New Single-Origin Milk Chocolates

It isn’t all wine and meat here at the F&W Aspen Classic: at the Tasting Tent I was glad to find Amano Chocolates’ new single-origin milk chocolate bars, and to meet founder Art Pollard. I got to write about Pollard for F&W Across America: Salt Lake City, but we’d only spoken by phone. It’s sort of like meeting the Ferran Adria of chocolate: while he’s a little more soft-spoken than the Catalan crusader, he’s got a similar magnetic enthusiasm for his work that left me convinced I should eat and think about chocolate all day like he does. In fact, in another life I would like to be him: the chocolatier not only builds (and launches) rockets for a hobby, but he travels all over Venezuela, Madagascar and more recently, Indonesia and Ecuador, hunting for beans. He’s just found one that yields a distinctive flavor never tasted before in chocolate; he says that one should be out in bar form soon. Meantime, to tide us over we have his licorice-tinted Jembrana milk chocolate from Bali and—for all the meat lovers—the milk version of the mildly bacony Venezuelan Ocumare.