Favorite Chocolates of 2021

Join me for a look back at my favorite chocolates of 2021. You can also listen to my year-end episode below, and then I’d love to hear your own favorites from this bizarre trip around the sun!

Qantu Maple & Maras fleur de sel

At Qantu Chocolate in the French Canadian city of Montreal, Quebec, husband and wife Maxime Simard and Elfi Maldonado tie together the beautiful story of their relationship in their bar made with local maple sugar, maras fleur de sel, and Peruvian Chuncho cacao. The bar is such a lovely and thoughtful balance between the cacao and maple. The maple isn’t bold and aggressive, but rather a subtle but insistent accent to the nutty, almost fudgy cacao with notes of cinnamon and a beautiful smooth texture. You can hear Maxime and Elfi talk about this bar in Episode 20.

Crow & Moss Vanilla Smoke 69%

The Vanilla Smoke 69% dark chocolate bar from Crow & Moss in Petoskey, Michigan was one of the most evocative I tasted this year. The cacao for the bar is infused with hickory smoke for flavors that are reminiscent of barbecued meats, but with fruity and dessert-like flavors from the cacao and vanilla. There’s so much happening between the smoke, salt, vanilla, and fruity cacao, and it feels like those flavors should be at odds, but they blur so seamlessly it’s hard to tell where one stops and another begins.

Solkiki Yirgacheffe Coffee Redskin Peanut White Chocolate

Solkiki’s Yirgacheffe Coffee Redskin Peanut White Chocolate is a fascinating bar with an overriding impression of lightly salted peanut butter fudge (think the filling in a buckeye) with touches of peanut brittle and an undercurrent of nutty, earthy coffee. 

Terroir by Onyx Colombia

The folks at Onyx Coffee Labs have launched a line of chocolate bars called Terroir by Onyx that use coffee and cacao from the same regions. Their Colombia bar offers a beautiful  interplay between the more acidic fruity and floral notes and the deeper nutty and woody tones with caramel and bourbon barrel. There’s an upfront nuttiness from the coffee, but after that the balance between the higher notes of wildflowers and creamy sweet tropical fruits and the bar’s deeper, warmer comforts is seamless and beguiling. What a beautiful alchemy of these two crops.

You can hear more about the process and spirit behind the Terroir series in episode 13.

Videri Dark Milk Chocolate 55%

Videri Chocolate Dark Milk out of Raleigh, North Carolina, is smooth and luxurious, with deep caramel cream and a ridge of acidity rippling beneath the silky & creamy mouthfeel.

You can hear from Videri founder Sam Ratto in Episode 31.

Nostalgia Chocolate Madagascar Sambirano Valley 70%

Nostalgia’s Madagascar Sambirano Valley 70% bar is a great example of how well Tyler understands his beans and how to let them express themselves, with the awareness that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Madagascar is a bold origin, but this bar shows enough restraint to allow its flavors to be graceful rather than brash. The acidity of the origin is there in citrus and berry, but it’s gentle, layered over a chocolate foundation of cashew and dry roast, with sunny, radiant warmth.

You can hear from Tyler Cagwin at Nostalgia Chocolate in Episode 30.

Manoa O’ahu Island Mililani 70%

Manoa O’ahu Island Mililani 70% from Hawaii represents what this tropical archipelago tastes like in my mind. It’s floral, fudgy, fruity, with notes of coconut, lily, berry, banana, and papaya, sweet but not too sweet, an island vacation in bar form.

Askanya Wanga Neges 50% Milk Chocolate

Askanya Wanga Neges is a 50% milk chocolate bar from Haiti made with rapadou, an unrefined sugar. This bar has been a continual rediscovery for me throughout the year, one I’ve come back to and continually been caught by just how good it tastes. It carries a subtle grassy sweetness like agave syrup with a touch of hay, a creamy texture, and a comforting fudgsicle-like body.

