Les Criolle; chocolate cocoa pods. I’ve only ever had one of Michel Cluizel’s products before but those mushrooms were sublime and these look amazing too. Let’s take a look at what the press bit says:

A unique gift of coloured cocoa pods, filled with a velvety smooth and delicious dark chocolate ganache.

Yum. Yum. They definitely look the part, there’s four of these cocoa pods in here, all different colours. a dark brown, a dusty black, a dusty brown and another dark brown, so perhaps only three different types.

You, or should I say, I, notice just how large these cocoa pods were when I open the box. I was eating these with big manly bites and they took three chomps, so if you were to eat these how should be eaten, i.e. much slower, then these would last you fairly long.

The furthest to the left pod was almost a dark chocolate, it was dark brown in colour and slightly bitter in taste. The chocolate felt greasy and there were fingermarks on it from me, suggesting that this may in fact actually be very high quality chocolate (what I would expect). The ganache is, as you would expect, rich. Very creamy, soft and truffle like, it melts in the mouth and complements the chocolate well. If I had to guess I’d say this was a 60-70% dark chocolate, I have to leave that 10% margin of error due to the high quality ingredients (i.e. lack of sugar) throwing my game a little bit.

The darker, dustier chocolate pod is an odd one. I was expecting to be even more bitter than the dark brown pod but…it wasn’t. At all. It was less bitter, and while not creamy, had a very neutral taste to it. The chocolate shell, while thick, didn’t present too much in ways of taste, it was the ganache that stole the show. The ganache was basically the same, I assume it’s a stock formula, but this one was almost kinda boring. Very nice, but lacking in clear flavour either on the sweet side or on the bitter side.

Our last chocolate looks like milk chocolate, only again it has a dusty touch to it. Again it’s very greasy to touch, and again I’m confused as to what type of chocolate this is. It doesn’t seem like milk chocolate, it’s not sweet or milky enough. It’s not dark chocolate, there’s no bitterness to it at all. Again, while delicious, I feel like I’ve missed something here.

And that about sums these up, they were delicious, the ganache got sickly after a bit but I loved them all. Yet at the same time, they were all very samey, my fault or his? I don’t know. This is a hard one to conclude, like I said I liked them, but at the same time I felt like, as I said, I missed something. I got these on a special offer, I’d recommend you do the same. A very odd one, here.