Returning to the single origin bars from Zak's Chocolate, today we have their Papua New Guinea 70%. The paper this time is blue and silver, which go excellently once more with the blue foil side of the inside wrapping. The pattern, too, blends well with the usual diamond shapes on the chocolate. Flavor notes here are black cherry and tobacco leaf.
The chocolate's aroma is intoxicating, with what I call silver notes. (I call chocolate blue, red, silver, but why not ever gold?) Blue and silver, as in the packaging, are definitely this chocolate's colors. Its profile is bewitchingly smooth.
Beginning with a tender mouthfeel and smooth chocolate flavor, this chocolate is light and glistening. Like if chocolate were glass--or diamonds, perhaps? Then it deepens to something perhaps a tad earthier and richer. That rich chocolate taste that develops is akin to a ganache. In that rich chocolate flavor is where you would find the black cherry notes; it's like a flourless chocolate cake in regards to that flavor. The chocolate melts away as tenderly as it began, leaving behind a delicately tangy taste of bliss.
There tend to be the chocolates that are filled with flavor notes and the chocolates that simply have cocoa notes; I would say this one lands somewhere in between. It has complex flavor but not quite that layered flavor. So it has that blessed simplicity of the chocolate flavor we all love while also offering a more nuanced profile. That combination of both sides is what makes it such a stunner, like an entrancing lover.
It's cool and suave while also sensitive and understanding. There is zero bitterness to this chocolate, so it's quite approachable. The tobacco leaf flavor note implied something a little more intimidating to me, but perhaps the touch of earthiness or even my analogy of a lover was my interpretation of the tobacco (not that I would want a lover who smokes tobacco--I'm talking archetypes here--but I digress). So it is another great exploration of chocolate from Zak's.
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