Domori D-Fusion Lattesal Bar

Posted by Edmund in Bakeries & Sweets, Featured Articles | 0 comments

Composition: Milk Chocolate with Salt.
Region of Production: Italy
Price: 75g for about $7

Producer’s Notes: “We chose the sweet and aromatic Guérande salt to bring forth a fresh hint of banana and citrus fruits of this fine milk chocolate made with Arriba cacao. Guérande salt is not refined nor bleached and maintains a natural grey color.”

I was quite intrigued when I found out that Domori, one of the finest producers of gourmet chocolate, has released a D-Fusion Line, where it incorporates a single ingredient into different types of chocolate. I’m not too crazy about the idea of “D-Fusion,” but once I saw the box I was almost certain this bar would be great. Domori goes with a simple, elegant approach: a polished, glimmering silver box that displays the chocolate’s color and the fusion ingredient (salt), with a similarly silver wrapper for the chocolate itself.

The packaging, however, is very misleading. Once you open the box, though, you notice the chocolate isn’t quite as radiant a dark brown/coffee color as the boxed showed, nor is it quite as sleek. Instead, each piece is a rather hard, flat box, without much of a gloss at all. You are left with a dull, grayish light brown. Moreover, the bar comes in only four large, clunky pieces that would take at least four bites to eat each. On the positive side, the snap is great, making it incredibly easy to break the chocolate into further pieces.

As you open up the wrapper, the aroma of banana and nuts jumps out at you. It dissipates rapidly, but it is rather strong for a milk chocolate, and it reminds you that you’ll be eating something sweet even if it has salt in it.

Unfortunately, that sweetness can be cloying. I assumed that the salt would balance out the bar, yet I found this bar to be just as sweet as any other milk chocolate bar. It’s also surprisingly one-dimensional. The salt does give off some fruity citrus tones (as the producer notes suggest), but that flavor from the salt is very subtle. Instead, this is a very intense, very milky chocolate that verges on the taste and consistency of caramel, with slight tones of coffee. The aftertaste is just as sweet, leaving a harsh finish that irritated my throat somewhat, although I did like that the salt also came through more strongly in that finish.

The texture also leaves something wanting. While the chocolate is so smooth that it is easily one of the creamiest bars you can eat, it’s still surprisingly hard to the bite. It doesn’t have a bad snap per se, but I’m not a big fan of the crunch and firmness, mostly because it slows down the melt significantly, so that you have to force the bar to melt by moving it around the mouth constantly. The chocolate also has a very viscous quality to it, making it somewhat unsatisfyingly clingy. That heaviness does, to be fair, allow it to leave a somewhat bigger impression on the palate, but it’s not all that long regardless, vanishing within a minute or so.

The Domori Lattesal is thus decent at best. While it has an incredible milkiness, the flavor is integrated very poorly, nor is the chocolate itself all that great in terms of quality.

Presentation: 2.0/5.0
Taste: 1.8/5.0
Melt: 2.2/5.0
Flavor: 0.5/5.0
Length: 1.5/5.0
Value: 1.0/5.0
Verdict: 1.4/5.0