I’ve run into this chocolate maker at 2 different chocolate festivals–Northwest Chocolate Festival and Midwest Chocolate Festival. The NWCF was my 1st chocolate festival and it was, frankly, just short of overwhelming. I remember tasting their chocolate and buying a few bars, but don’t remember meeting anyone from their team. However, later at the Midwest Chocolate Festival in IN, I was sure to talk to them. Liang is just about as sweet as her chocolate–she gifted me 2 beautiful origami cranes. Let me introduce you to Kessho Craft Chocolate and Gelato. Its co-founders are Liang Wang and Mark Huetsch. Liang studied pastry and chocolate making in Tokyo. Mark studied computer science and Chinese studies at Stanford. They met in 2009, then opened Pantry’s Best, a bakery known for reimagining Asian ingredients into Western-style desserts. They launched their chocolate making brand in 2019, then relocated to Austin, Texas in 2023. “Kessho” translates to “Crystal” in Japanese. It’s a symbol of clarity, purity, and finding the right balance of elements. Kessho has won 33 awards from the Academy of Chocolate, International Chocolate Awards, and Good Food Awards since their start in 2019.
Now let me introduce you to Kessho’s 70% Kokoa Kamili Tanzania chocolate bar. These cacao beans are from the Mbingu area, a thriving market town located in the Kilombero District of the Morogoro Region in central Tanzania. The town is known as a center for organic cacao farming. These beans are trinitario and have been sun-dried on mesh tables.
Sight: clean molding with glossy shine; dark brown with a hint of red; on-point mold design; on the outside, colorful packaging that uses a traditional Chinese watercolor technique, and on the inside, a simplified look at the process of chocolate making along with the origin of these particular beans
Sound: good snap with break
Smell: fruity and strong
Mouth Feel: texture is smooth with the occasional sugar crystal; easy melt with thin coverage
Taste: plum and more plum! then a hint of lime and finishes with a fudgy chocolate flavor
Astringency: barely a hint
Summary: I mentioned the occasional sugar crystal in an otherwise perfectly smooth texture. It’s not accidental. It’s brilliant. It keeps my mouth engaged on different levels without being an unwelcome disruption to that silky smooth texture. And that plum flavor is amazing, then mellows with the help of the lime and blends so nicely with the dark fudgy flavor. I ate the original bar from the NWCF almost immediately after purchase. The one I tasted for this review was a replacement purchase–replaced 4 times over.