Tazmanian Chocolate

 

A friend of mine from Aspen was visiting Tazmania last month and brought back some of their locally made 'dark' chocolate.  It's amazing stuff.  Top 3 of all time for me in terms of taste and consistency.  However, as you can see from the pic below, it's a bit odd in terms of ingredients.  Maybe their idea of chocolate is different than ours, or it could just be that they're upside down!

 
As you can see, sugar is the first ingredient so I wouldn't consider this 'dark' chocolate.  That's fine with me though ... I don't hold grudges as far as chocolate is concerned.  The other thing you'll notice is that vegetable fat is an ingredient.  At first I was not at all amused by this.  A chocolate PUFA bar I thought.  Swell.  

Then, to my delight, I deduced that the particular vegetable fat they used in this case happens to be coconut oil.  Two things led me to believe this.  First, the texture.  Seattle Chocolates makes chocolate truffle bars with coconut oil and I love them.  They have a silky smooth texture, just like this Tazmanian bar does.  Second, as you can tell from the pic below, I could actually see the white coconut oil.  They must have used quite a bit of it.  For sure, at first, I wasn't convinced I was 'seeing' the coconut oil.  I thought it might be salt, or even chocolate bloom, but it is neither of those.  

I find it a bit strange that they chose to use the wording 'vegetable oil' instead of coconut oil.  Perhaps in Tasmania people still think of it as arterycloggingsaturatedfat.  I'm sure lots of people do here as well, but in a very positive sign, I picked up 78oz of Nutiva coconut oil at Costco for $19.99 the other day.  And, of course, they had a whole frigging pallet of it.  

Go Coconut Oil!!