Milk chocolate studded with broken pieces of Sylvain speculoos, from Generous — 70 g.
Speculoos deserves an introduction, because outside the Low Countries it is usually misunderstood. It is a thin, hard, caramelised spiced biscuit from Belgium and the Netherlands, traditionally pressed in carved wooden moulds — the name comes from the Latin speculum, a mirror, because the biscuit is a mirror image of the mould. Its flavour is not simply “cinnamon”: the classic mix runs cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white pepper, and the deep caramel note comes from brown sugar cooked hard rather than from added caramel. It was a Saint Nicholas biscuit, made for early December, long before it became an everyday thing.
This bar exists because biscuits break. Every biscuit factory produces a constant stream of broken pieces that are perfectly good and unsellable as biscuits, and the normal destinations are animal feed, anaerobic digestion or waste. Generous set their own breakage into chocolate, which turns a by-product into the point of the product. Given that roughly a third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted — much of it before it ever reaches a shop — building a product deliberately around that stream does more good than any amount of careful shopping at the other end of the chain.
Why speculoos and milk chocolate work so well. The biscuit is dry, hard-caramelised and assertively spiced; milk chocolate is soft, sweet and mild. The spice gives the chocolate something to do, and the milk rounds off the pepper and clove that make speculoos too insistent on its own. It is the same logic behind dunking a speculoos in coffee, which is what Belgium does with it anyway.
An honest flag from the maker, which we are keeping. Generous state plainly that this bar, unlike the rest of their range, is not organic — because the rescued biscuit is not certified. Refusing to use it would simply mean wasting it.
Contains gluten and dairy. Check the pack for the full allergen list.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.