Vosges Oaxaca Bar

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

Vosges Oaxaca Bar.
Oaxacan Guajillo y pasilla chillies, Tanzanian bittersweet chocolate (75%).
$7.50 for 100g.

This is the 3^rd time I’ve opened up a Vosges box only to find the chocolate absolutely smeared all over the wrapper, to the point that the color had almost completely faded on the vast majority of the bar, both on its front and back. I could have accepted it if it had only happened once or twice—maybe it was just a faulty bar. But three times? This is just poor packaging, and it shows. This problem (technically “chocolate bloom,” the separation of the cocoa butter from the chocolate) is quite common when chocolate is transported poorly or stored in hot conditions, but a bar this faded should never be sold.

Not that it matters much with the Oaxaca Bar, since the flavor and build of the bar are horrible regardless. As soon as I tried to break it apart, I again noticed just how tough Vosges’s bars are. I’d expect this toughness from a dark chocolate, but the Oaxaca Bar has an unsatisfying tendency of breaking apart into every shape except for the squares into which it’s actually shaped.

That toughness comes through in the melt, too, as the Oaxaca Bar doesn’t really melt on its own—you need to munch it down. That’s disappointing for something at 75%, which is by its nature going to be very intense and so needs to be tempered properly so that it goes down smoothly. Vosges’ Oaxaca Bar, however, never quite approaches any sense of smoothness. The harshness is even more surprising when you consider that the bar uses soy lecithin, an emulsifier, to give it an artificially smooth consistency. The net result is that, even when the bar does melt, it has a very fake creaminess to it that interferes with and suppresses the natural flavor of the cocoa.

Nor does the flavor help, as the Oaxaca Bar prefers to hit you strong and hard with the chilies. These chilies could have been the one redeeming quality of the bar, but they simply overpower the bar, which is surprising considering how intense the cocoa should be at 75%. The dark chocolate, though, comes off as very bland and light, even if it is very bitter. On the one positive side, it is rather long, lasting on the palate for quite a bit of time. That aftertaste, though, is interrupted by the strong chili taste, which is almost unnoticeable until the very end, where it emerges in full force and leaves you utterly devastated with an extreme spice that you could not possibly have expected, given how bland the chocolate is. On the one hand, it’s satisfying to see that the bar actually has some flavor to it. On the other, that flavor is just so harsh, immoderate, and even plain bad that it’s difficult to enjoy. The bar runs the gamut from extreme bitterness to extreme spiciness, and I just didn’t want to savor the aftertaste at all because it was at times too much to bear—I just wanted some water both to wash out the bitterness and to relieve the heat.

Honestly, I don’t term this type of added punch “complexity,” because it simply is not. Rather, it’s a gimmick to cover up the overall poor taste of the chocolate, and it fails at even that. In order to be critical, I’ve been restrained in my review, but there’s really no excuse for the Oaxaca Bar. Two friends of mine—separately, with no communication between each other, mind you!—went so far as to even term it “cardboard,” and I’d agree.

How Vosges could have used an artificial emulsifier and still ended up with a chocolate hard as a rock is a mystery to me. And how they could have taken such a bitter chocolate and turned it into such a weak flavor, completely dominated by an abrasive, immoderate spiciness is even more of a mystery. It’s mortifying to think that Vosges is charging $7.50 for this bar.

Really, Vosges makes fantastic milk chocolate, but I’d recommend avoiding its spicy Oaxaca Bar at almost all cost.

Presentation: 0.0/5.0
Taste: 0.0/5.0
Melt: 0.0/5.0
Length: 2.0/5.0
Value: 0.0/5.0
Verdict: 0.0/5.0