Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

“I mean, sure, it’s good, but it’s BETTER when there’s booze inside of it.”

~American chocolate consumers

America loves chocolate more than just about everyone.  Sure the Swiss might have us outgunned, but we still eat about 10 pounds of chocolate a year, per person.  We don’t want to look it up because we have a specific AFFotD search engine that locks your computer for two days if you try to search for anything about vegetables, but we’ll just assume that this means Americans eat more chocolate every year than they do salad.  You’d think chocolate is a relatively easy to acquire food item, but it’s actually surprisingly arduous to turn cacao beans into deliciousness—they’re naturally bitter, so they have to be fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted before their shell is removed and the remaining nibs are ground into pure chocolate in its “rough” form, which is then separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter, which is mixed in varying proportions, and often combined with sugar and milk.

If you stopped reading once you saw the word “fermented” while your mind drifted to visions of alcohol dancing in your head, well, it did for us too, so that’s totally understandable.  The key is, chocolate is everywhere, and mankind has been ingesting it in one form or another since about 1400 BC, and while America doesn’t lay claim to any particularly revolutionary adaptation of it (with the possible exception of Hershey’s) just about every straight man in America has bought chocolate to appease their stressed out girlfriends, and most of them have subsequently gotten in trouble for saying something along the lines of, “Hey babe, this should help with the PMSing, right?”

It shouldn’t be surprising that we have more types of chocolate than “dark, milk, and white.”  It’s not even surprising that some variations of chocolate might do a disservice to the original treat.  We’re not here to focus on that.  We’re here to tell you, the intrepid American who just finally finished the last of the base of your giant chocolate bunny you got for Easter, five of the strangest flavored chocolates in the world.  Because you’ll probably want to eat a few of them, and you’ll definitely want to purposely avoid at least one.

Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

If we didn’t have multiple kinds of chocolate to eat, we wouldn’t have box of chocolate manufacturers going around finding ways to trick us into eating the coconut one when all we wanted was the toffee.  But whenever we achieve variety in the things we love, there are bound to be strange and occasionally horrifying missteps.  Like the following.  Granted, we’d eat all of them, but that’s largely because sometimes when you get wasted you really want some chocolate.

Tabasco Chocolate

This is easily the one product on this list that most people would absolutely eat, unless they don’t like spicy foods, chocolate, or joy.  Tabasco is an inherently American product that makes everything taste better, from eggs to pizza.  Plus, it makes mosquitoes explode.  It’s magic spicy vinegar from Louisiana, and apparently you can buy dark chocolate that’s been infused with it, because fans of spicy foods can find a way to put hot sauce in anything.

There are places that make fancy hot chocolate that’s mixed with chili peppers, so for people who are really into chocolate, it isn’t really surprising that this product exists.  That being said, someone still had to take a look at a product used extensively on savory foods and decide, hey, let’s put this in some chocolate.  America is so great, you guys.

Tobacco Chocolate

This one actually seems gross.  People at least eat Tabasco sauce.  Yes, normally it’s mixed with other foods, and the one time we had our staffer chug an entire bottle of the stuff he had to take down half a gallon of milk before dry heaving into our coffee pot, but at the same time no one’s gonna get mad at you if you pour a bunch in a bowl of soup.  But if you sprinkled tobacco in someone’s soup?  The response most likely would be, “What the fuck man, why did you just ruin my soup, what is wrong with you!?”

You smoke tobacco, or chew it if you’re a baseball pitcher in the 1960’s, or press it to your lower lip if you’re, like, really redneck.  You don’t eat it, the same way you don’t smoke chocolate (and if you tried you’d probably just end up with, well, melted chocolate).  Some people say that the notes sort of go together, and that a dark chocolate can go well with a fine cigar, but that’s like saying that you’d want to eat a cake made out of shoes because you like the smell of leather.

Chocolate Pop Rocks

Yes, this product in question is a bunch of pop rocks covered in chocolate, though there are other candy makers that make pop rocks chocolate as well.  This one has us on the fence, because while we love pop rocks, we’re not sure if creating chocolate that explodes and fizzles in your mouth would make the chocolate taste better, or just make it more terrifying.  All we know is that if we were to buy this product, we’d go around to unsuspecting people and have them eat it without telling them it’s pop rocks, and then document their subsequent freak outs when the chocolate in their mouth starts feeling like its full of bang snaps.

Camel Milk Chocolate

Al Nassma is a chocolatier founded and owned by the ruler of Dubai to supply the world chocolate made with camel milk as requested by exactly zero sane people.  They bill themselves as the only provider of camel milk chocolate, which would make sense because that’s a stupid idea.  You can’t just pick a random animal, milk it, add that milk to chocolate, and then expect us to think you’re anything but a crazy rich Sheikh with a camel farm and way too much time on your hands.  That’s pretty much the Middle Eastern equivalent of the New York subway system coming out with rat milk chocolate sponsored by that one episode of The Simpsons where that actually happened.

Cheese and Onion Chocolate

Oh God, what have you done, Ireland?  What on Earth have you decided to do?  Yes, this is a chocolate bar that is cheese and onion flavored.  Of course it’s from the United Kingdom, because you can’t think of any other country where that would seem like a good idea, and of course it sold out of the first 100,000 bars they produced already because clearly there are forces in this Universe that exist only to upset our not-so-delicate sensibilities.  We’re so mad that this exists that we can’t even wrap our minds around the fact that it’s popular.  Now we know how our parents felt when we first came home with that Backstreet Boys CD.