The age old problem is how to make an ingredient like cocoa taste good. Cocoa is a very bitter ingredient but there are many ways to mellow out the bitterness and create a flavour that is very appealing. Chocolate is all about the balance of ingredients to create a flavour that people will like. The most popular way to mellow out cocoa is with milk. Milk not only lessens the bitter flavour of cocoa, but it also gives it more fat to add flavour. Some chocolatiers have even attempted to balance out the bitterness of cocoa with cocoa butter, cocoa butter being the fat found in cocoa beans. I’ve tasted a few examples that have truly achieved a great chocolate bar using only cocoa, but I’ve seen a few failures too.

The other way to make cocoa less bitter is sugar. The thing about using sugar is that it makes the cocoa really sweet. Milk smooths out the cocoa and helps with the flavour, sugar on the other hand just makes it really sweet. This is where this Carlos V chocolate bar fails, it’s gone for the higher sugar route to try and tamper down the bitter cocoa. Sure the cocoa is not bitter, but this bar has such a strong sweet flavour. It’s almost sickly sweet and that’s not really balancing out the cocoa, but overpowering it.

It’s not a horrible bar by any means, it’s just really sweet. If you have a really sweet tooth, and you’d rather have candy over chocolate you might enjoy this bar. However I find that a good milk chocolate is all about balance of ingredients, and this bar just weighs a little too far in to the sweet/sugar realm for my liking.