A fruit-led dark chocolate with an intentionally rougher edge
At 65%, I expected something darker and more bitter. Instead, the Peruvian cacao turns almost immediately towards fruit, and for most of the tasting it never really turns back. This is a good understanding of how to craft a good chocolate around the characteristics of the cacao variety, with a simple ingredient list, something that this Japanese maker is obviously aware of.
Minimal are a curious chocolate maker who have expanded their product SKU’s in all directions. This can sometimes lead to a lack of focus on some chocolate products, but this bar is a good example of them getting it right.
They call this bar “Fruity” and there is a lively acidity from the start, first reminiscent of dried apple, then berries and, later, a darker, caramelised note. What surprised me is how literal the fruit feels: at times it seems less like picking out a tasting note than tasting the sharpness and concentrated sweetness of the fruit itself.
The light roast makes more sense as the chocolate develops. There’s little of the over baked brownie-like depth that often comes with dark chocolate; the cacao keeps its acidity, and cocoa sits underneath rather than out front.
The texture is deliberately coarse, with a slight graininess and a slow, almost reluctant melt. It felt peculiar on the first piece, but increasingly right on the second. Smoothing away that roughness might make the chocolate more conventional, but I’m not convinced it would make it better. However, I would not expect this level of coarseness in all of the chocolate I would want to eat.
Driven by acidity and fruit rather than roast or bitterness, this is an unconventional 65%, and the two-ingredient recipe leaves very little between you and the cacao. I like the stripped-back ingredients, and the potential for comparing different bars of different origins.
My only reservation about this bar is the packaging, and it lost points because of it. The plastic-like pouch looks generic for a chocolate this individual, and gives no hint of what’s inside. Basically this is hiding a good bar of chocolate with a cheap feeling generic mylar “pouch”… so you have to ask, why use it?
Overall Rating: 7 out of 10