Criollo Flight
There are four major varieties of cacao: Forastero, trinitario, nacional, and criollo. Today, I tasted five chocolate bars made with the criollo subspecies, and invited my fiancé Duncan to join me. He gave me permission to share his tasting notes, so you’ll see them side by side: Mine on the left, and his on the right. I’ve also included some notes at the end on what I think “criollo” is like, compared to other varieties.
Akesson's Criollo Bejofo Estate (Madegascar) 75%
Logan
Smell: fruit and spice, like mango salsa
Taste: Little bitter and sharp. Bites at my tongue. Woooow suddenly sour. Super sour citrusy puckering my mouth. Still a bit of spice.
Around the sour, there's a round smoothness. I'm seeing a woman in a bright orange dress flirting and dancing in the street on a hot night. Fruity tequila cocktails all around. This is one of the fruitiest chocolates I've ever tasted. What kind of fruit? Raspberry, but also dried cranberries and lime.
Duncan
Smell: rich, dark, sweet, throaty, thick. Reminds me of chocolate Easter eggs, of the whole inside of my mouth being coated with chocolate, sucking and sucking and lingering.
Sharp! Sour! Grape or licorice or something, as the outer layer melts. A grainy underlay, making me think of briny tide pools and glimmers of sand draining away in the sunlight. This is much greener and bluer than the smell, which was pure reddish brown. It hangs in the back of my mouth almost like a cheese or a sour candy; my tongue is producing a ton of moisture to compensate.
A soft, yielding crunch; even sharper and sourer and almost like alcohol when chewed. A high-pitched note, like a flute. Steel, citrus, something green-yellow, maybe a hint of blue smoke. There’s almost no “chocolate” left at this point, like the chocolate was an egg containing something wild and reptilian. A sour, cold-blooded creature with a venomous sting that skitters between the high rocks.
Domori Crillolo Chuao (Venezuela) 70%
Logan
Smell: Mmm soft gentle sweet happy. Lavender and blue.
Taste: Soft and sweet. Delicate. Paper flowers strung up and laid across a table. Hm something surprising coming up. There's a very odd flavor underneath here that I'm having a hard time describing. It reminds me a little of caramel. It's like a light caramel river.
Paddling lazily down a light caramel river in the fall.
Duncan
Smell is almost exactly the same as Bejofo but … weaker? Softer? Attenuated? Like a memory from the week after, a whiff of lingering scent from an Easter egg found days ago. Just the tiniest hint of light brown or caramel in along with the true chocolate.
Slick, dark, smoky—a leather couch owned by a cigar smoker. Mahogany furniture, red velvet drapes, dim incandescent bulbs. A grandfather with motor oil clinging to the creases of his hands. It’s almost rubbery as it melts, the leftover thin sheet supple and flexible in my mouth as it slowly disappears. A little sharper when I chew it, a note of something seeping out between the cracks and vanishing before I can get a good look. I like it more in the second minute than in the first. It leaves my mouth almost dry, like it took the moisture with it as it went.
Domori Criollo Guasare (Venezuela) 70%
Logan
Smell: Very warm scent, not warm like spicy but warm like autumn candles. Nutmeg cloves cinnamon. Soft gentle, an old well loved comforter.
Taste: Surprisingly smooth melt. Creamy caramel. Such a creamy smooth luscious flavor, like bathing in warm cream.
If this were a boat it would be... no sorry this isn't a boat at all, it's got to be the water itself, a perfectly smooth calm pond reflecting autumn leaves. It's like the feeling of washing my hair in the thickest creamiest foaming shampoo, and the feeling of the warm water surrounding my scalp as I submerge myself to rinse it out.
Duncan
Back to the stronger smell. My brain thinks this is the smell of True Chocolate, as based (apparently) on the experience of chocolate Easter eggs. The association is too strong and too pure (so far) for me to get anything other than an intensity differential, between the three. This one’s more intense than Chuao but still not as intense as Bejofo.
Started off wet and watery, then the sun came out and I was left with a drying patch of sand. Hot, sunny, coarse grains on bare feet, dry grass rustling. The experience is beachy, but not ocean, like I’m still on the far side of the sand dunes. If Chuao was brown and red, this is yellow and tan. A sharper crack when chewing, and this time what seeps out is more persistent. It’s yellowy with a tinge of green, reminiscent of squash and mangoes and unripe bananas. The progression inward from the sea on the island of the Lord of the Flies as we head higher up and higher in.
This calls me to a place where no one has been for a long time, and does not promise to let me come back. A cave that looks a little bit like the mouth of a skull, from the right angle. Sour fruit plucked from the tree, overripe and rotting just a little, threatening to turn out to be a hallucinogen after it’s much too late.
Domori Criollo (Blend) 70%
Logan
Smell: Smooth and chocolaty. A girl sitting inside in a comfy pillow nest on the floor knitting during a snowstorm. A bit of fruit and flowers.
