Choctal Chocolate Ice Cream

Have you ever wanted to do a world tour of chocolate in a convenient, don't leave your house, frozen kind of way? Choctal can do that for you, and they do it in an all natural style (without eggs too). They are a young company currently working to become a Certification B Corporation. Recently they offered to send over some free samples and there was no way I was going to say no to this lineup. Now they also have a set of vanilla flavors to be covered in a separate post tomorrow, but right now we're going to dig in to...

Choctal Chocolate Ice Creams
Single Origin Chocolate

So Ghana Chocolate is definitely the lightest colored, in the middle we have Costa Rican Chocolate and then Dominican Chocolate*, and rounding things out is the distinctly dark Kalimantan Chocolate. I recognize all of these names except the last one, so off to wikipedia and Kalimantan is... the Indonesian portion of Borneo.

Now if I understand right, you are supposed to try them all together to truly understand how different they are although I do have a little fear that the order might mess with my taste buds a bit. Let's start with...

Kalimantan: whoa, it almost does have a caramel finish to it. I can't say I've had a chocolate like that before. Lots of nice complexity. There is a bit of dryness (bitterness) to it but not in an unpleasant way. That little bit of bitterness just primes you for your next bite.

Dominican: whoa, it does have hints of mocha! two for two on truth in labeling! it's a mild coffee complexity, nothing scary even for me. Cool. Oh, I should mention it's good ice cream too! I do adore a short ingredient list.

Ok, Costa Rican is not my style, it's just too heavy on the coffee/bitter front for my liking. It also mentions caramel and butterscotch notes but it's in a burnt way. That was definitely not meant for me.

Last up is Ghana and it should have "an essence of fudge". Hmmm, interesting. I don't know if my brain would have jumped right to fudge from the very first bite but that description sums it up pretty well. There is a deep, somewhat sweet richness to it that does remind you of fudge. Factor in a nice, full bodied texture and I won't argue with the fudge tag. I want to say there is a little lingering coffee note to it, but it could just be left over from the other two samples.

I want to rank Kali first but at the moment it's the Ghana that I want to polish off first. So let's go Ghana, Kali, Dominican and then Costa Rican. Actually, let's bring in Mrs. Scoops for a moment. Ha! She's got Kali in first with Ghana in a close second. I told you it was close!

I have to admit it, this was definitely fun and you really do need to open all of them at the same time, at least on the first run at them. I really expected them to blur together, but the fact they didn't is a testament to the quality and distinctness to this lineup. My mini world tour was fun and if you get a chance to go on it, I say go for it!

--Wait! Before I go, I need to point something out. It's really nice to have a regional chocolate flavor that isn't a gimmick. For example, H-D Mayan Chocolate. They didn't go out of their way to get regional cocoa, they just added some cinnamon. I applaud Choctal for what they did here.

On Second Scoop: Having finished up the samplers, all of my opinions stand, but I want to make one more point. When I first saw what Choctal was up to, there was a part of me that thought that basing your company on just two flavors of ice cream is not going to go well. Now that I've had it though, it's kind of genius. How often have you heard someone complain that they don't like this vanilla base or that chocolate base? I hear it a lot. This lineup solves that problem. You can finally dial in exactly what kind of chocolate you like and just throw on whatever toppings you want. My only thought for them is that I hope they can expand the lineup a bit more. This feels like it's more for the foodie crowd than your average joe (or jane). Not that I think most people couldn't gravitate towards one of the current options, I just think one or two more flavors to round things out would be nice, in particular a sweet flavor would help keep this train going. Best of luck to Choctal, keep doing what you are doing. [The more they sell, the lower the price becomes, the more people can try it!]

*Note: some kind of packing insert to keep the samples safe would probably be a good idea

Verdict?  very well done
Buy Again?  yup