Fracois Pralus is a French chocolatier with his company based in Roanne, France. They make their chocolate direct from the cocoa bean and have won many awards such as the Grand Prix d’Excellence and the International du Chocolat. They have their own cocoa plantation in Madagascar, with direct control over the quality of the cocoa grown and used.

This single origin bar from Indinesia uses Criollo cocoa beans. It’s noted to have orange peel, high acidity to begin with and liquorice and burnt toffee finishes to it. Sounds delicious and complex. The wrapper is orange, perhaps hinting at things. All of Pralus’ bars are single origin and are colour coded, they’re all also very expensive at £3.95 a pop over at Chocolate Trading Co (I got this for £1), and this man almost exclusively deals with dark chocolate, with nearly all their bars being 75% cocoa solids and up (they even have a 100% bar), with one 45% bar, everything else is above. They all sound amazing, I wish I had the money to splash out on them.

So opening the wrapper and we have a fairly plain looking dark chocolate tablet, full of chunks, with the difference being that at the bottom there’s one very large piece with a Pralus signature on, very nice.

The taste here is deep, very deep. There’s surprisingly, a lack of bitterness with this bar. Make no doubt about it, it’s not sweet, but I was expecting it to be worse than this, it has a very good balance to it. The flavour though is what this is all about, like I said it’s deep and rich. A very strong cocoa, I ate this while drinking a strong cup of black coffee and was nearly overwhelmed after a few pieces, not for the faint hearted at all. I didn’t note the orange peel, but I’m sure I could detect just a hint of liquorice as it melted, no toffee though.

Complex is certainly what this is, just like all of Pralus’ bars. One day I hope to try the rest of their range, like a few of the extremely good chocolate bars I’ve had recently, I recommend this if you have the money for it and you want to try some extremely good chocolate, how it really should be. Hats off to Pralus, this is very well made chocolate and how it should be.