My Thoughts On A Mexican Chocolate

I was in Mexico (Tulum and Bacalar, to be specific) quite recently, and I had the time to visit a small chocolate shop in Tulum. They offered some interesting products, and I was rather interested in them.

To get started, I have to say something about the bars. They had some basic 64% bars that they made from chocolate they harvested themselves, which is an interesting bit that can be thought about in terms of ethics for a while. Some of the bars had inclusions, like sea salt and hibiscus. All the bars were 64%, without exception.

But a whole shelf of bars was just for one inclusion, and that was medicinal honey. I thought about this for a while and ultimately came to the conclusion that the honey was warmed up and then mixed into the molten chocolate so that it wouldn't immediately seize up. It takes a lot of sweat to produce a chocolate bar with honey, especially if you melange your chocolate, as a lot of chocolatiers do. It's a very difficult inclusion to incorporate, and I still speculate about how exactly they got it in there.

Another mystery presented itself when I finished buying my bars. I unwrapped the one with honey, and found two things. First, that the honey was barely present and that I could hardly taste it, and second, that the chocolate was not tempered. The fact that I couldn't taste the honey compensated for the confusion I had over how they got it in there, and the untempered chocolate suggested to me that they had intended to keep their chocolate "traditional" and kept it as it was. Nevertheless, it stayed solid on my hand and had snap to it, so I would surmise that I simply got lucky and found a rare, tempered bar that was not meant to be tempered. I drew this conclusion after considering the fact that an earlier bar was untempered, and so was the third bar I bought.

The other products were jars of the honey the used in their chocolate, drinks, and nibs. The nibs immediately jumped out to me, because I'm in the market for nibs of all sources right now, but the quantities at which they were being sold was too small for it to be convenient. So I ignored those, and got down to tasting the chocolate.

It was very astringent, and I wasn't able to detect many notes through the bitterness. The notes I did get were strong and acidic, mostly fruity notes like raspberry and blueberry. I was surprised by the end, though, which carried with it a sudden decrease in the bitterness and a couple of chocolatey and caramel-y notes came through. I think that if the bitterness had gone earlier, then I would have picked up on them earlier. But I still found them, right at the end, and that's better than nothing. The blueberry note surprised me, because it was more jammy than sour, which wasn't in keeping with the theme of the bar, but oh well, it was good for balancing anyway.

That's it for my analysis of this cool little Mexican chocolate shop, but stay tuned, because I will be recapping my 2025 year in a blog post very soon!