Organic milk chocolate with macadamia nuts, 100 g, from MEURISSE — made with 39% cacao from Papua New Guinea, Fairtrade certified and plastic-free packaged.
Macadamia is the only Australian native plant to have become a significant world food crop. It grew in the coastal rainforests of Queensland and New South Wales and was eaten by Aboriginal peoples long before European botanists named it in the 1850s. Almost every other major crop we eat came from Eurasia, Africa or the Americas; macadamia is the exception. Commercial orchards were then established in Hawaii, which is why most people associate the nut with the Pacific rather than with Australia.
It is the hardest nut in the world to open — not a figure of speech. The shell requires something on the order of three hundred pounds of force per square inch to crack, which is why macadamias are practically never sold in shell and why mechanical shelling had to be invented before the crop could be commercialised at all. That difficulty is a large part of why they cost what they do.
And it is the fattest nut, at roughly three-quarters fat by weight — more than any other. Unusually, that fat is dominated by monounsaturates, and macadamia is one of very few foods rich in palmitoleic acid. What this means at the table is texture: macadamia does not crunch so much as give way, with a creaminess no other nut has. Against milk chocolate, which is also soft and rich, the effect is almost seamless.
39% cacao is high for a milk chocolate. Ordinary mass-market milk chocolate often sits near the EU legal minimum of 25%, with sugar and milk making up most of the rest. Nearly forty per cent means noticeably more chocolate flavour and less sweetness, which is what allows a delicate nut to be tasted at all.
One genuinely important warning: macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs. They cause weakness, tremors, vomiting and hyperthermia, usually within twelve hours, and the mechanism is still not understood. Very few people know this, and it is worth knowing — keep this bar off the coffee table if there is a dog in the house.
Contains macadamia nuts and milk.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
MEURISSE - est.1845
MEURISSE - est.1845
MEURISSE - est.1845
Lovechock NL
