A Lesson In Chocolate Buying (Green & Black's Organic Maya Gold Dark Chocolate)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Green & Black's Organic Maya Gold Dark Chocolate
Date:	23/05/09 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Delicious and unusual, small bars = better for you

Disadvantages: Comparatively more expensive

I have a bad habit of not liking to leave a shop without buying something. Usually I manage, even though it's a struggle, but with Charity Shops it's a little harder, and one lunch time, weary through lack of food, the Oxfam across from the hospital where I used to work grabbed me and wouldn't let me go until I swapped some coins for a bar of Green and Black's Maya Gold Chocolate.

The thing is, I didn't know that's what I was buying. The little letters didn't jump out at me quick enough, and I thought at the time I was investing in some of their regular dark chocolate which I've had before, and liked. This could have turned into a lesson on checking before you buy, but instead it turned into a lesson on trying new things, because the chocolate turned out to be a nice surprise.

My first impressions were that I wouldn't have expected a firm like Green and Black's to succumb to over-packaging, but they seem to have done as there were two layers to unwrap before I got to the bar itself. The chocolate looks quite dull, and my bar wasn't made up in easy-to-break segments, but it snapped into haphazard pieces easily enough.

Maya Gold is described as 'Dark Chocolate with Orange and Spices' which sounded dubious to me. Orange? Sure. But spices? In Chocolate? Um, ok. It sounded funny to me on paper, but turned out to be quite nice. The spices (cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla) are very, very mild and add only a subtle flavour. The orange is also not overpowering, and the result is a bar that tastes like normal high cocoa dark chocolate, with a bit of a quirky kick. I liked it more than some similar products because the orange and spices were thoroughly blended into the bar, leaving a smooth chocolate behind, not one with bits and chunks like the Lindt bar that has orange zest / peel in it. The orange flavour is nice on its own because so few single portion bars are orange these days. The Cadbury's orange one is no more, and the Lindt ones are all big sizes - at least 100g. G&B do sell a milk chocolate orange bar which is nice, but more sickly than this one due to the mix of the sweet milk chocolate with the sweet orange. Substituting a bitter dark chocolate eliminates this.

It tasted like a good bar of chocolate for winter - you could imagine enjoying it with a hot drink, wrapped up warm on the sofa - and the fact that the bar smells like Christmas only adds to this image. It tastes, as most G&B products tend to, like high quality chocolate. I think this is partly due to the high cocoa content, but there must be more to it than that since their milk chocolate is also luxurious, and is much lower in cocoa than dark varieties. It's definitely a chocolate for adult tastes.

Green and Black's chocolate is suitable for vegetarians, fair trade and organic, and as such is sold at a premium. This bar is also suitable for vegans and the ingredients list is reassuringly short - just 6 items, despite it being a bar with 'added bits', not pure, simple chocolate. My bar was 39p, but it was a thin sliver of a thing - a very small, 20g bar (similar in size to the 'under 100 calories' range from Cadburys). The usual sized ones - about 50g I think, and similar in size to a standard Dairy Milk - are nearer to 70p. However, the increased price is justifiable for the quality of the bar you get, and the nice being-good-to-the-world feeling you get from choosing this over some mass produced alternative.

Green and Blacks have an ever-growing selection of bars and boxes of chocolates, and ice cream too, but very few stores stock the entire range. Generally vegetarian and health food shops will stock it, as will larger supermarkets. In addition, weird universities like Manchester where students seem to have enough free time to develop a conscience often have it in their Union shops (I, on the other hand, went to UMIST, where the techy types happily scoffed KitKats and other Nestle products while working all hours...) Add in charity shops like Oxfam, and you end up with half a dozen G&B outlets within walking distance of my former work place. Not good.

I think they should give out samples of this and other slightly obscure flavours (G&B offer butterscotch, ginger and raisin and hazelnut among others), since most people will try things that are free, and I'm sure many would, like me, become fond of this once they got around to trying it. It sounded like a weird mix on paper, but it turned out to be a tasty, unusual bar that I'll happily have again.

Interestingly, I now live in the land of the Maya, and they have nothing similar to this bar here. Hmmm.



http://www.greenandblacks.com/

Summary: Try it if you haven't already