Berkshire Bark Chocolate

Once, when flying out of Logan Airport in Boston, I found a cute little, ridiculously overpriced, market with local artisanal goods: Berkshire Farms Market.  If you've flown out of Terminal 2 at SFO, you'd recognize the model, just like our Napa Farms Market.

Anyway, while I was there, I couldn't resist picking up some chocolate.  It has been a while since I have reviewed chocolate, mostly because I just haven't been trying anything new, so, a chance to try a local specialty was most welcome.  I settled on Berkshire Bark, chocolate produced in the nearby Berkshires.

"No preservatives, no shortcuts, just natural, honest ingredients."

Berkshire Bark makes thick slabs of chocolate, aka, chocolate bark, with several types of chocolate for the base (milk, dark, white) and assorted mix-ins.  They take pride in their ingredients, using Belgian chocolate, whole roasted nuts, no preservatives, etc. 

I only purchased one bar, and it was fine, but, I don't see a reason to seek out this brand again.

Big Bar of Pretzelogical!

"Premium quality Belgian dark and milk chocolate holds together pretzels, homemade sea salt caramel and natural peanut butter."

All of the bar varieties sounded interesting, but once I saw the Pretzelogical, I looked no further.  Every component was something I love: chocolate, both milk and dark.  Caramel.  Peanut butter.  Pretzels and salt to make it salty-sweet.  Oh yes!

The "bark" comes as a big slab, a square in this case, although they also make regular rectangular bars too.

Pretzelogical: Inside.

So, how did all these ingredients come together?

The bark itself seemed to just be milk chocolate.  It was fine milk chocolate, but not remarkable in any way.  The only dark chocolate was a drizzle on top.

But of course, the chocolate is just the base.  I was eying all the mix-ins.

I was very confused with my first bite.  There was something very hard inside.  It turns out, the caramel was more like toffee, very, very hard chunks, as you can see here (the two bigger white areas).

"We add Maldon sea salt to our caramel at the last minute to preserve its texture and incredible flavor."

Hmm.  "Preserve its texture"?  It was rock hard!  And sadly, I didn't taste the salt I was looking forward to.  Moving on to the pretzels ...

"It took two years of searching to find just the right prezels to mix into Pretzelogical.  Our pretzels come from a small family-owned Pennsylvania company that has been making pretzels for almost 100 years."

The pretzels were little chunks of pretzel rods.  They were ... pretzels.  Honestly, nothing special here.

Ok, what about the promised peanut butter?  Well, I never found any pouches of peanut butter, although I could sorta taste some peanut butter from time to time.  I guess it was mixed into the chocolate?

Overall, what we had here was basic milk chocolate, standard pretzels, rock solid chunks of sweet caramel, and a subtle essence of peanut butter.  It had some different textures, and varying amounts of sweetness, but no saltiness, and really none of the magic I was hoping for.

***.