Lake Champlain 5 Star Hazelnut Chocolate Bar

Posted by Edmund in Chocolate, Gourmet Chocolate Bars, USA | 0 comments

Filled Milk Chocolate Bar.
$3.80 for 1.8 oz. bar (51 g).
Organic Chocolate.

This bar is incredible in all the ways that count, though it does have a few superficial problems. First is the presentation: This is just a small, chunky, fat candy bar in a plain paper wrapper, with barely any adornment whatsoever.

Moreover, there is really no length to this bar. That isn’t the point of the bar, however. Instead, it’s a relatively cheap, milk chocolate hazelnut/gianduja experience, and you should be expecting very much a “candy bar” taste, albeit a gourmet one.

Nevertheless, the excellence of the bar becomes immediately apparent as you put it into your mouth, as it melts almost flawlessly. The milk chocolate and gianduja are both perfectly creamy and smooth, with an incredible airiness that helps them to blend together so fluidly that you can barely separate the texture of the milk chocolate from the gianduja.

But looks (or, rather, textures) are deceiving. This bar is the definitve hazelnut experience, with a hazelnut flavor that is both extremely pronounced and never overwhelming. Nuts and nut pastes like gianduja tend to be inedibly sweet, but that isn’t the case here, as the bar has none of the cloying sweetness or fattiness of other hazelnut bars. That’s where the bar really shines: While you do feel a candy bar-like sweetness, it’s not too strong and is counterbalanced by a strong, truly hazelnut flavor. That flavor comes through particularly in the small chunks of actual hazelnuts that are integrated into the paste. These chunks also give the bar a very satisfyingly gritty crunch, reminiscent of that of a wafer.

Ultimately, though, it’s not possible to give an adequate description of what this bar actually does that distinguishes it, since on the surface it’s so simple. It’s just a bar with proper sweetness, a nutty crunch with full nut pieces, and an ultra-creamy gianduja filling.

It is, however, a testament to just how good this bar is that I’m not a fan of gianduja by any means (after having had my fair share of it throughout Belgium, the gianduja specialist), and yet I find the incredibly light, perfect gianduja in this filled milk chocolate bar one of the best I’ve ever had, to the point that I couldn’t put this bar down. Lake Champlain indeed gets a 5 star rating in my book, at least for this knockout 5 Star Hazelnut Bar.

Presentation: 1.5/5.0
Melt: 4.9/5.0, specifically for a cheap candy bar.
Length: 0.5/5.0 (but not really all that relevant here)
Taste: 4.9/5.0
Flavor: 4.9/5.0
Value: 4.0/5.0. Gianduja this good isn’t so common. Still, it’s a lot for such a short experience.
Overall Score: 4.8/5.0