Our Favorite Chocolate Bar Is Intense In All The Best Ways Possible

Even if you've got an undeniable sweet tooth, there's nothing wrong with being slightly picky about your chocolate. A good chocolate bar should be sweet but not too sweet and have enough bitterness to give the chocolate some character without tasting unpleasant. It should be velvety without being like that chalky dark chocolate in grocery stores. In short, it's a game of balancing opposites together into something strong but also comforting. Chocolate bars are comfort food, after all. So what's the best one out there?

Chowhound did a full, comprehensive breakdown of chocolate bars, unwrapping and ranking the 20 best chocolate bars on the market. The competition was fierce and often overly sweet, but the winner is a familiar name for San Francisco locals: Ghirardelli's Intense Dark Chocolate was the clear winner, just narrowly beating out Lindt's Intense Orange Dark Chocolate in second place. The dark chocolate Ghirardelli bar was considered a "goldilocks" of chocolate bars, and it tasted rich without becoming overwhelming. The cacao percentage is listed as 72% on every wrapper, which is strong enough that it doesn't taste especially sweet. But it's also not at the level where it just becomes bitter. It's not especially pricy either, which certainly helps.

It helps that Ghirardelli adds other flavors to its Intense Dark Chocolate as well. The chocolate company refers to the 72% chocolate bar as a "bestseller" on its website and explains that you can also find "hints of mocha, blackberry, and dark cherry." These are subtle and almost overpowered by the strong dark chocolate, but they do a great job of rounding out the background of its flavor profile. Plus, there are expert ways to taste chocolate for hidden flavor notes if you really want to single them out in each bite.

The strong flavor of the Intense Dark Chocolate is sometimes called bittersweet, which makes it sound much sadder than it truly is while you're eating it. The bitter aspect comes from special compounds called "flavonols" in pure, unfiltered cacao, which can taste extremely bitter when pure. In a milder version like the 72% chocolate, it gives a lighter kick, which is rounded out by the sweet element that comes from the sugar. Luckily, most dark chocolate has less sugar than milk chocolate: Ghirardelli's 72% includes 7 grams of sugar per serving, which is two pieces of the chocolate bar (so there are four servings in a full chocolate bar). A chocolate bar that rich doesn't need to be eaten all at once, anyway.