Small organic dark chocolate tablets with spices, in a box of ten, from Chocolates Artesanos Isabel in Spain.
Spiced chocolate is not a modern invention — it is the original. For the great majority of chocolate's history it was a drink, not a food, and it was savoury and spiced rather than sweet. The Maya and later the Aztecs drank xocolātl: ground cacao whipped with water and flavoured with chilli, achiote, vanilla and Lippia dulcis or ear-flower, served cold and foaming, and often unsweetened. Sugar arrived only when the Spanish brought the drink back to Europe, and the solid, sweet, milk-laden bar we now think of as chocolate is a nineteenth-century invention. Spices in chocolate are the older tradition by around two and a half thousand years.
Why spices suit dark chocolate specifically. Cocoa contains several hundred aroma compounds, and a great many of them overlap directly with the aromatic chemistry of warm spices — the pyrazines, phenols and terpenes produced by roasting and by spice essential oils occupy the same territory. Cinnamon, clove, pepper and chilli therefore do not sit on top of chocolate the way a fruit flavour does; they slot into it, extending what is already there. That is why spiced chocolate reads as deeper rather than as a mixture.
Chilli in chocolate is worth understanding. Capsaicin is fat-soluble, which is why cocoa butter carries chilli heat so effectively and so slowly — the burn arrives late, builds, and lasts. It is also why a glass of water afterwards achieves nothing and a piece of bread does.
Ten small tablets. The right format for a bar with an assertive flavour: try one, share the rest, and give some away.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.