Amano Artisan Chocolate’s New Chocolate Bars

Amano Artisan Chocolate, Utah’s award-winning chocolate maker, recently added three new bars to its array of hand-made, bean-to-bar chocolate.

Years ago when Amano was a fairly new company, I visited owner Art Pollard at the factory in Orem, watched chocolate being made and learned why Amano is such high quality chocolate. (More on that later.) Many Americans think “Hershey’s” when they think “chocolate.” But we’re talking “fine chocolate,” not the mass-produced kind.

Amano specializes in “single-origin” chocolate, where only cocoa beans from a specific region of the world are used for each specific bar.

Chocolate flavors vary with the soil and climate of a particular region, and chocolate connoisseurs like to savor the subtle differences in chocolate from a particular location. Some of Amano’s products take it a step further, and use only cocoa beans from one farm.

That’s one reason why it’s different from big chocolate companies that blend together a variety of beans from different regions of the world to create a “uniform,” mass-produced flavor.

Amano is known for buying its cocoa beans directly from growers, visiting plantations in person to get top-quality products. And it’s proudly labeled as fairly traded with the farmer.

Amano buys cocoa beans from areas as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. 

So it’s no surprise that these hand-crafted 3-ounce bars cost $8.95 and up. To me, a specialty bar with intense chocolate flavor is something you keep in a drawer, and every day just break off a few squares to savor as a little treat.

Here are the three new bars:

Cuyagua ($14.95 per 3-ounce bar)

• As a single-origin chocolate, it comes solely from Cuyagua, Venezuela, and contains 70 percent cocoa.

Cuyagua is a village on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela.

“The cocoa from Cuyagua has been famous since the time age of the Portuguese pirates who traded these beans,” said Art Pollard. “I have the immense honor to make chocolate with Cuyagua’s rarified beans.”

Tasting notes: Complex chocolate flavor with notes of spice, melon and cream.

It’s made with four pure and simple ingredients: Cocoa beans, pure cane sugar, cocoa butter, and whole vanilla beans.

My favorite bar of the trio is the Japanese Sea Salt & Cocoa Nibs ($9.95)— milk chocolate mixed with cocoa nibs and Japanese sea salt.

I’m one of those oddballs who prefer milk chocolate over dark. (Although the Chocolate Manufacturers Association says more people on the East Coast prefer dark chocolate, and those on the West side of the county tebd ti prefer milk chocolate, so I’m in good company.) This milk chocolate has a creamy smoothness, but the cocoa nibs give this bar a bit of crunch and a deeper flavor. The salt adds a hint of savory without overpowering the bar.

According to Art Pollard, founder and chocolate maker, “Salt awakens milk chocolate. So do cocoa nibs. Together, they make a milk chocolate that is truly beautiful.”

Why Japanese sea salt over other salts? When planning this bar, he reached out to his good friend Mark Bitterman of Bitterman Salts.

“He is a great guy and perhaps the country’s leading expert on exotic salts. We chose this beautiful Japanese sea salt that is handmade from ocean water pumped from the ocean’s depths where the sea water if ultra pure,” according to Pollard.

The cocoa used to make the milk chocolate comes from Ocumare, Venezuela (one of Pollard’s favorites). Ocumare chocolate is known for its fruity and floral notes. The nibs are made with cocoa from Ecuador.

The company’s tasting notes: “Rich milk chocolate, sea salt accents the flavor of the milk and tempers its cream. Deeply roasted cocoa nibs add texture and accent to the base chocolate flavor.”

Citrus Melange A Trois ($9.95) is a grown-up version of the chocolate from Pollard’s childhood.

“Nothing goes better with chocolate than citrus,” said Pollard. “Every time I taste the two together, it brings back childhood memories of the orange chocolate found during the holidays.”

“We make the chocolate with cocoa that we obtain directly from one farmer in Ecuador. We then combine it with the oils from yuzu, an incredible citrus from Japan; tangerine, and grapefruit (hence the name “citrus melange a trois”).

Here are some things I learned back in 2007 when I visited Pollard and his then-partner, the late Clark Goble at their Orem factory.

• The cocoa beans are hand-sorted before roasting. Every chocolate company has a unique roasting style to achieve a certain flavor profile.

• The roasted beans go into a melanger, which uses a granite wheel to grind and mix the beans into a thick, peanut butter-like goo, and then sugar is added.
• A roll-refiner machine makes the bits of sugar and ground beans as smooth as possible. A lot of the experience of eating quality chocolate is the smooth texture. With cheaper brands, you can feel a little grittiness of the sugar.

• Quality chocolate “snaps” when it’s broken, indicating high cacao content and well-tempered chocolate.
• Amano’s bars (as well as other good-quality bars) will list the percentage of cacao — the amount of chocolate that’s actually made from the cocoa bean.
• With good dark chocolate, you want to taste the notes of the bean. A cheaper company might add more sugar to cover up things like moldy beans or badly processed cacao.

Where can you buy Amano products? I know that Caputo’s in Salt Lake City carries them, and you can order them on the Amano website.