Sunday, February 20, 2011

A Sipping Sundays Hot Chocolate...with Green & Blacks Organic 70%

Since it is a leisurely Sunday afternoon and still bitter-cold and windy outside, I am craving hot chocolate. But today I want a very bitter and dark hot chocolate because I have been eating far too much sugar recently.  I would like to get back to my regular style of indulging, which is to simply enjoy a nice bitter treat with minimal sugar added. So I decided to pull out a 100 gram Green & Black's Organic 70% chocolate bar and melt it into some milk to create a very simple hot chocolate.

 
I  broke up about half of the 100 gram bar and put it in the bottom of my mug, then poured steaming hot milk over it and stirred until it was all melted. Today I used one cup of milk, with half being whole milk and the other half skim milk.  With a toddler in the house, we always have whole milk on hand, but you can just use whatever type that you usually drink. If you only have skim milk, you can always add a little half & half or whipping cream for a richer hot chocolate experience.

 
The Green & Black's chocolate bar made my hot chocolate bitter but smooth, and until I got to the last ounce, there was no sense of the earthy and organic flavour that is in the Green & Black's chocolate.  At the end of the cup of course, it just tastes like a liquid form of the pure chocolate, so all that earthiness comes out in the last few sips.

 
As for the taste of the chocolate itself, it is quite bitter, with a slight organic and very earthy taste to it, as mentioned above.  I am quite used to organic chocolate by now, and have come to appreciate the earthy, hearty flavour of most organic dark chocolate bars. Green & Black's offers a nice line of organic chocolate, with some really great flavours.  But I always like to stick to plain chocolate for my hot chocolates and 70% for when I need to get myself out of a severe sugar craving phase. Hopefully, with willpower intact, I will finish this bar tomorrow when I am looking for a sweet treat.

 
I have only one more note on the Green & Black's 70% chocolate bar: if you are vegan or allergic to milk, be warned that this 70% (unlike most 70% dark chocolate bars) does have whole milk powder in the ingredients list.
   
Here are the full details from the package of the chocolate bar that I tasted today:

 
Green & Black's Organic Dark Chocolate with 70% cocoa solids, 100 g
Green & Black's Ltd., London, England
http://www.greenandblacks.com/
Ingredients: organic cocoa liquor, organic raw cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, soya lecithin, organic vanilla extract, whole milk powder. Contains milk and soy ingredients. May contain traces of nuts and cereal.

To read other Sipping Sundays articles and see more hot chocolate recipes, see the following posts:

2 comments:

  1. Great article about food. It looks very delicious, thanks to the blogger for sharing, we are a supplier of plant extracts, and hope to have the opportunity to cooperate together.

    ReplyDelete