The Good: Good dark chocolate flavor, Decent ingredients, Good corporate ethics
The Bad: Expensive, High fat, Nuts are not overly flavorful
The Basics: Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars left me unimpressed as they have good ingredients, but a higher fat content without an accompanying flavor benefit to them.
Green & Blacks seems to be expanding in my local market and that has afforded me the opportunity to review much of its up-scale candy bar line. Tonight, I broke open my Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bar. The truth is, I'm not big on candy bars with nuts and the Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond bar does not have a very strong nut flavor to it - save as an aftertaste. The dark chocolate in these bars is appropriately dark and bitter, but it does not blend overly well with the nuts. The result is a high-fat chocolate bar that is more bitter than pleasant.
Basics
Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars are one and three-eights inch by one and five-eighths inch rectangles of chocolate that are about three-sixteenths of an inch thick and connected side by side and in rows, to form a bar of ten segments. Each bar comes unified in a foil wrapper. The foil-wrapped chocolate bar is sealed in a cardboard package.
Each chocolate bar is sold in a way that it is easy to segment and control portions. In this form, the 3.17 oz. bar, the chocolate bar represents two and a half servings. Each bar appears solid (the Roasted Almond flakes are embedded, as opposed to acting like a filling) and is stamped with the Green & Black's logo.
Ease Of Preparation
These are candy, so preparing them is as simple as opening the cardboard and then opening the foil wrapper from around the actual chocolate. There is no trick to eating Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars.
Taste
The Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond bars are easily one of the most aromatic candy bars I have yet tried. The Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond bars smell strongly of dark chocolate and that is very inviting to people like me who love dark chocolate!
On the tongue, the Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond bars are very dry. The dark chocolate flavor is potent and unrelenting. The almonds in the Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars only make the bars more dry tasting. The dryness does not have a salty component to it; this is a bitter, dry candy bar where the nuts manifest as a crispy texture in it. This is a fairly basic candy bar on the flavor front.
The Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bar has a very strong dry, bitter chocolate and almond aftertaste that endures in the mouth for several minutes after the last of it is consumed.
Nutrition
These are candy, so health aspects are seldom one's top concern. That said, the Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars are made of generally good ingredients, justifying their expense. The primary ingredients are bittersweet chocolate and organic roasted almonds. There is nothing unpronounceable in these candies.
A serving from the Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars is considered four rectangles from the overall bar, which is a somewhat silly serving size for a bar that is segmented into ten pieces (as that means one whole bar is two and a half servings). From four squares, one takes in 210 calories, including 170 calories of fat. There is no sodium and 3 grams protein in each serving. There is a decent amount Iron (25% RDA) in each bar, but no significant quantities of any other major nutrients. The biggest nutritional detraction in the Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond are the 19 grams of fat per serving and the 50% RDA of saturated fat that comes from the 10 grams of saturated fat!
These are not Vegan-compliant, nor are they recommended for anyone with a nut allergy as the contain almonds and are manufactured on equipment that processes tree nuts and milk. They are not specifically marked as kosher (I'm not sure why), but Green & Black's uses sustainable cocoa farming for their cocoa, which is nice!
Storage/Clean-up
The bars of these Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars remain fresh for quite some time. The bars we picked up a month and a half ago had an expiration date of October 7, 2017, though they will certainly not last that long as I will have consumed mine well before then! One assumes that if they are kept in a cool, dry environment they will not melt or go bad. It is hard to imagine just what it would take for these to go bad outside melting and refreezing.
As for cleanup, just throw the packaging away when you're done! These chocolate bars are made such that there is no real cleanup needed, unless one is eating them in a hot environment. Under that circumstance, it is likely one would need to wash their hands, though these bars do not melt as easily as cheap or milk chocolates. When this chocolate melts into most fabrics, it will stain.
Overall
Green & Black's Pure Dark Chocolate Roasted Almond chocolate bars are bitter and fatty and for the price, I hoped for more roasted nut flavor to them.
For Green & Black's chocolate reviews, please check out:
Pure Milk Chocolate Salted Caramel Bar
Pure Dark Chocolate Raspberry & Hazelnut Chocolate Bars
Pure Dark Chocolate Sea Salt chocolate bars
4/10
For other chocolate reviews, please visit my Chocolate Review Index Page for an organized listing!
© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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