Ruby Chocolate: Your New Favourite Flavour

A Swiss company, Barry Callebaut, has recently developed a brand new type of chocolate: ruby chocolate, a pink coloured chocolate with a supposed berry-like sweet but slightly sour taste. Now to be clear, this isn’t simply white chocolate with berry flavouring. This is a brand new type of chocolate, made from ruby cocoa beans that have a naturally fruity flavour making it only the fourth basic variety of chocolate to have been developed.

While this is still very much in early phases of development by Barry Callebaut, this does not mean it won’t be appearing in a commercially available mainstream product in the near future, as the company develops new products for some of the chocolate giants of the world such as Cadbury and Hershey’s.

The immediately obvious combination that could enhance a well established existing product is that of the naturally sweet and tangy ruby chocolate with the filling of dried fruit and nut. Imagine that double hit of beautifully sour fruit with the earthy flavour of crunchy nuts, an indulgent mixture of flavours and textures just waiting to be produced and bought in droves by people crying out for the next big thing. Why replace the base chocolate altogether though when you could combine it with the other existing varieties? A bar made of a mixture of white and ruby chocolate, alternating between the super sweet white chocolate smoothness with a hit of tart ruby chocolate cutting through seems like a flavour explosion that should be happening as soon as humanly possible.

Another key feature of ruby chocolate that is very much worth mentioning is that it can be easily made as a naturally low sugar product, with the natural sweetness of the ruby cocoa beans being more than enough to produce a perfectly palatable treat. Low-calorie low-sugar snacks that would traditionally use dark chocolate as an ingredient could start using ruby chocolate to take the edge off the bitter dark chocolate flavour. In this vein, it could easily be conceivable that ruby chocolate could find its way into the mainstream market through the health food sector and growing out from there as its delicious potential is realised.

To round off an article about a new ingredient that just happens to be chocolate, the only area of any real importance left to be discussed is desserts. Chocolate and raspberry is a well-loved combination, and few can pass up on the allure of a rich chocolate pudding or brownie either loaded with deliciously sweet baked-in raspberries or smothered in a luxurious berry sauce.

So what if the chocolate already had the flavour of berries, enhanced with that tangy raspberry coulis and balanced out with a bittersweet dark chocolate sauce on the side or even a melting middle… Surely I’m not the only one who can’t wait for this to be a decadent reality? Only time will tell how well ruby chocolate will be received and utilised once it becomes available to the culinary creatives of the world, which will hopefully occur sooner rather than later for all our chocolate-loving-sakes.

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