Mashpi Organic Chocolate with Cacao Pulp 65%

Despite much of my life revolving around cacao, I rarely get to taste any part of the fruit except what’s made from the beans. Getting to taste Mashpi’s 65% dark bar with cacao pulp filling was an awesome chance to taste the different aspects of this plant together in one bite. The juicy pulp with its flavors of passionfruit, lychee, and gooseberry popped against the earthier Ecuadorian chocolate around it. The chocolate itself has an earthy/fruity balance, sort of like the underlying flavor of an earthy variety of hot pepper stripped of all its heat.

Map White Chocolate with Guava, Toasted Coconut, & Black Lime

Map Chocolate’s white chocolate with guava, toasted coconut, and black lime offered an intriguing tropical puzzle my senses enjoyed solving, while offering soothing foundational familiarities to undergird them. I have probably tasted this bar—and enjoyed more imagined tropical getaways with it—more than any other this year.

Miette et Chocolat Passionfruit Salted Caramel bonbon

in Denver, we stopped in at Miette et Chocolat run by Chef Gonzo from the Netflix show The Bake Squad. Gonzo creates gorgeous bars and confections, and was kind enough to show us behind the scenes of his operation. His Passionfruit Salted Caramel bonbon was simply one of the best things I tasted all year, period. Such an incredibly bright burst of fresh passionfruit and lemon that melt into the caramel, the salt snapping it all into focus. My wife and I each took a bite and just looked at each other, speechless.

Xoconat Up in Smoke

The cacao for Up in Smoke is smoked over a Thai aromatic candle used in many Thai desserts, and also includes pandan and coconut. I had never tasted anything made with a Thai aromatic candle, and if I hadn’t known, I’m not sure I would have identified the flavor as smoky at all. What came to mind almost instantly for me was the smell of an old bookshop, the kind I can get lost in for hours on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Bibliosmia is the smell pages of old books take on as they age, and with my eyes closed as I tasted this bar, it was like I was in a shop full of them, the shelves overcrowded and thin sunlight streaming in through the windows, warming the wood surfaces and the over-stuffed and worn down leather chair I would retreat to with my finds after browsing. That aromatic tableau involves the books, the wood, the leather, the dust of ages in the air, and the bar’s toasted coconut, pandan, and whisper of salt breathe warm vitality into the scene. You can hear more from Nat about this bar back in Episode 05.

Not Yr Sweetie vol. 3: He’s Really Gone

In January I got to taste my first bar from Not Yr Sweetie, and appropriately, it was their Fuck Trump vol. 3: He’s Really Gone, a 70% Tanzania bar. The initial fudgy flavors move aside for notes of blueberry and berries and cream, a smooth roast shielding a regal underlying acidity, with touches of wildflower honey in a perfect melt. Not a bad way to celebrate a new era.

Ratza Chocolate Self Love

I flew to Chicago in August to sit for my Advanced Cicerone tasting exam. I’d been dealing with health problems all year, and I wasn’t optimistic about my chances of passing, but in the days before the exam I felt a sense of calm acceptance take over. Throughout the summer, I had been using chocolate as a means of meditative self-care. I would sit up straight, close my eyes, put a piece of chocolate on my tongue, and focus on nothing but the physical sensation of tasting it, followed by the joy and delight of having a body that can interact with the world through flavor. One of the bars I found myself returning to for this was Self Love, an 80% bar made with reishi and chaga mushrooms as well as ashwaganda and maca root, which founder Sara Ratza says boost energy levels and our immune system. Both were needed, so I turned to it often. I took it with me to Chicago, and sitting in the room of my Airbnb the morning of the exam, I stared out the window at the soft sunlight and slipped a piece of the bar into my mouth. It’s a quiet bar, with a savory, earthy foundation highlighted by gently sweet stone fruit notes. I told myself that whatever happened on the exam, it was going to be okay, and tasting that chocolate as it slowly melted, I was able to believe it.

You can hear from Sara Ratza back in Episode 15.