E Guittard Quetzalcoatl Chocolate Bar Review

On my trip to the US I had the opportunity to behave like a kid in a candy store by going in to “Fog City News” and perusing the vast array of chocolate bars they have there (I’m sure they were just sold out of Askinosie). I went and chose some I was less familiar with and that included some of this chocolate.

In a chocolate shop like this, it is impossible to gauge the quality of a specific line from the smell of the shop. With other lines, walking into the shop gives you a sample of what you’re in for as your nose picks out all the individual smells and can assess the levels of fat and sugar (not always a bad thing 😉 ). You get a good feel for the quality of the chocolate. A label tells you little (unless you count the ingredients list) and sometimes it can be misleading. So in the spirit of fairness and an almost idiotic belief in the potential of chocolate to be good, I chose my bar.

With this chocolate, there were a range of percentages of cocoa and knowing as I do that this is meaningless but also wanting to give this chocolate a fair chance, I selected the 70% bar called Quetzalcoatl. On this bar thhe label proudly boasted “Vintage chocolate making in the French tradition” which apparently means bitter, overroasted, gritty texture with an odd flavour which I’m not sure what it is. It was overwhelmingly bitter, dry, woody but overall burnt. Not at all pleasant and one of the reasons some people claim to not like dark chocolate. Besides Cadbury and Hershey, if this is classed as better quality dark chocolate it could create the false impression in people’s minds that this is what all dark chocolate is whereas it is not the case.

By masking the flavour of the bean and over roasting them, they have really done this chocolate no favours. This could simply have been a bad batch or it could be that over-roasting is part of their process. Whatever the reason, this chocolate was a slight disappointment to me.