Sunday, January 9, 2011

Vosges Bars: Black Salt Caramel

Having spent a lot of December baking delicious treats that I hope you got a chance to try for yourself, I now find myself in January continuing to review a handful of Vosges 2010-2011 holiday edition bars. I planned my reviews so that the bars I considered to be the most holiday-theme-heavy got reviewed earliest – think Gingerbread Toffee and Peppermint Candy Cane– yet a few others, such as the Cherry Rooibos bar that I wrote about yesterday, got deferred because they didn't seem very holiday specific to me. Fortunately, Vosges is still selling all the holiday bars through their website, and most of them are available on the shelves of stores that carry Vosges. One such bar that seems to be well-stocked at the Friendship Heights Whole Foods and at Biagio is the Black Salt Caramel bar.

The chocolate bar base is a 70% cacao dark chocolate, which is smooth but a tad try. The taste is not very bitter, and is a tad sweet with a hint of vanilla and a bit of an earthy undertone.

As the standalone flavor of the chocolate is not very complex, the featured component of this chocolate is the burnt caramel, which is a bit runny and fails to adhere to the chocolate base properly, and black Hawaiian sea salt.

Though the caramel isn’t robust enough to support the crisp chocolate exterior, it has a pleasing sweet-salty taste that is fairly well balanced. Though I enjoyed the taste of the caramel, I was disappointed by the texture mismatch with the chocolate base, and would likely not include this bar amongst my favorite Vosges bars – that, I reserve for the Gingerbread Toffee and the Barcelona bars.

Do you like sweet caramel or salty caramel better?

10 comments:

  1. Yum! I'm not a huge caramel fan but I love salted chocolate. The sweet + salty combo is amazing.

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  2. @Erin (Travel, Eat, Repeat) If you like salt and chocolate, I highly suggest the Vosges Barcelona bar - it has a great blend of chocolate, almonds, and sea salt.

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  3. Oh man, that bar looks divine! I entered a contest once where I "designed" a chocolate bar (didn't win), and I had Hawaiian black salt in the bar as well. I love my caramel whatever way gets it in my mouth quickest!
    :-) Lisa

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  4. Salty caramel, for sure. I think I left this off the list for my brother, though, as I noticed that it was runny caramel and such things don't survive well when crammed into suitcases for a few weeks!

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  5. I'm not really a caramel person......but I guess that if I had to choose, I'd pick salty!

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  6. @karmaperdiem Salt+chocolate is a great combination - the folks at Vosges have sure figured that much out.

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  7. @Lisa (bakebikeblog) I kind of like halfway in between myself :).

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  8. @Hannah Yeah, this thing didn't even do so well in a bag on the way back from the store. Pity, because it tastes pretty good.

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  9. @fitchocoholic The salt is definitely a nice addition to a sweet caramel.

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