Compartes Love Potion Bar

Brand: Compartes (Los Angeles)
Price: $9.95
Place of Purchase: Compartes Store, Brentwood, CA


Compartes offers many different types of bars. When first gazing at the wall in the store, I was overcome with excitement with so many choices. The varied art of the boxes, the varied flavor combinations. The longer I took to make my choice, though, the more I wondered if one place could pull off so many great bars.

The Love Potion bar is a 70% dark chocolate bar with hints of pink pepper and lotsa orange peels. The pepper is really just felt as you put the chocolate into your mouth. This is not really a spicy bar. I almost breathed the pepper more than tasted it. The big part of this bar is the orange peels. These are not oranges but orange peels, and, as such, are quite a bit ask texture-wise. As someone that enjoys melting the bar in my mouth, I was greeted with the hint of pepper and ended up with one or more hunks of very hard orange peel in my mouth--not good. This made the bar almost a bust. In an effort just to finish the bar, I began tossing a piece in my mouth and chewing it. Suddenly, Love Potion worked. The texture of the peels really made the chew even better. I really do not want to chew my chocolate but it made the bar work.

The art is very eye-catching and clever with the subtle silhouette of a woman tasting a moon.

http://compartes.com/products/chocolate-bar-orange-pepper-spice-love-potion

** (out of 4)

Poco Dolce Bittersweet Chocolate Hearts

Brand: Poco Dolce (San Francisco)
Price: $20.00
Place of Purchase: gift

Poco Dolce has made their reputation upon their Tiles (single-flavored bittersweet chocolate squares) and they are as good as anything need be. Coming in the same simple and elegant box of the tiles are the chocolatier's seasonal offerings, and, for Valentine's Day, it is Chocolate Hearts.

Poco Dolce's chocolate is my favorite chocolate. It is smooth and seems to usually hit the spot between sweet and bitter just perfectly.

Their Chocolate Hearts are a chocolate ganache in a hard chocolate shell. With treats like this, I struggle a bit with the difference of texture between the shell and the inside. I rarely bite and chew and prefer to just toss in the candy and let it melt, but the shell and the inside melt and different rates. I probably should just change my approach to eating these things but I like what I like. The Chocolate Hearts were a good pick for me since the hearts were small and easily fit in my mouth whole and the texture difference what not as pronounced as for other truffles.

The Chocolate Hearts are a pure chocolate experience and I preferred them to Poco Dolce's Christmas offering of chocolate ganache Snowballs (minty powdered sugar outside). With the Hearts you get two different chocolates (shell and ganache interior) to enjoy in one candy.

Poco Dolce Bittersweet Hearts

*** (out of 4)

Compartes Wild Cocoa 80% Bolivia

Brand: Compartes (Los Angeles)
Price: $12.95
Place of Purchase: Compartes Store, Brentwood, CA

The limited edition bar is a single origin bar from Bolivia and part of Compartes's World Series collection. For those keeping score at home, it is bar #15.

The packaging, like all Compartes bars, is eye-catching and pretty. To be fair, this particular box art is a bit pedestrian and might initially seem like you are getting a souvenir from a zoo, but it is a "Wild Cocoa" bar. It is definitely not the modern, chic packaging that I prefer and is common among bars of this expense. The inner shinny wrapping is more functional than artistic but I do like the simple stamping of "Compartes Chocolatier 1950" on the wrapping. (I wonder if, in 1950, they ever dreamed of selling such a product?)

It is an 80% bar and thus is not for everyone, I suspect. Being a high-percent bar, the melt is fantastic. As pleasing as any bar that I have tried. It has an excellent finish that stays with you offering just the taste of chocolate and little in the way of other flavors. Happily, the bar, despite its high percentage of cacao, does not have a bitter aftertaste, like, say, Mast Brothers of Brooklyn. I wonder if this is true of most single-origin bars? Eating the bar offers a pleasingly light experience--like a cloud.

The bars have the typical Compartes partitions that offer many little triangles that can be happily broken off and melted in your mouth and two large triangles with the name of the chocolatier.

High-priced, excellent 85-gram bar.

Compartes Wild Cocoa 80% Bolivia

**** (out of 4)