Catch X.
Yelp
While perhaps not all of their products are down on the bottom rung with the likes of Peter's, Hershey's, or Cadbury... Guittard is not good chocolate. Guittard is clearly not on par with industry standards like Callebaut or Felchlin.
Now it should be noted that Guittard makes two product lines: Guittard and E. Guittard. The E stands for "single origin."
Regular Guittard frequently contains such fine ingredients as:
- Vanillin, an artificial, potent but flat vanilla replacement (though actual vanilla does contain vanillin) that is produced at huge environmental cost.
- Potassium Carbonate, a drying agent that is used in cold fusion research and glass production, mmm-mmm. Sometimes this is used to dutch chocolate, but I don't often see it listed as an ingredient.
- Genetically modified soy, in the form of lecithin. I personally prefer my chocolate without lecithin. It's not that I think the lecithin itself is bad so much as it is frequently just used to cover up sloppy processing.
Elsewhere in the Guittard product line you would find:
- Partially Hydrogenated Palm Oil, a transfat, "Got heart attack?"
- Sorbitan Monostearate, a sythetic wax used to make the chocolate pretty looking.
- Mono- and Diacylglycerols, are stablizers that bind up oil and water mixtures.
Wow, are you as hungry for this "chocolate" as I am?
Yes, all of these industrial byproducts show through in the final product. Waxy texture, poor flavor release, muddied top notes and a cottonmouth finish.
While their E. Guittard line is slightly better and contains things like "real vanilla," (in my mind vanilla should be so standard you needn't preface it as "real") and single origin beans. It is one of the worst all natural, single origin chocolates of the market.
Even if E. Guittard tased good, I would have huge reservations with a company that clearly has no standards about what they feed to their customers.
Two stars because it didn't make me sick.
(I go five stars for best of it's type in the world and one star if I literally vomit. Two and four for bad and good respectively, three for average)