The hubby and I received a very prelibate bottle of rum for Christmas, and we thought the best way to enjoy it was with some dark chocolate. But once a the store there were many different kind, at many different prices! We pondered for a while which one was going to be the best, you know, the best is not necessarily the most expensive! At the end we had a brilliant idea, why not get a few different brands and do a little tasting?!
So we did! We got three chocolate bars. The cheapest is the Milka bar that sells for around 70 cents, then we got a bar of the local Ritter Sport (did you know that Berlin hosts a Ritter Sport chocolate museum?) this one costed about 90 cents. And finally we bought a bar of Lindt, horribly expensive at about 2 euros.
We prepared two glasses of rum and two squares of each brand of chocolate for each one of us, then we sampled. First we sampled a small bit of chocolate with the mouth unadulterated by the flavor of the rum. Then we had a sip and sampled again. The result did not change and the hubby and I completely agreed (this happens VERY rarely).
And this is how we liked the chocolate:
3- at the third place we had the Ritter Sport bar. The chocolate just didn’t deliver, it was hard and broke in pieces rather being creamy, the taste was pretty bad, unpleasantly bitter.
2- the Milka bar scored second. It’s creamy and tastes good, but it was hardly bitter at all, not knowing from the packaging that it was a bitter chocolate I don’t think I would have been able to guess.
1- and the winner is: Lindt chocolate bar. Hands down this was the best. Creamy and tasty, bitter but not unpleasant.
Is it worth paying more than the double for the Lindt chocolate? Possibly, this is for you to decide. But stay assured that this is not most we payed for chocolate, and that is not the best chocolate we ever had. You can read some more about amazing and very expensive chocolate in my post on Zurich.
That said, we tasted dark, bitter chocolate, and I think that is the hardest to make. For example I think Ritter Sport and Milka both make a very good milk chocolate bar with hazelnuts, Ritter is my favorite for this one, so most of the times you can enjoy good chocolate without braking the bank. I must admit though that I didn’t do a side by side comparison with Lindt… but it’s probably better not to :P
I think our chocolate tasting was a brilliant idea! Rum and dark chocolate go very well together! But you can also taste the chocolate with no liquor, it was very interesting to notice the differences. I think it’s worth it to know if what you are paying is a fair price and that depends on your taste, again, the most expensive is not necessarily the best, take a little tasting and find out for yourself :)
