Blue Apron Foods

42-43. Blue Apron Foods
814 Union Street between 7th and 8th Avenues (Park Slope, Brooklyn)



Logistically, it’s great when one location offers two items from the TONY list. Located just around the corner of 7th avenue on Union Street, lies Blue Apron Foods, a small gourmet foods shop, offering everything from cheese to olive oil to chocolate to chorizo. After a quick browse around the store, I was guided to the two items on the list, Askinosie chocolate and palacio mild chorizo.





Askinosie chocolate, named after owner Shawn Askinosie, bills itself as the first small batch chocolate maker in the US to press their own cocoa and as the only maker of natural cocoa powder. After removing the biodegradable packaging which just felt a little pretentious, I was left with a chocolate bar with generally the same dimensions as your standard Hershey bar. The similarities stop there. The 70% dark chocolate bar has a deep flavor with earthy, fruity tastes mixed in. While I wanted to simply eat the entire bar at once, I couldn’t help but let each piece melt and enjoy the flavors just a bit longer. The 52% milk chocolate trades off the intensity of the chocolate for some more pronounced fruit flavors. Sure, for $7.50 I can’t imagine buying these often, but it’s certainly worth it for the chocolate fanatic in your life.





The Palacio mild chorizo at only $1.50 per piece is considerably easier on the wallet. While each sausage is only about 4” in length, it packs a smoky and spicy flavor into each bite and a few seconds in the microwave made the flavors come out even more. The only problem I had was that it was incredibly oily and slid across my plate which made slicing through the natural casing a fairly difficult task. If Blue Apron Foods wasn’t so far away, I could definitely see myself picking up a few pieces more often.