Chocolate with Candied Pistachios // Le Bonta, Lucca IT

A smooth 61% dark chocolate bar studded with crunchy candied pistachios. I found this delicious bar in a lovely little storefront in Volterra that sells chocolate from different parts of Tuscany. I wish I could remember the name! There were a lot of things that looked good in there. I deliberated over some attractively packaged mason jars filled with chocolates of varying description, but ultimately it was the candied nuts that won me over to this bar. Le Bonta chocolates are made in Lucca, which happens to be my favourite town in Italy. I knew there was no way a bar that looked like this gorgeous chocolate pistachio bar wasn’t going to be delicious, but after tasting a few of the other chocolate bars that the store had laid out for customers to sample and finding them to be a bit waxy I wondered if I would be disappointed. But I wasn’t. This chocolate is uncharacteristically creamy for dark chocolate, but still has the lovely, tart, somewhat earthy aftertaste that characterizes most quality dark chocolates. The lightly candied pistachios complement it wonderfully, offering a delightfully crunchy antidote to the smoothness of the chocolate.