I found some more outside SFBA chocolate to share — starting with a fun gift idea for the holidays:
Everybody gets coal this year
No I’m not punishing you all for your votes this year — although I can’t help thinking that way, seriously America, WTH? — instead I introduce you to Chuao Chocolatier, Carlsbad, CA, and their bar that turns the idea of coal in naughty children’s stockings into something fun for everyone.
Chuao’s Exploding Coal is a limited edition bar that I picked up at our local Peet’s Coffee. With a name like that I had to check it out. Chuao is known for their trendy flavors — like potato chip, bacon, and churro — and quality ingredients so I didn’t feel like I was taking any chances getting this one. And it sounded intriguing: “Popping candy and black cacao conspire in dark chocolate.”
I enjoy the fizzy sensation of popping candy in melting chocolate but what is black cacao?
I guess I’m late to the party because Google had a lot of black cacao/cocoa entries — turns out it’s something people use to make really dark colored chocolate desserts — like literally black. According to the King Arthur Baking site, it’s “used to give baked goods the deepest, darkest color (more black than brown). Black cocoa powder is ultra-Dutch processed, meaning it is treated with an alkaline solution to reduce its acidity. This gives it a smooth texture, dark color, and unsweetened-chocolate highlights.”
So no actual coal involved — although there are chocolates made with activated charcoal. Those will have to wait for a future article.
Such a big fun bar seems like it should be shared which is exactly what I did. My regular tasters are game for pretty much everything chocolate and they got into this one — reading the ingredients list, decoding the package illustration, and when I opened it up and we saw the mold had different words in every square people got into picking squares with the words they liked best.
The bar wasn’t actually black but a very very dark brown. The popping candy was visible as little bumps in the bar.
The bar had a hard snap and the crackling fizzing started as soon as the melting did. Chuao is very generous with the popping candy in this bar — the popping lasted a long time. If you have never experienced this sensation before this is a good bar to try.
The 60% couverture was a good chocolate if a little sweeter than we expected — I mean it looked darker than a 100% bar but it didn’t taste like one — so black cacao seemed to only add color not bitterness. This bar was a winner with my tasters.
Exploding Coal is part of Chuao’s holiday collection. Other bars in the collection feature peppermint, gingerbread, and S’mores. They sell mini bars of the holiday collection flavors online which would make perfect stocking stuffers — including a 100-count single flavor option if you have a long naughty list this year.
Chocolate by the beach
This fall Cacaopod and I took our first vacation since the pandemic — we drove down to SoCal to visit our clients and combined our business trip with stays in LA and a few oceanside towns. Unfortunately we got COVID halfway through the trip so instead of checking out a lot of chocolate we mostly slept our way back home. I call it our comfy bed tour. Fingers crossed we can check out the LA chocolate scene next year.
We did get to try some chocolate on the road — although it was totally random. Our first day we stayed in Avila Beach — a small kinda funky beach town halfway between SF and SoCal. Checking out the boardwalk we saw an old fashioned beachside sweets shop. As you can see from their awning they carry the whole range of expected sweets including chocolate. We knew absolutely nothing about the place but it said the magic word so we went inside.
Inside they had counters of chocolates and ice cream plus shelves and displays of more chocolates and confections. The staff was very friendly and helpful, giving chocolate suggestions and telling us about Reimer’s Candies.
Reimer’s started as a family owned business in the 1950s in the Central Valley — they still have a location there along with one in the Sierra foothills and the Avila Beach store. They have always made their own chocolates and ice cream. Last year they were bought by Stafford’s Chocolates, Porterville, which plans to keep the Reimer’s brand while consolidating some production and sales.
That explained the Stafford’s chocolate bars in the displays but there were also barks from a third chocolate supplier — Mama Ganache Artisan Chocolates in San Luis Obispo — and hard taffy from a confectioner — Swedish Candy Factory in Solvang — on the shelves too. Turns out they are small longtime CA candy companies that Stafford’s has also acquired but is keeping as separate unique businesses.
