Review: Fortunato No. 4 Chocolate

Mid-January is right down the middle of what my wife calls the chocolate season. The chocolate season runs from Halloween to Easter, with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day therein.

I like chocolate enough to have some opinions about it, but not very refined ones. For example, I’ve never liked hard candy labeled “chocolate” (example: the Dum Dums lollipops that were around for a while). And anything labeled “chocolatey” is immediately suspect, because that’s a word manufacturers are allowed to use when whatever’s in the product doesn’t meet minimum definitions of chocolate.

But mass-market from a name I recognize? Hershey? Nestle? Cadbury? I like these products and don’t have much religion about which is better. However, all mass-market chocolate is potentially problematic from a human trafficking perspective, so there’s that. And I’m kind of wondering if the intelligence that served me an ad for Fortunato No. 4 chocolate in my Instagram feed is smart enough to have used that little tidbit about me.

Fortunato No. 4 is a Peruvian-American family business that offers half-kilogram packages of 36% milk chocolate, 47% dark milk chocolate, or 68% dark chocolate for $19.95 each. They also sell roasted cacao nibs by the pound for the same price.

Now, north of $18/pound for chocolate sounds like a lot, but chocolate at any price is a luxury, is it not? Plus, if you’ll run the numbers you’ll probably find it’s not as outrageous as you think, particularly compared to premium brands.

I ordered the 36% and the 47% for my initial review. The scores on the blocks of chocolate are a bit crude and don’t allow for a lot of fine control, but you can break them into bars with 80-90% precision.

I started with the 36%, and I’ll just say right off that perhaps my anticipation was unreasonably elevated. It’s definitely a good-tasting and high-quality product, but I was primed for complexities that never materialized. Perhaps this is to be expected from a palate so attuned and accustomed to comparatively inexpensive American chocolate.

I enjoyed the 47% considerably more, finding it richer, and with a longer-lasting, more robust flavor that persisted considerably longer after it had all melted. It was about as sweet as the 36%, but more intense.

(Do I sound like a rube more accustomed to reviewing hot sauces? Heh.)

I’ve since ordered the 68% and the cacao nibs, and will add to this review when I receive them. I’m looking forward to both. And, perhaps in the future we will order some additional Fortunato No. 4 specifically for cooking, and evaluate from that angle.

If you’re a chocolate lover and you’re curious, I’d say give it a go. I might start with the 47% though.

You might also like:

• The chocolate season
  Well, once again the Easter festivities are happening “automatically” from my vantage point. Lea did…
• Review: Soylent Ready-to-Drink Food
  Now you have to love a company that names a food product Soylent. And if a prominent local blogger a…
• Review: Habanero Tostitos
  Lea spotted this bag at Publix the other day and correctly supposed that I might like to try this pr…
• BoWilliams.com On Huntsville Hot Wings: Cricket’s
  This is part of an ongoing series reviewing hot wings in the Huntsville area. Visit #HsvHotWings for…
• What do the Bosco people have against Alabama?
  I think most of us know what Bosco is. I remember Gene Simmons telling of squirting it directly in h…