Does Whittaker’s Cocoa Samoa taste like Koko Samoa?

by | Food Stories, Our Food | 0 comments

I’m super late to this game, especially since Whittaker’s released their artisan ‘Cocoa Lovers Collection’ way back in 2020… but I had to find out (properly):

Does the Whittaker’s Cocoa Samoa Chocolate actually taste like Koko Samoa?

In case you didn’t know, cacao beans are a staple crop of the Pacific – we’ve been growing it since ages ago… and while we HAVE been exporting our cocoa beans to chocolate makers around the world, Samoans mostly consume our cocoa as Koko Samoa: a dark chunk of pure, unrefined cocoa that we like to boil up and drink hot.

 

It’s quite rare for chocolate makers to draw attention to Samoa as a source of their beans… and rarer still for them to name a product after us, so naturally, I wanted to see if our Whittaker’s namesake actually tastes like the koko we know and love.

The short answer? No.

I mean, its flavour is familiar, but I don’t think my taste buds are professional enough to recognize the distinctness of Samoa koko after it’s been refined this much.

Still, what I do taste is a pretty good piece of dark chocolate. It’s smooth and creamy and boldly ‘cocoa’, even on the sweeter end of dark chocolate flavours.

Not bad at all. 

The only thing missing – at least for my Samoan preference – is that beautiful, mildly bitter kick you get from actual Koko Samoa. 

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