I like this idea. These longtime brands have strong local followings and their own distinct offerings — Reimer’s makes Stollen (German holiday bread) seasonally in addition to chocolates and ice cream — along with some overlap — the 3 chocolatiers all make boxed chocolates for example. We got something from each maker to get acquainted.
Old school sweets
Since we were on the road and a heat wave was projected in a few days we didn’t want to get anything delicate like bonbons and truffles so we asked the staff for recs of other chocolate treats Reimer’s makes.
The staff recommended their Crispy Bear Paws, California Turtles, and Peanut Butter Dreams.
They said the Crispy Bear Paws were their favorite and we agreed it was the best of these treats. It had a crispy chewy crunch from the rice crispies and caramel inside a thick coating of dark chocolate. As Cacaopod said the dark chocolate was good — not great — but good. We’d try these again.
The California Turtle substitutes California almonds for the more traditional pecans. They also changed the ratio of caramel to chocolate — they had a lot of caramel and only a small dollop of chocolate. The piece was a generous handful of almonds bound together with chewy caramel. The chocolate didn’t have a presence at all. To us it was definitely a candy or confection more than a chocolate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but I prefer a more traditional turtle.
The staff told us that their most popular item was the Peanut Butter Dream which they make in both milk and dark chocolates. As a peanut butter lover I always like to check out what chocolatiers are doing with this combo of 2 of my favorite foods so we got one of each.
The pieces had a smooth lightly peanut butter tasting filling. They were too sweet for us — even the dark chocolate one — and I would’ve preferred a stronger peanut butter flavor.
We also got a small bag of their Dark Chocolate Honeycomb Crisps which we liked as much as the Crispy Bear Claws. The chocolate was thinner and the honeycomb was crispy — just like the name said — so it was a good treat and it traveled well.
Reimer’s has a limited menu of chocolates on their website. They are more of a you-have-to-be-there kind of experience. Luckily Avila Beach is a pretty sweet little town to visit so if you find yourself there, drop into Reimer’s for a treat.
Definitely not salt water taffy
The non-chocolate sweet we bought at Reimer’s was hard taffy called Polkagris. It was a large taffy cylinder — it looked kinda like a big fat candy cane stick. It comes in different flavors — from the traditional peppermint to more diverse ones like watermelon and peach mango. We got those 2.
I forgot to take pix of the Polkagris we bought but the illustration below is fairly accurate:
This was a difficult treat to share. This taffy was hard like old school Turkish Taffy but it was also a thick cylinder so it wasn’t easy to break like Turkish Taffy. It’s meant to be eaten more like a lollipop because it has to sit in your mouth a while before it gets chewy.
I had expected a soft chewy salt water taffy like you find in every other candy shop in a beach town but Avila marches to its own beat. We figured out a way to break it to sample even though we were on the road without tools — we were both candy loving kids way before we went professional so we got skills.
With all that said this is a fun treat. It’s handmade by the Swedish Candy Factory using quality ingredients and it tasted like it. The flavors are strong and just go and go and go — for as long as it takes to soften and chew a piece and afterwards too. It would be nice if they made a chocolate one.
In addition to being available in all of Stafford’s multiple businesses’ shops, you can buy Polkagris on the Swedish Candy Factory website.
Massive bar
Stafford’s Chocolates makes bars, bonbons, truffles, molded chocolates, brittles, toffee, drinking chocolate, enrobed chocolates, and baking chocolate. I really liked their chocolate bar packaging — a heavy paper wrapper with “Milk Chocolate” printed and embossed over a text-as-graphics design and a small info label affixed over top — so I got one to try.
The Milk Chocolate with Almonds bar was a big, thick 4 oz. bar. For reference most craft chocolate bars we sample are between 1.5 and 3 ounces. This bar didn’t look bigger than a lot of other bars but it was thicker — more than 1/4″ thick.
A strong sweet chocolate smell hit me as soon as I opened the inner foil wrapper. The bar had a medium snap and was visibly full of chopped almond pieces.
The chocolate had a smooth texture and a sweet caramel flavor. It was very American chocolate — Cacaopod said it reminded him of Hershey’s — and too sweet for me.
