When I was at Whole Foods in Nashville over the winter break, I picked up a couple of bars of a brand of chocolate I'd never seen before: Escazu. Made in Raleigh, N.C., the three-ounce chocolate bars come in six flavors. I chose cacao nib and sea salt.
According to the package and the website, the company roasts, grinds, and refines its own cocoa beans, then crafts each bar in small batches, often made-to-order. The ingredients list, always the first thing I look at on a chocolate bar, is short and sweet: cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla bean, and the featured flavor, cacao nib in the one and sea salt in the other. If you compare this to most commercial bars, you'll notice the main thing missing is soy lecithin. I don't know whether it's the soy itself, or just the fact that the candy is being processed for shelf-stability rather than for fresh flavor, but most chocolates without soy lecithin taste a lot better than those that have it.
Escazu is no exception. The cacao nib bar is both sharp and fruity, a nice sweet-and-sour flavor. It tastes strongly of chocolate rather rather than fat or sugar, though it does have a softer texture than my favorite Italian chocolate bars. The cacao nibs are not very noticeable, though they probably increased the chocolate flavor. I also like the thickness of the bar and the size of the slightly rounded squares. It doesn't beat out Amadei or Domori in my book, but it is definitely one of the best American-made chocolate I've had.
Escazu Artisan Chocolates
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