Do posh chocs have more bite than classic bars?
As Thorntons shops close while Hotel Chocolat booms…
‘ Claggy old Dairy Milk makes me nauseous’
YES
ChoC horror! White chocolate has been axed from the office for National Statistics’ annual inflation basket, and Thorntons is closing outlets. Meanwhile, its ritzy young rival hotel Chocolat saw revenue rise 11 per cent in the six months to the end of December 2020.
Back in 2007, the competition between Thorntons and this swish upstart was so bitter that Thorntons’ top chocolate-maker was forced to resign for deliberately squashing truffles in a hotel Chocolat store. Nearly 14 years on, in the choice between ‘Motel Chocolate’ and hotel Chocolat, posh chocs have decidedly won out. And quite right too, I say.
My grandmother, a former Cadbury employee, will be turning in her grave. however, not since childhood — when she used to present us with factory seconds — have I been able to stomach queasy sweetshop wares.
Claggy old Dairy Milk makes me feel nauseous, a Mars bar would just about finish me off. As for the annual trauma that is the Creme egg, please do not speak of such atrocities. Notso-great British choc is preferable to America’s hershey bars, but that’s only because those taste of cat pee.
For decades, I thought I hated chocolate, just as I thought I hated coffee. This caused no end of fury among some women, for whom not loving the sweet stuff was considered akin to renouncing the sisterhood.
In fact, I just needed my chocolate — like my coffee — to be the real deal: small quantities of ultra-dark, ultrapotent, ultra-posh stuff; a heady delicacy rather than some mindless sugar rush. Actually, what I hanker after is a return to form. Chocolate first became a craze here in the 18th century as a rich, hot drink made with water rather than adulterated with creamy milk.
Cadbury pioneered chocolate’s industrialisation, leading to today’s cheap confectionery — high in sugar, but not boasting much in the way of actual cocoa content.
Well, no more. The ‘ bean to bar’ movement has brought Britain chocs that actually contain chocolate. In Dairy Milk, for example, the proportion of cocoa solids can be as low as 20 per cent; in bean-to-bar wares it’s often around 72 per cent. That’s what I want — a serious endorphin hit, not some brief high that’s worn off by the time I leave the newsagent’s.
So sorry, Gran, but a Curly Wurly won’t cut it. only last night, I ordered £60 of hotel Chocolat rose and violet creams to serve to friends at my upcoming 50th (Covid allowing). I wouldn’t subject them — or myself — to anything less.