Chocolate SIG aka The Choc Club

Today im posting about something different for a change - a casual chocolate tasting club. If you are looking to start your own, here's a collection of articles to get the basics and more. Chocolate tasting is a nice way to spend good time with your fellow chocolate lovers and friends. Why not try this weekend? Anyways, have a nice weekend folks!

Samples from a session in 2011

Our Choc SIG (special interest group) was kicked off some 3,5 years ago by yours bluntly and 4 other chocolate enthusiasts working in the same office. Things change but we do meet every now and then, sit and chat, and eat chocolate.

This is how it works: everyone brings their own sample, we taste and discuss them together. It's not very formal, oftentimes discussion drifts to completely different matters. There are no statistics, spreadsheets, questionnaires or rating scales involved but we discuss the samples tasted and choose a winner per each meeting. Slow pace and dark choc work against gorging: you would be surprised to see how much of the choc is actually left over from the sessions! The Choc Club is indeed beneficial: reduced cravings for chocolate, drifting towards allegedly more healthy, dark chocolate and quality time spent in good company. What else could a girl want?

The Winner

Here's the winner of last session, Marabou Premium Dark chocolate and almond. The choc was praised for it's feel, and crunchy, balanced taste. Truly a nice dark almond chocolate.

Runner-ups

Black salt lakrits bar was well liked too, not for its chocolate but for salmiakki it contained. Yes, I know, a horrible acquired taste. The chocolate in the bar was your common, light Marabou quality, bit too sweet but the salmiakki used was really good. Maybe salmiakki needed some mild, non-spectacular chocolate to shine?



Fazer's strawberry chocolate divided opinions. Some of us liked the strawberry chunks and others considered it too bland or sweet.

Other Candidates

We had some other candidates in the session but they received not too many mentions. This beautiful French chocolate was visually pleasing but due its uneven structure there was no concensus on its taste. Dark Fazer blue is a classic, and won an earlier round but I guess we have eaten so much of it that it made no special impression. Nevertheless, chocolate is always good!

Beautiful chocolate souvenir from France

Darker version of a Finnish classic