This is my second encounter with Taza’s stone-ground chocolate, this one a bar with 80% cacao, with coconut and almond. Needless to say, everything is organic. (To refresh your memory, Taza is an American company headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, that offers Mexican-style stone-ground organic chocolates.)
The bar is 2.5 ounces, and is a fairly normal rectangle scored to enable you to break it into bite-size lozenges. The color, not unexpectedly, is very dark, and the texture, equally predictable, is fairly brittle. (A side note: we were sitting in the Pub the other day and someone noted that chocolate does not respond well to heat. In this case, my bar of Taza’s Almond Chocolate happened to be sitting under my desk lamp: the heat from the bulb softened the bar so that the texture was much closer to “regular” chocolate — somewhat soft and chewy. And the flavor was a little more aggressive. For what it’s worth.)
The flavor: to be quite honest, I’m having a hard time identifying any coconut or almond in the taste. The chocolate is the dominant presence, although it’s slightly sweeter than I would expect. But as for identifiable nut flavors, that just doesn’t come through, not even in the aftertaste, which, again, is slightly earthy.
Nevertheless, this is one I can recommend for those times when you just have to have a little bit of chocolate — more than two bites verges on overwhelming, even for a confirmed chocoholic like me.
If you want to find out more about Taza, including their complete line of products and local retailers, they’re online here.
