BarkTHINS Snacking Chocolate
September 14, 2017
Last month I wrote a review of 7th Street Confection’s Dark Chocolate Thins (Raspberry & Quinoa). I thought they were pretty tasty.
Today, I have an extremely similar product from BarkTHINS®. To the best of my knowledge, BarkTHINS came first, in 2013. The flavor is different, but the concept is the same; thin dark chocolate pieces with inclusions. Today I’m trying Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Seed with Sea Salt.
Comparing the two, I can scarcely tell the difference in appearance. The BarkTHINS appear to be slightly thicker chunks, but then pumpkin seeds are bulkier than quinoa and freeze-dried raspberry bits.
The chocolate flavors are similar, too. BarkTHINS chocolate is nutty, with nice toasted coconut and vanilla notes and a hint of spice (cinnamon?).
The sea salt brings out the chocolate’s buttery and honey notes.
The texture is good with a sturdy chocolate snap and the crunchy seeds.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of bloom on this particular package of chocolate.
It looks as though it is cocoa butter bloom, which is a grayish haze that sits on top of the chocolate and makes it look “old”. It’s greasy to the touch.
The photo here shows the whitish haze of bloom. The chocolate is not as dark as you would expect of dark chocolate. (It's also scuffed from banging around in the packaging, but there's not much that can be done about that.)
Don't worry, the whitish bloom is perfectly safe to eat, but it’s not chocolate at its best. I don’t know when it would have happened – it could have been at the manufacturer, or during transportation to the store, or sitting on the grocery shelf. Somewhere along the line, the product got too warm, and the surface cocoa butter melted and re-solidified.
According to BarkTHINS website, www.barkthins.com, they use Fair Trade dark chocolate with “real, simple, Non-GMO inclusions for a completely original take on snacking.” They say, “Snacking. Elevated.”
I like the dark chocolate with pumpkins seed and sea salt, and I agree that they are great for snacking. But do I really need another reason to snack!?
There are a variety of barkTHINS available on Amazon. Here's a link to the Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Seed package reviewed here.
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I like those bark thins! We used to buy them all the time at Costco. Never had any problem with bloom there. I would be thrilled if the chocolate was a bit less sweet. But overall a great product at a very reasonable price.