chocolate, followed by sugar, then cocoa butter and cocoa powder, so we can assume that there’s plenty of chocolate in this bar. The bar itself is 3.5 ounces (100 g), a little over an inch wide and over six inches long and nearly an inch high — “chocobloc,” indeed. It’s molded into wedges, which is fortunate: the texture is fairly dense and quite firm, and trying to eat a block of this — well, if you have any loose teeth, don’t try it. Happily, the wedges are quite easily to handle.
The bits of nougat all seem to have sunk to the bottom, and they provide a little bit of crunch to an otherwise very smooth bar. As noted, the texture is firm, but not brittle, and the mouth feel is quite seductive — it’s somewhere between a high-quality milk chocolate and the heavy-duty 85 or 90% cocoa bars I’ve tried.
The flavor is chocolate, no two ways about it — the “honey-almond” of the nougat is, quite frankly, overwhelmed by the cocoa, offering just a bit of sweetness in the aftertaste.
If this is representative of Frey’s offerings, it’s easy to see why they’ve become the number one Swiss chocolatier.
You can find out more about their history and their (literally) hundreds of products (now including chewing gum!) at their website.