You can buy Stafford’s chocolates at their stores and on their website — including their exclusive Ooey Gooey Bar which covers layers of homemade marshmallow, peanut butter, and caramel in chocolate and toasted almonds. Sounds interesting — maybe try it in dark chocolate?
Worth exploring
The chocolate we enjoyed the most on our trip was from the 3rd business that is under Stafford’s wing.
The Cherry Almond Bark from Mama Ganache Artisan Chocolates had a humble appearance — a slab of bark in a clear bag tied with twine. A small card containing all the important info and a small round sticker of the company logo completed the look.
The bark was attractive looking with a good amount of whole roasted California almonds and dried Bing cherries mixed into the dark chocolate. It broke easily, and the crunchy almonds and chewy cherries were nice contrasts to the smooth texture of the chocolate. All of the ingredients were top quality and it was a tasty bark.
In addition to barks Mama Ganache makes bonbons, truffles, bars, caramels, patties, drinking chocolates, and baking chocolates. Their signature piece is the SLO Chew — caramel, cashews, peanut butter, and brown rice crispies covered in milk or dark chocolate. You can order their goodies online, and they have their own factory store in SLO, CA (AKA San Luis Obispo) just 15 minutes up the road from Reimer’s. I hope to visit them next time we head south.
Keep Portland chocolatey
The next 2 bars we sampled were supplied by one of our regular tasters. He visits Portland fairly regularly and this time when he was in a shopping district he knows well he unexpectedly spotted a chocolate shop. I like to think I am influencing people to notice the artisan chocolate that exists wherever they go but this time it was actually a new second location of a local chocolate maker so I can’t take any credit.
Established in 2014, Creo Chocolate, Portland, OR, makes pretty much everything chocolate — bars, truffles, drinking chocolates, enrobed chocolates, caramels, and baking chocolate. They even make chocolate mint lip balm using their cocoa butter. They offer build-a-bar tours at their factory and you can buy most of their extensive line on their website.
My friend in chocolate brought a plain dark chocolate bar and one with inclusions. The plain bar, Purely Dark 85%, was made with Ecuadorian cacao, organic cane sugar, and cocoa butter.
It had a medium hard snap and a smooth texture. It was a savory slightly nutty chocolate and not as bitter as expected for 85%. It was a little drying afterwards.
Creo also makes 62%, 73%, and 100% bars in this line. Since they all use the same Ecuadorian cacao this could be a good group of bars for comparing cacao percentages to find your sweet spot.
The inclusions bar, Northwest Hazelnut & Cherry, was a 73% Ecuadorian cacao bar jam-packed with toasted hazelnut pieces and dotted with big whole dried cherries. It was a well made bar with a good snap and immediate hazelnut flavor, then the savory chocolate flavor. The soft dried cherries required chewing so that flavor came last but was good too and made a nice combo with the nutty chocolate bar.
As you can see from the pix, their packaging is very eye-catching with cacao related images printed in metallic gold covering most of the front with a little center window giving a glimpse of the chocolate inside. They would make a nice souvenir or gift next time you are in Portland.
Keep England weird
Finally, we have Monty Bojangles’ Choccy Scoffy Truffles — a treat one of our other tasters picked up on a trip to England. He didn’t have any info on the manufacturer or the truffles themselves. He just liked the name and the packaging — and knew our crowd would be down for whatever unfolded.
Inside the box were individually wrapped dark chocolate truffles which I thought was a good idea — both for clean travel and extended freshness.
The truffles were dusted with cocoa powder and had a smooth texture. They were harder than regular truffles which I assume was to keep their shape which resembled a square top knit beanie — and maybe also related to freshness. Most truffles are supposed to be consumed within 2 weeks of purchase — these were freshness dated to over a year later.
They had a good chocolate taste with a raspberry overtone. I was pleasantly surprised and the crowd enjoyed them too.
Monty Bojangles also makes flavored truffles similar to the Choccy Scoffy. On their website you can click and drag flavors to create your own treasure chest with a total of 100 truffles inside — but unfortunately they do not ship to the US. Even if you can’t buy anything their website is fun to visit — it looks quite trippy — like a gentler version of Monty Python animations.