Sharp at the start. A smooth melter. Some puckering sour in the sides of my mouth, but not a lot. Underneath, caramel and cream. Maybe some roasted pears. Yeah, this is more warm smooth creamy river. There's a little bit of coolness in the undertow, and a little bit of peppery spice on the surface where the insects sweep down and brush the water with tiny legs. It's really a lot like eating a chocolate-covered caramel that's been warming in the sun, even though I know it's just chocolate.
It reminds me of people sitting outside the coffee shop in my tiny river town playing guitars and singing together, their voices blending in silky round folk harmonies. Being wrapped in simple loving comfort.
Duncan
A hint of something sharp and green in the smell, like fresh-cut grass. Still very Easter, since I can imagine Dad out mowing the lawn while Mom helps us count the eggs.
This one is slow to wake up, and smooth as it gets rolling. A gentle fade-in, still quiet even thirty seconds in. Whisper chocolate, lullaby chocolate, a room lit only by fairy lights. There’s a hint of black fudge, an aftertaste of alcohol, like ice cream made with a splash of brandy. It feels grown-up, and the fact that it feels specifically grown-up leaves me feeling young and a little bit pretending, like this is the first family reunion where they let me stay up after putting all the “kids” to bed, and all the aunts and uncles are sitting around the kitchen table, along with my older brother who’s now no longer special, no longer the only one. There’s something that almost disappears when I chew it, some kind of spirit evaporating in a puff. It’s genuinely reminiscent of paint thinner, and has the same sort of pleasant quality that just a single whiff of paint thinner has, before it gets overwhelming and you get a headache.
I think this is what acquired tastes taste like just before you acquire them. I’ve maybe never come this close to understanding alcohol. I can feel myself threatening to learn to like it a lot.
Amadei Criollo (Blend) 70%
Logan
Smell: Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I think I smell caramel. It's darker. Smooth and dark like a mahogany table.
Texture is a little bit grainy gritty chalkey. Flavor is super creamy at the start. Reminds me a little of rice wine. There's really deep flavor here, like a huge round stone plunging into the depths of a pond, solid and massive sinking into the silent darkness. It's like being a little child who is comforted in the middle of the night after waking up from a nightmare by a huge man with gigantic warm hands and the smoothest warm baritone voice. It washes right into my core. Hm I just got something green there right at the end, something just a tiny bit mossy.
I think this is one of the longest and deepest chocolates I've tasted. Overall it's cool dark round smooth creamy comforting. It's a very complex emotion, not simple comfort, but definitely a very important variety of comfort specifically. Reassurance, relief and being wrapped and anchored. Brilliantly made. This one's a masterpiece. I love it.
Duncan
Smell: Dry, dusty, chalky, a certain kind of homemade clay made with flour and salt that leaves your hands and shorts white. Casts on a friend’s forearm from their broken wrist. Middle school art class, middle school science lab, seventh grade when we mummified chickens for Egypt month (after they stopped smelling horrible). This has much much much less of the True Chocolate™ but for some reason I find myself more interested in just … continuing to smell it. I remember an art shop on Church Street in Burlington, North Carolina, where I first encountered Sculpey, years before that building turned into a game store and my Tae Kwon Do academy.
Taste kicking in much faster than the Domori blend. It has a lot in common with breakfast cereals, a kind of grainy sweet crunchy nature. HoneyComb, MiniWheats, Crispix with a little sugar added. Biting into it I get the image of a bouncy ball.
There’s a lot of substance and heft; I wonder how much is just because the bar is much thicker than the others? But it really feels more dense and bite-through-able, like they made the bar thicker because the chocolate already wanted me to fill my mouth with it. I’m no longer eating the M&M’s one at a time; I have become impatient and acclimated and need a whole mouthful to stay interested.
Biting into a double-sized chunk, now—I can get some of the sharper and more complex details, I can feel a hint of sophistication, but it’s like a fancy high-quality version of a thing meant to appeal to kids. A kids’ cartoon masterfully crafted so as not to bore the parents, a candy that is somehow $2 when it should clearly be $10. Warm, syrupy, cool, crunchy—oh, new theory, it’s a melange specifically so that the kids can have a !!! experience and the adults can have a ! and a ! and a !. Something for everyone, tease the different instruments apart if you feel like but it’s also good to just hear the actual song.
I went back for more; I’ve now put twice the mass of this chocolate in my mouth as any of the other four. I’m getting butter, brown sugar, graham crackers. I’m getting Swiss cake rolls and corn bread and—oh, there’s chocolate, suddenly I just got “chocolate” and felt silly for feeling surprised. Flipping channels on a Saturday morning, never lingering on anything for very long; I’ve seen all these reruns before so I can drop in for a minute and move on and it’s fine.
I think this is clearly one of my favorites of the ~20 chocolates I’ve paid attention to so far, and I think I will not be able to remember why when I try it again.
Reflections
After tasting these bars, I think that criollo is all about the caramel and cream, the round smooth warmness. The Akesson’s bar was quite different from the others, with way more sour fruit going on. But even that one eventually developed something distinctly round and creamy.
I think that more than any of the other major varieties, criollo wants to be hot cocoa.
