The best types of dark chocolate, and the ones we reach for

Two-ingredient single origin

Cacao and sugar from one place. Nothing to hide behind, which is the point.

Without added cocoa butter the bar is a little firmer and the melt a little slower, and the flavor of the origin comes through with nothing in the way. This is the style that made American craft chocolate, and still the one makers use to show off.

Start with Dandelion's Zorzal Comunitario 70% from the Dominican Republic (the maker's notes: chocolate cake, yogurt, tamarind). Fruition's Dominican Nacional 77% runs to walnut, tobacco and fudge. Dick Taylor calls its 78% Vanuatu bold and wild, with an almost tobacco-like richness.

Single estate and named fermentaries

One step past single origin: the wrapper names the farm, the co-op or the fermentary. Fermentation and drying set most of a bean's flavor, so the people doing it matter as much as the trees.

Goodnow Farms is the clearest example. Its Asochivite bar comes from wild trees harvested by Q'eqchi' Maya farmers in San Juan Chivite, Guatemala, who ferment and dry the beans in their own village. Its El Carmen bar comes from small family farms near Matagalpa, Nicaragua, fermented at Cacao Bisiesto. Both are 77 percent, and they taste nothing alike: green banana and mango in one, caramel and raisin in the other.

At the far end of the scale is a bar from one farm. Mānoa's Waiāhole bar is made once a year from roughly 100 trees on the Reppun brothers' farm on Oʻahu.

High percentage, 80 to 100

Less sugar, more cacao, and nowhere for a bad bean to hide. A well-made 85 percent should taste like dark fruit and roasted nuts, with bitterness in the background. A poor one tastes like burnt coffee and leaves your mouth dry.

At 100 percent there is no sugar at all, and the bean has to carry everything. Raaka makes its 100% from unroasted Kokoa Kamili beans from Tanzania, with a little of their cocoa butter, and describes it as creamy, bright and strong with a tingling fruity bite. Fruition's Colombia Tumaco 85% (brownie, butterscotch, blackberry) and Castronovo's Arhuacos 80% (soursop, white grape, walnut, black pepper, green tea) show how much flavor survives with very little sugar.

Go slowly. Use a smaller square than usual and let it sit on your tongue.

Heirloom cacao

The Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund works with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service and the Fine Chocolate Industry Association. It gives an Heirloom designation to cacao that passes three tests: a tasting panel, a visit to the site, and a genetic analysis. The fund wants to find and protect trees with exceptional flavor before they are cut down for higher-yield clones.

The designation is rare enough to be worth noticing on a wrapper. Ritual Chocolate's Madagascar 75% comes from Bejofo Estate in the Sambirano Valley, which holds HCP designation #15, awarded in 2018. The maker tastes citrus, raspberry and roasted peanuts in it. Ritual's Belize 75% is made from Maya Mountain Cacao beans, which also hold the designation.

An heirloom designation says the genetics and the flavor were checked by people who care. That is a very good start, and the maker still has to make the bar well.

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Bright, fruity origins

Some places grow cacao that tastes like a fruit bowl. Madagascar's Sambirano Valley is the classic: red berries and citrus, with an acidity people either love or need a minute with. Dick Taylor's 72% Madagascar, from Bertil Akesson's estate, is a good place to start (molasses, orange, toast).

Tanzania is the other. Kokoa Kamili, a fermentary in the Kilombero Valley, buys fresh beans from local farmers and ferments them centrally, and a lot of makers buy from it. Dandelion's Kokoa Kamili 70% tastes of guava, Turkish yogurt and fudge, according to the maker. Askinosie's 72% Mababu, from a farmer group in the Kyela district, runs to strawberry, blueberry and graham.

If you think you do not like dark chocolate, try one of these. The bitterness most people expect is not where these bars live.

Nibs and inclusions, done with restraint

A dark bar with something in it can be great or a disguise. The test is whether you can still taste the chocolate.

Cacao nibs are the most natural inclusion, since they are just roasted cacao in pieces. Castronovo takes it somewhere unusual: its 68% bar uses Arhuaco cacao from Colombia studded with nibs of Theobroma bicolor, a wild relative of cacao called macambo or jaguar cacao, bought from a women's cooperative in Chazuta, Peru. Flake salt is the other classic. French Broad's 70% Sea Salt bar uses flake salt from Spicewalla in Asheville.

We skip bars where the inclusion is the headline and the chocolate is the delivery system.

Where the old three-type story fits

You will still see Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario on wrappers. They are useful shorthand and a simplification. A 2008 study of 1,241 trees found ten genetic clusters of cacao, among them Marañón, Nacional, Amelonado and Criollo. Most of the world's cacao is Amelonado, a Forastero type grown largely in West Africa, with a bold, classic cocoa flavor. Fine flavor cacao, mostly from Latin America, is under 5 percent of world production by ICCO's count.

On a wrapper, a genetic name is a hint, not a verdict. Fermentation and the maker's roast move flavor at least as much.