| Thursday, November 29, 2007 |
11:01 - Chocolate Reviews: Scharffen Berger 62%, 70%, and 82%
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From "Ehh" to "Huh", in no particular order
If I'm going to be doing these chocolate review thingies, I think I might as well start with something close to home: Scharffen Berger, the Berkeley-based chocolate company founded by wine makers to pioneer a bean-to-bar chocolate making industry in the United States, and now owned by Hershey, just as San Francisco's Ghirardelli is now owned by Lindt.
A side note before I get started on the company's three strengths of dark chocolate bars: you do pronounce it the way it looks like it should be pronounced, don't you? I mean, it looks like a German name, and that being the case the pronunciation ought to follow fairly standard rules. But I've heard more than one person in more than one circumstance pronounce it, unaccountably, "SHAY-fen BAR-zher", or even "bar-ZHAY". As though it's French—and not just French, but Super Mutant French. Or am I showing my linguistic ignorance here? Someone please feel free to enlighten me.
Anyway: on to the bars.
All three varieties are presented in 3-oz (85g) bars, a pretty decent size, and more generous than Valrhona and friends with their 75g bars (though not as imposing as Lindt's big flat 100g planks). The foil inside the wrapper is not sealed, and opens up along with the paper jacket. Unfortunately, the bar inside is scored in big weird triangles, possibly the most inconvenient possible shape if you're trying to break off small regular pieces. It's even worse than Domori's signature unscored slabs in that regard; they might as well not have bothered, as far as I'm concerned.
The three bars have distinctly different flavor characteristics, and no particular varietal signatures I can detect—the wrappers talk about "the world's best cacao beans", in meaningless marketing-ese, suggesting that these are blends of beans from lots of places, not that that's necessarily a bad thing (Lindt's top-drawer 85% bar is most certainly mostly regular Forastero beans from West Africa, not Criollos from Venezuela or Madagascar—they're just handled really really well).
Of the three, I like the 82% best, followed by the 62% and then the 70%. The 82% has some deep, rich, fruity complexity to it and a tangy pucker at the back of the throat. The aftertaste reminds me very strongly of Domori's Arriba (made from Ecuador's unique gourmet-grade Forastero strain known as Nacional or Arriba), which I thought tasted like suntan lotion once you got past its characteristic Arriba flavors of orchids and blackberries. This bar doesn't taste like Arriba, I don't think, but it does have that same weird aftertaste—it's just not as distracting or unpleasant here. I don't know about "dried figs with a mild peppery spiciness reminiscent of red wine", as it says on the package, but it's definitely tasty. Melt and finish are decent but nothing special.
The 62%, on the other hand, is approachable, a little nutty, much less complex, and a lot sweeter, as you'd expect—but it's not entirely one-note, either. It's not the chocolate-ice-cream maltiness of The Chocolate Traveler or Drost; it's something tangier, possibly the citrus and honey that the package tells you to look for. You find yourself frowning into the middle distance during the long melt, wondering what the hell that is you're tasting in the distance behind the chocolate and the sugar—it's beguiling, keeping you interested until it's gone, and then you want to try a little more to see if you can figure it out this time. This is a very decent middle-of-the-road bar if you're into subtlety, and it'll disappear quickly if you're not careful.
The 70% is not quite so interesting, though. There's a little of that same not-quite-Arriba tone in it that the 82% has, but it disappears almost immediately after the melt starts, giving way to one-note bitterness and an astringency that leaves the tongue coated with sour-tasting waxiness. This bar doesn't have the sweetness of the 62% or the complexity of the 82%, and brings nothing new to the table on its own. I'd give this one a miss if I were you.
Being owned by Hershey hasn't dulled Scharffen Berger's unique characteristics any more than any of the other chocolate industry conglomerations in the last few years have changed anyone else's recipes; these people know that what makes the various companies different is their unique processing techniques and sourcing practices, and they generally keep their hands off, treating it as a mere investment portfolio piece, like McDonald's did with Chipotle (much to my relief). That said, though, Scharffen Berger doesn't seem to be that ambitious a company in the burgeoning gourmet chocolate industry, with these three comparatively undistinguished blends making up the whole basis for their line of products, a far cry from the litany of varietals from the likes of Domori or Valrhona. Why don't they bring out some single-origin varietals of their own? I mean, hell, even Hershey is doing that with their "Cacao Reserve" line; in fact, that may be the reason: Hershey might not feel that Scharffen Berger is a well-known enough brand to be their high-end chocolate flag bearer, and they want to keep it under the Hershey name until they get their feet under them in this market. Too bad, since those Hershey bars aren't even manufactured by Scharffen Berger, but produced under contract by an unknown European company. Scharffen Berger might have missed the boat on this one, unless Hershey gives them free rein to expand their own offerings a bit, and see which one does better in the marketplace.
... Then again, maybe the company is making its own varietals—they're just not available on Chocosphere.com. And they don't appear to be all that highly rated, either. I might have to check this out for myself, if I can even find these bars.
I for one think Scharffen Berger could do some excellent Arriba or Madagascar bars if they decided to go that direction. But as it is, their dark chocolate blends are serviceable, but not worth writing a big long blog post about.
...Aw, crap.
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Brian Tiemann
