Friend to All Candy: Taza Chocolate Mexicano Vanilla

We came across a new chocolate today, and not only had we never seen it before, but it was on sale. Also it was in the shape of discs. Also it had the word "Mexican" on it. These facts made a purchase an inevitability.

I'd never heard of Taza, so I was curious about this company. Obviously the high-end chocolate market is flooded nowadays, what with all the buzzwords you can put on your packaging to maybe get a leg up on the competition, like "all natural" and "fair trade" and "organic" and "direct trade" and "artisinal" and so on and so forth. But "stone ground" is not one I'd seen before, so it seemed worth a look-see.

It's different. That's obvious right out of the gate. The chocolate is disc-shaped:

Because the discs are relatively small, breaking off an individual wedge isn't necessarily easy. And this flavor (vanilla) is pretty sweet, so unless you have a major sweet tooth, you'll probably want to eat it in smaller pieces.

But it's gooood. It was a lot different than what I was expecting. Being stone ground gives it a rougher texture than a normal chocolate bar. Check it:

It's kind of chunky. It took a moment to get used to, but once I did, I liked it a lot. Like I said, even though it was a dark chocolate, it was pretty sweet. The vanilla flavor was pronounced but not overpowering. If I'd had a frame of reference for the aesthetic they were going for, I probably would have opted for the cinnamon flavor, if only because when I think of Mexican chocolate, cinnamon's the first thing that comes to mind, and the blending of flavors in this bar makes me think they'd handle that combination particularly well. Taza makes a bunch of different flavored discs; the vanilla one is good enough that I'll probably work my way through all of them.