Faux milk chocolate, made with oat milk instead of the usual rice milk. Ethicoco are a startup bean-to-bar producer making all-vegan all-organic fair trade chocolate, from imported beans. The guys at Ethicoco were kind enough to send us a couple of sample bars for our review... and we're excited about it..
There are plenty of faux-milk chocolate brands in the UK now - Moo Free, Celtic/Choices and Plamil are the big three. They all use the same milk alternative though - rice powder. That means they all taste pretty similar. In 'the olden days of yore' (the 1990s), you could get chocolate with soya milk in too. Oat milk is new though.
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| Conching (Wikimedia, hover for attribution) |
Before we get to whether oat milk is successful, first consider this. Making chocolate from scratch is hard, and very few people do it. Ethicoco is one of only ten producers in the UK who actually make their own chocolate from cocoa beans. They roast the beans and conch and temper their own chocolate. Add to that, the development of a new faux-milk recipe, and we're already impressed.
So is it any good? We think it's very successful. It doesn't taste like Dairy Milk, but maybe that's a good thing. It's mild, creamy and just sweet enough - everything that faux milk chocolate should be. This isn't aimed at kids - the single source beans give that away, but not all grown ups like dark chocolate, or at least not all the time.
The bar has a very mild kind of cereal flavour in there, rather than an identifiable taste of oats. You probably wouldn't guess what the mystery ingredient was in a blind tasting, and it may even be the barley malt we're tasting, rather than the oats. Overall, the chocolate has a taste you might mistake for a foreign brand of milk chocolate - say American, if you're used to British chocolate.
Are Oats the future?
We'd like to see Ethicoco have a go at a kids' chocolate bar, maybe sweeter, and with a bigger dose of vanilla. (You know, if you smell a pack of Dairy Milk, it's the vanilla that hits you, not the cocoa). The oat milk recipe is very kid friendly anyway, and we think this oat milk thing could be a winner, for the future of vegan milk chocolate.
The Not-so-Good: Not enough vanilla for kids?
Veganoo Score: ★★★★★
Ethicoco - Oat Milk Dominican Republic - Vegan Milk Chocolate
Ethicoco - Oat Milk Dominican Republic - Vegan Milk Chocolate
Footnote: Ingredients
Here is the ingredients panel from the pack we reviewed.
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