Omnom Chocolate Black n Burnt Barley Bar
By David Nilsen
The beaches of Iceland are made of black volcanic sand, and when the surf crashes onto the shore and races up the beach, it offers a startling visual contrast of white on black. The shoreline can look like a photographic negative of a tropical beach, lending an element of surrealness to the already striking landscape of this island nation in the north Atlantic.
On a small peninsula in southwest Iceland sits the capital, Reykjavík, and on a small spit of land reaching out to encircle the city’s harbor sits an unassuming industrial building housing Omnom Chocolate. Co-founded by chocolate maker Kjarton Gíslason, Omnom makes a range of single origin bean to bar chocolates, as well as unique inclusion bars that often highlight flavors of this city and the island culture as a whole.
One of their most popular bars echoes the stark black sand of the country’s beaches, and uses ingredients better known in the world of beer than chocolate. Omnom’s Black ‘n’ Burnt Barley bar happened almost by accident.
Omnom hosts educational events for the public at their factory, often bringing in collaborators to discuss specific ingredients. For one such event years ago, they hosted some of the city’s craft brewers for a beer and chocolate pairing. The brewers brought along beer ingredients like malt and hops so attendees could handle and smell them alongside the cacao beans used in chocolate making. By accident, they left those ingredients in the event room after the event.
Kjarton has been working on a recipe for a white chocolate with a bold caramel flavor to it, but hadn’t yet landed on a successful recipe. The leftover beer ingredients led to a spark of ingenuity.
“We’d done a bar in the past that worked out but was very unstable because we were using caramelized sugar in it,” he explains. “When you temper a bar with caramelized sugar, it attracts a lot of moisture, so it would crystallize on the inside.”
When he saw the malt the brewers had left behind, he decided to try it in the chocolate on a whim. He had a batch of chocolate in one of his test machines, so he poured in some of the roasted malt and left it to spin overnight. The next morning the chocolate didn’t look very appetizing, but he was pleasantly surprised by the flavor.
“When we tasted it, we were like, ‘Whoa, this is kind of interesting,’” he says. “It had a kind of grainy, malty flavor to it, like burnt toast, but delicious burnt toast.”
After experimenting with several roasted malts, Kjarton returned to the malt he used in that first batch, one familiar to brewers and craft beer fans: Carafa III. This roasted barley malt is produced by Weyermann Malt in Germany, and lends an espresso or chocolate-like roastiness without harsh bitterness. He wanted to provide some textural elements and bring more nuance to the bar’s flavor, so began looking for additional ingredients to complement the Carafa malt.
“I found a farm here in Iceland that does organic barley,” he explains. “We took some of that to a popcorn factory and had them puff it up for us. We also ground up some of that puffed barley and some malt flour. It was kind of a eureka moment when it came together.”
Black ‘n’ Burnt Barley—a white chocolate bar made with Carafa III malt, puffed Icelandic barley, and ground puffed barley and barley flour—was almost ready, but it was missing one thing. It was delicious, but it looked…kind of gross. The bar was a dull gray color, and didn’t look very appealing.
“We added some activated charcoal from coconut acid and it gave that hint of smoke and a dramatic color as well,” he says. A touch of salt, and the bar was ready to go.
Last October I had the chance to lead a beer and chocolate pairing with my friends at Lady Justice Brewing in Aurora, Colorado. It was the week of the Great American Beer Festival, and I knew some of the attendees would be brewers or other beer professionals. I wanted to feature a bar that used beer ingredients they’d be intimately familiar with in a way that cast those ingredients in a totally new light.
We paired Omnom’s Black ‘n’ Burnt Barley bar with a Lady Justice Bock brewed with peach vanilla black tea and barrel-aged malt. The bar has a lovely, layered caramel flavor and a toasty roast, like slightly over-darkened caramel corn. It’s delicious, and it pulled out the peach and vanilla notes in the tea and added nuance to the bready notes of the beer’s malt. It was the most popular pairing of the day, and attendees were surprised to find out the pitch black bar in front of them was actually white chocolate.
Looking at the back of the Black ‘n’ Burnt Barley bar dotted with puffed barley kernels, I’m always reminded of the black sand beaches my wife and I stood a few years back, staring out at an ocean that went on forever. Basalt columns jutted up from the back of the beach in some places in perfect geometry, and elsewhere the scrub grass ran across the flat plains and stopped just at the edge of the beach, where the water couldn’t reach it. Iceland’s landscape is beautiful in its harsh austerity, but there’s a playful mischief to its culture, and that’s reflected both in Omnom’s recipes and its artwork. It’s all about remembering why we love chocolate in the first place.
“Chocolate should be fun. It should be a fun experience to eat it. We grow up eating it, but as adults there’s still a kid inside of us. We’re trying to capture that vibe. As long as I get to make chocolate, I’m happy.”