Vosges Organic Dominican Milk Chocolate Bar

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

Composition: 45% deep milk chocolate.
Region of Production: USA.
Origin of Cocoa: Dominican Republic.
Price: $7.50 for 100g.

While at the Vosges Haut Chocolat Café in Chicago, I was lucky enough to get a couple free samples of their chocolate bars. This is one of those, coming in a mini 0.5 oz. case. While that’s too small to get a great impression of the chocolate, this is probably one of those bars that tastes better in smaller quantities, given its cloying sweetness.

Vosges does a great job with the presentation of its 0.5 oz. bars—much more so than with its larger bars, in my opinion. The wrapper is the traditional Vosges box, displaying the ingredient you’re about to eat. More importantly, the Organic Dominican Milk Chocolate Bar carries a message, as the word “dazzling” is written in large letters across it. While I think “dazzling” is hardly the right word for this bar, I do have to say it does a nice job for an organic milk chocolate.

The bar has some complexity to it. The milk is very rich and even feels like it has a very slight grittiness to it, like cocoa powder is present in its raw form. The milk, being on the dark side, also has some balance to its sweetness, which this bar really needs given just how sweet and cloying it can get. Moreover, a variety of flavors are noticeable: a hint of caramel, slight bananas, some coffee, and some earth/dirt.

The couple problems that really pop up are in the melt and roundness. Like most milk chocolate bars, this one doesn’t really hit the whole palate. This bar in particular, though, seems exceptionally short, melting almost immediately and then dissipating rather quickly, even though it’s on the darker side (which should help it stay on the palate a little longer). One thing to note is that it uses lecithin, so it has an artificially creamy melt to it, which in my opinion works to its disadvantage. On the more positive side for the texture, the bar has a nice crack/snap to it as you bite in—one which I didn’t expect to be so hard/loud for a milk chocolate bar.

One final complaint is that this Organic Dominican Milk Chocolate Bar falls into what I call the “milk trap”—being just too sweet. If more than just a small amount is put into the mouth, it eventually becomes cloying, leaving the palate with that heavy, slightly candy-like, creamy milk sweetness that you frequently find in American chocolates. Still, it could have been a lot worse.

Overall, then, Vosges’ Organic Dominican Milk Chocolate Bar is decent at best. For something organic, it really does approach the real thing in terms of taste, and it has a lot of complexity for an organic chocolate bar. Still, I’ve had a lot better for a lot less, and “organic ingredients” really aren’t a sufficient excuse for some very basic problems with the bar.

Presentation: 4.0/5.0
Taste: 2.2/5.0
Melt: 1.5/5.0
Length: 1.0/5.0
Value: 1.0/5.0. Very overpriced for a milk of this quality, even if it is organic.
Overall Score: 1.8/5.0