It would be interesting to see an Americas-centric version of this test. I'm a huge fan of El Rey chocolate (from Venezuela), particularly their Caoba 41%-cocoa milk variety. Obviously, not much (if any?) cocoa is actually produced in the EU, but more or less all the chocolate brands tested are (this is not a problem, but leaves open the possibility of a repeat test with a totally orthogonal set of chocolate brands).

> not much (if any?) cocoa is actually produced in the EU,

I was curious. I know France's overseas departments include French Guiana, which is part of the EU. There is native cacao in FG. Using Google Translate of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiana_(cacao) :

> Genetically, they differ significantly from other cocoa trees in that in the Quaternary, after a period of global warming, the Amazon rainforest remained only patches of humid forest separated by large expanses of dry savannah . In one of these islands of humid forest in the south-east of French Guiana , cocoa trees have survived, which, being isolated from other cocoa trees, have evolved differently

I found one chocolate production facility in FG - http://walapulu.fr/ - "WALAPULU @ CACAO ET CHOCOLAT DE GUYANE FRANCAISE". Last updated 6 years ago so perhaps no longer in business?

https://cheeseweb.eu/2015/09/french-guiana-cacao-market-boat... comments "Sadly, however, French Guiana’s Cacao de Rivière does not yield the delicious Belgian chocolate we know and love." Elsewhere comments mostly that FG cacao might be a source for disease resistant strains.

Anyone else know where cacao might be grown in the EU?

That chocolate brand is so good, I used to eat all the time while growing up in Venezuela. Are there stores in the US selling it or are you getting it online?

It used to be carried at the Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia where I used to live. They stopped before I moved to Sante Fe 2 years ago. I have not seen it here or anywhere else since.

I used to shop every day at WFM back east. I also used to eat about 400g of El Rey Caoba every time I shopped. Not good for my weight, but I was a pretty serious triathlete most of that time.

My favorite reasonably priced chocolate brand, I think I heard about it first here on HN way back when.

If you’re ever in Austin, El Rey’s only US location is a tasting room in Stonewall, TX, out on 290 just before Fredericksburg, near all of the little hill country wineries that sure do try.

Highly, highly recommended.

https://goo.gl/maps/opLzBTVcMZDKvtW37

El Rey is great. I've personally bought several hundred lbs of their chocolate over the years. They seemed to have a serious supply chain issue during 2020 that got me scared, but they have more choices at the moment, which makes me happy.

Check out recchiuti, https://www.recchiuti.com, which is the best chocolate I found in the SF bay area.

For plain chocolate, including bulk, Guittard is pretty good. Even before COVID, you couldn’t visit the factory, though.

Thanks for the tip, this will go into my gift list.

Would be interesting to see what correlation the ranking has with sugar content and also possibly generate a ranking normalized for sugar content.

I call the day after Valentine's Day "Cheap Chocolates Day." I hauled at least 14 kg of chocolate this year, in addition to already having on hand: bulk chocolate-covered raisins, bulk chocolate-covered cashews, chocolate&almond-covered ice cream bars, powdered cocoa for hot cocoa, Nutella, 5 different flavours of Clif bars that include chocolate, chocolate ice cream, chocolate gelato, and wine and port to go with the chocolate.

Applications for testers now accepted. :)

You should start a Valentine’s Day gift startup: A 6 month chocolate box subscription.

Might not work so well in the northern hemisphere though…

I'm surprised these were all actually distinct chocolates and that some of them weren't just relabelled bars produced by a different company on the list already.

As mentioned in the post: the Cote d'Or and Suchard chocolates are extremely similar, and only had a minor difference in the ingredient list. If we had known, we would not have included both.

If you’re interested in chocolate, highly recommend trying out some of the winners of the International Chocolate Awards -

https://www.internationalchocolateawards.com/

How could you forget Tony's Chocolonely?!

If it had been available in common Danish supermarkets I would have included it :)

Salted Chocolonely is so good.

If you want to get a nice tour of different chocolates every month, I recommend Cococlectic ( https://cococlectic.com/ ). I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but have been receiving craft chocolate from them each month for years. Yes, like in the post, you will get the ones that taste like tobacco and chalk sometimes, and other times you'll get something divine. It's a fun surprise each time the box arrives.

good god, $10 per bar of chocolate, and basically no discount for how long you'll commit to their club? yikes.

I'd still maybe be tempted, but living in a hot climate, I have zero confidence I wouldn't just receive a messy box full of chocolate soup during the summer months.

I wouldn't recommend it if your mailbox is in the sun. We had ours sent to work and we'd take it home from there.

Neat experiment! Nice of them to make the code available. I’d be interested to hear more about the logistics of running it for the participants. Would be fun to do one locally.

One question - I noticed one of the tasters said “Knack.” twice in the comments. As an American, I’m not familiar with that word being used this way. Is this just a way of saying “Clever” or something like that?

It's probably a mis-translation from German. "Knack" is a german word that describes a specific sound - I'm not sure there is a precise English translation. The dictionary offers "click" or "snap" as a translation, "crack" would be another similar word.

I assume that in this case "Knack" refers to the bite of the chocolate and describes a hard/brittle chocolate.

Happy to answer questions about the participants.

For the "Knack": I'm not 100% sure either. I think he meant that it had a nice snap/crunch.

None of these is what I'd call premium chocolate, though. I'd done something like this at the office with gianduias (chocolate blended with hazelnuts), Venchi came out on top.

I'm disappointed to see many of the big Belgian brands (other than Cote d'Or) were omitted. I'm particularly partial to Neuhaus and Galler. I was very surprised to see Lindt in the top five; I personally find it to be waxy and weak. But maybe the version available here in US supermarkets is not the same as the European product.

Amusingly, if you compare to https://onlydarkchocolate.com/tag/5-stars/, it seems that the individual preferences vary fairly strongly.

It would be interesting to have a matrix decomposition of preferences.

If you need an excuse to eat more chocolate.... I mean collect more data, you could try a swiss-style tournament next time. It will yield more match data for the weaker chocolates.

I've just made the calculation. I eat about 60g of chocolate a day. That's 83kg per year. Mostly Villars 72% and Lindt 78% but I may do with lesser 70% cocoa ones if necessary...

22 kg, not 83. (That's still a lot.)

Ow shame on me, my calculator was in hexadecimal :)

At 540 calories per 100g that is 118,000 calories (kilo calories).

I run 5 km every day though.

That is 1,825k a year, or about 146,000 calories. So it about cancels out.

One comment on the presentation: Markdown-style ASCII art tables look cool and all but they don’t work well on mobile at all. And I imagine they’re not very good for accessibility either.

Will keep that in mind.

It's very hard to present tables on Medium. If someone knows a better technique I would be happy to learn about it.

Almost all recipes I see from famous British cooks tell you to use Valrhona but I've always preferred Lindt.

This test tells me I am not alone.

I'm not sure about Lindt, but Valrhona is very easy to buy in catering quantities, and fairly cheap. IMO Lindt is a more interesting chocolate on its own, but that works against it in cooking where you just want the 'normal' chocolate flavour.

Subtleties are also going to get drowned out in baking when you're also using flour, eggs, dairy, etc.

I learned from this that I really like Björnsted equador dark 70%. Lindt is pretty good too, but I knew that.

where would you buy this chocolate?

google shopping and amazon don't turn up any results

The brand seems to be available mostly in Germany and Denmark.

A very similar chocolate seems to be Vivani (from the same manufacturer). "Vivani edel bitter 70%". Maybe that one is easier to find.