A few weeks ago, Merrill, a friend and fan of hot chocolate (smart girl), sent me a little package. Inside was a sampler pack of 4 Taza hot chocolates. Since then I have been anxiously waiting for the perfect day to try this out. I have seen Taza hot chocolate sold at my local cheese store, and since I love everything that store sells, I figured there was a reason that they sold Taza hot chocolate. It must be good.
Today turned out to be the perfect day to try this out. Rich got home early and with the change in time it was still light outside. With the sun shining on the balcony and the temperature cool enough to enjoy a hot drink, we decided that this was the day. It took a while to decide which flavours to choose. My little sampler pack included three disks of flavoured chocolate; vanilla (50% dark), cinnamon (50% dark) and chilli (50% dark), with the last one just good old dark chocolate (70% dark). Today we settled on cinnamon and chilli.
The packaging provides easy to follow instructions on how to create the hot chocolate. One cup of milk heated up, take it off the heat and add the chopped up chocolate. Mix until dissolved and then heat up again. Add a little pinch of salt and you are ready to enjoy it. We used my favourite hot chocolate testing mugs and brought them out to the balcony to drink.
I love what this company has done with its chocolate, from the marketing and branding to their sustainability angle. Everything is organic: the coco beans, the cane sugar, the vanilla beans, cinnamon and even the chilli powder. The cocoa is sourced directly from growers who are paid a fair price. The packaging is full of interesting tid bits. Apparently the company uses Oaxacan stone mills instead of steel refiners to grind their cocoa in small batches resulting in a unique texture and robust flavour. I love the brown packaging and the fonts used. I hadn’t even tasted the hot chocolae and I was a fan. How can this be bad…really?
It wasn’t bad, in fact, it was fantastic! I really loved these hot chocolates and couldn’t find anything to fault. Rich had the chilli which had just the right amount of kick, while I had the cinnamon which was beautiful and rich. They were both silky and very easy to drink, and the flavour was a perfect balance, bitter but not too much and enough sweetness to satisfy a sweet palate.
Even after finishing my hot chocolate my newfound obsession with Taza continues. I spent quite a bit of time going through their website. They have factory tours in Somersville MA if anyone is over there, where they show you how they make their chocolate. They even organize a chocolate tour to Belize regularly. All of their chocolates have a batch number on the packaging that you can enter into the site to learn more about your particular chocolate. They use bicycle couriers to deliver their chocolate locally and have really made sustainability part of their whole operations. Alex, Kathleen and Larry, the founders of Taza, basically created the hot chocolate company that I would have liked to create myself … which is good because that means that instead of starting a hot chocolate company, I can dedicate my time to drinking hot chocolates and tell you about them! Thank you for that.
And thank you Merrill! You can send me hot chocolate any day…really.
Verdict: I really loved Taza hot chocolate disks, as you can probably tell. I can see this will turn into a guilty pleasure for me. Since writing this blog I have tried almost all the Taza flavourites and they are all fantastic! Taza Chocolate,
Ultimate Hot Chocolate 