Artisan Kettle Organic Chocolate Chips
September 29, 2017
There’s another player in the organic chocolate chip arena; Artisan Kettle made by Clasen Quality Chocolate. They are available in four varieties - semisweet, bittersweet, milk and white. The chips are organic and fair trade certified. Sourced from South America.
Why organic chocolate? It’s the thing to do, right, because organic is listed on lots of labels so why not chocolate?
Non-organic crops are treated with synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides and cacao trees are no different. Thankfully, it’s common-place now to walk to into a grocery store and find organic fruits and vegetables and lots of other foods.
Over the years, organic foods have become more available and more affordable (yay!). In chocolate, it’s not just the cacao that’s organic. Other ingredients such as sugar, dairy, vanilla, nuts, etc. should be organic as well.
Sometimes organic chocolate isn’t 100% organic due to one or more of the added ingredients being non-organic. Check the label, most of the time it will indicate the organic percentage.
Artisan Kettle Chocolate Chips
Today, I’m tasting three of the four flavors of Artisan Kettle chocolate chips. I bought them at my local grocery store. I have the Semisweet 44%, Bittersweet 55%, and the Milk 33%.
The milk chocolate chips are more chocolatey than the standard milk chocolate chips. The cocoa notes have a strong presence throughout the entire taste. The chocolate is fruity and little nutty. The dairy notes are buttery, and milky, with a hint of honey. The chip feels a little course in the mouth.
The 44% semi-sweet chocolate has a sweet
ness and flavor that reminds me of marshmallow. I taste notes of toast, spice, and a hint of vanilla. The chip feels a little course in the mouth.
The 55% carries a strong impact of chocolate with notes of oatmeal, nuts, and just a bit of roasted coffee. This chip feels a little course in the mouth too.
All three of these flavors are tasty by themselves. I haven’t baked with them yet, but I did make a no-bake nutbutter cookie with the 55% dark chips. The chips retained their strong chocolate taste in spite of the other intensely flavored ingredients like sunflower seed butter and raw honey.
Oh yea, forgot to answer my own question, why organic chocolate? Because it’s not only better for your health, but it’s so much better for the health of the farmers (no more applying toxic chemicals to their crop and soil) and for the health of the environment (more sustainable cacao means years and years of delicious chocolate).
Still need more reasons? Just taste it, and feel good about it already!
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Just bought the 44% chocolate at Costco and the chip is chalky but not grainy. Very strong aftertaste of alcohol extracted vanilla, emphasis on the alcohol ☹️ I will look forward to third party testing for lead and cadmium because if the levels are low I will suck it up and bake with them. Have they been third party tested yet? Also wondering if target brand organic baking chunks have been third party tested. Thanks
You bring up an excellent question about lead and cadmium testing and I don’t know the answer. I certainly haven’t seen testing results on any chocolate labels in my state yet. Here is an informational article from Confectionery News: https://www.confectionerynews.com/Article/2016/09/16/How-to-avoid-cadmium-and-lead-in-chocolate-Safety-recall-prevention