Sweet Journey Chocolates Bittersweet Chocolate

Today's World Food review is Sweet Journey Chocolates Bittersweet Chocolate (Dark Chocolate Tablet). This was a gift from a friend of a friend, going by the packaging and from what I can remember being said when it was given to me, I'm fairly sure this came from Duty Free in the USA. However it's a product of Isreal (?!) and distributed from Irvine, California. The ingredients list is pretty small for an American chocolate; sugar (first ingredient in a dark bar?), chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy/rapeseed lecithin and emulsifiers, Vanillin (artificial flavour). 

The chocolate is foil wrapped under the paper packaging which kept it nice and fresh on its travels. 

I don't really know why but the bar was covered in pictures of cows. 

It smelt very sweet, even for milk chocolate let alone a dark, bittersweet bar, it didn't taste as sweet as it smelt though. It lacked the richness I like in dark chocolate and tasted more like a plain chocolate though I could really taste the Vanillin (which turns out is the primary component of the extract of the vanilla bean) in the bar - I googled it to double check what it was as it had a real vanilla taste to it. None of this is too bad in itself, to be honest I've come to expect sweetness in dark chocolate from the USA but what I didn't expect was the awful, bitter aftertaste in each mouthful. It's like whoever made this thought bittersweet, dark chocolate is just milk with a nasty bitter flavour chucked in at the end. 

The texture and consistency weren't quite right either. It had a thick, nice enough bite and quite a gritty mouthfeel but it had no melt to it whatsoever. Whereas in the Rausch chocolates I didn't mind that and it was just slightly odd, the poorer quality of chocolate used here just made it feel like plastic. Not only did it not melt in the mouth at all but usually when I eat a darker bar I end up with almost black chocolatey smears all over my hands, but nothing here - again it was like holding little blocks of plastic. 

It's edible, the vanilla flavoured, might as well be milk chocolate is addictive in a guilty, I know this is crap I'm eating way if you can ignore the horrible aftertaste and the feeling you're eating chocolate coloured and shaped Lego. 

5/10