Milk Chocolate
by Cotton Tree
Impact
Toledo... no, not on the shores of Lake Erie (former home to Etch-a-Sketch & piano prodigy Art Tatum) nor the original city in Spain (site of Alcazar & El Greco’s birthplace) but the Toledo River Valley along the Caribbean coast of Belize where the cacáo (pronounced ka-COW) in this Milk Chocolate is from.
Holy Toledo, Batman, I didn’t know chocolate comes from a cow.
Wrong, Robin, but riddle this in the form of a punchline: according to the theory of Darwinism we evolved from apes & amphibians so anything might be possible seeing how we’re basically upgraded monkeys in our glass & steel skyscraper trees, swinging from branch-to-branch, banking on the big one.
Answer: The One is actually a clever binary of the Joker & The Riddler combined, & since cacáo was once used as currency around the jungles & rainforests of Mesoamerica, God is money which means the almighty dollar is... Allah.
By George, in God we trust.
Holy Toledo, Batman, I didn’t know chocolate comes from a cow.
Wrong, Robin, but riddle this in the form of a punchline: according to the theory of Darwinism we evolved from apes & amphibians so anything might be possible seeing how we’re basically upgraded monkeys in our glass & steel skyscraper trees, swinging from branch-to-branch, banking on the big one.
Answer: The One is actually a clever binary of the Joker & The Riddler combined, & since cacáo was once used as currency around the jungles & rainforests of Mesoamerica, God is money which means the almighty dollar is... Allah.
By George, in God we trust.
Appearance 3.7 / 5
| Color: | pink-amber tan, gamboge really |
| Surface: | damaged; scruffed & pocked w/ pinholes |
| Temper: | soft bounce-back |
| Snap: | got some click for a Milk (semi-high butter content) |
Aroma 6.9 / 10
aromatically-challenged... nowhere near the sharp cut force of Cotton Tree’s other bars, even it’s Dark-Milk, except for must, & slightly sufurous (a little 1,1-dimethylethanethiol): dry wood, namesake cotton then pulverized rice, buttermilk to cheese funk
Mouthfeel 11.6 / 15
| Texture: | fast & dry powder keg (high sugar content) |
| Melt: | collapses virtually disembodiied; super clean evacuation |
Flavor 49.1 / 50
swings a 2x4 of sapodilla wood, booming the senses, & gives the mouth a thumping, sounding thru the entire length -> tongue-tied by strangler fig -> swells dried papaya -> milk & vanilla instantiate small caramel + more of that bumptious Woody-the-Woodpecker chocolate -> chicle gum chews up & spits out sweet mango & orange for that extra layer of 'starburst-wow' to finish it off
Quality 18.8 / 20
A money bar; the cacáo poured into these molds essentially a printing mint.
Forget the math factored to calculate the rating. This bears immense hedonics for a category that rarely produces any (usually over-loaded with tall or long caramel rolls), with range that never downshifts.
All of it generated from miniscule cocoa mass (only vanilla has less weight in this bar – an unseen formulation til now) which means this is one beast of a bean, a kick boxer really, taking it to the sugar, fermented in a sweat box just renting the sapodilla woods into near volcanic flows.
Cotton Tree understands this cacáo’s DNA to get away with swathing it in so much butter fat.
A Milk unlike any other with none of the charred edges of its big Dark-Milk brother, nor the mechanical smoked-effects in hammy Javas & PNGs (for example, Bonnat’s Asfarth & Maglio’s Papouasia, respectively) or the multi-grain Milk Chocolate cereal of Plantations’ Ecuador.
Yeah, it’s unpolished... there’s nothing sexy to its schlub look & down-home basement-quality texture (without the least grip or astringency by the way – another testament to some modicum of noble pedigree in this strain). Plus, a little too vanillized. Overall flavor more than compensates, however, for these flaws: triple-ball macho (2 below the waist; the other above the shoulders) with a tender sweet-spot (again, so much sugar yet free from cloying).
Lord knows exactly what’s in store in the crap shoot that is micro-batch chocolate. Cotton Tree probably excels at variability & inconsistency - the hallmarks of such bar-smiths - making it all the more exhilarating each & every time one of its wrappers gets ripped open & out comes, at least for this batch, a powerful ka-POW.
ING: sugar, cacáo butter, milk, cocoa mass, & vanilla
Reviewed Autumn 2009
Forget the math factored to calculate the rating. This bears immense hedonics for a category that rarely produces any (usually over-loaded with tall or long caramel rolls), with range that never downshifts.
All of it generated from miniscule cocoa mass (only vanilla has less weight in this bar – an unseen formulation til now) which means this is one beast of a bean, a kick boxer really, taking it to the sugar, fermented in a sweat box just renting the sapodilla woods into near volcanic flows.
Cotton Tree understands this cacáo’s DNA to get away with swathing it in so much butter fat.
A Milk unlike any other with none of the charred edges of its big Dark-Milk brother, nor the mechanical smoked-effects in hammy Javas & PNGs (for example, Bonnat’s Asfarth & Maglio’s Papouasia, respectively) or the multi-grain Milk Chocolate cereal of Plantations’ Ecuador.
Yeah, it’s unpolished... there’s nothing sexy to its schlub look & down-home basement-quality texture (without the least grip or astringency by the way – another testament to some modicum of noble pedigree in this strain). Plus, a little too vanillized. Overall flavor more than compensates, however, for these flaws: triple-ball macho (2 below the waist; the other above the shoulders) with a tender sweet-spot (again, so much sugar yet free from cloying).
Lord knows exactly what’s in store in the crap shoot that is micro-batch chocolate. Cotton Tree probably excels at variability & inconsistency - the hallmarks of such bar-smiths - making it all the more exhilarating each & every time one of its wrappers gets ripped open & out comes, at least for this batch, a powerful ka-POW.
ING: sugar, cacáo butter, milk, cocoa mass, & vanilla
Reviewed Autumn 2009