Taza Stone Ground Unconched Chocolate

[Chris Hennes]

In Issue 79 of The Art of Eating Ed Behr writes about this organic chocolate:

I've enjoyed Lindt "Excellent" 70 percent on its own, but next to Taza it appeared dull, muddy, and off-flavored. Valrhona's Guanaja was free of defects, outstanding as always, but by comparison with the small-batch chocolates, its flavors were mainly deep and nutty, falling short on high notes and fruit. Taza is more vivid and intense than any of them [...]

My observation is that you can't fully understand chocolate flavor until you've tasted the unconched kind. Taza has an appealing raw intensity.

After that kind of introduction, how could I not rush out and order some? (Actually, it turns out that our local organic goods store carries it, but I did not find that out until my online order was placed and they wrote back looking for a local distributor.)

On the Taza website you can enter the batch number of your chocolate (mine is #174) and look up the details of the chocolate used in your particular bar. For example, for batch 174:

They were harvested on: Jun 30, 2008

They were fermented for 6 days.

They were slowly sun dried for 8 days.

The beans were received in our factory and inspected by: Mike

They were roasted in a Barth Sirocco 200 cocoa roaster for 41 minutes

What the hell does it mean? I don't know, but it's neat.

Here is what the packaging of the 70% bar looks like:

And the chocolate itself:

In particular, the thing that struck me first was that this chocolate is not milled super-fine. The folks at Taza don't want to do anything to the chocolate that might compromise its pure flavor, and apparently that includes milling it very fine. In fact, this chocolate is actually unconched, which makes it extremely unusual.

At first taste the chocolate doesn't seem like anything that unusual: a fine chocolate, no doubt, but not exotic. It is not until you really let it coat your whole tongue that its wild side comes out: then, wow. This bar has a beautiful sharp acidity to it that is a most welcome complement to the sweetness. It really has a great, rich, chocolate flavor that is then accented by this sharpness, which is apparently a result of not conching the chocolate.

I also ordered some disks of their Mexican-style drinking chocolate: I have not sampled those yet, but I have high hopes for them.

Has anyone else tried this stuff? Reactions?

[John DePaula]

Interesting report, Chris. I haven't tried Taza yet, but I will now.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

[gfron1]

Yep - we sell them. My response is the same as yours. Its definitely a good chocolate and very enjoyable, but for "special" I go for Patric or Askinosie.