This is a blast from the past. Chomp bars were everywhere here in the late seventies and eighties and were one of the cheapest chocolate bars you could buy. Still are in fact and a mother at my daughter’s school confided that these are her favourite naughty treats.
‘Confided’ is the right word because she’s probably about 25 years too old for the main Chomp target market unless she has a liking for cartoonish wrappers featuring a deranged mechanical dinosaur on the side and only seven measly percent cocoa solids.
This secretive mother is also on the trim side, so maybe I should not have been surprised to see how stingy the chocolate coating was on the bar when it was unwrapped. Half of it was so thin it was already cracking and falling off.
Then again, a glance beyond the cartoons revealed that it’s covered in the dreaded C word. No, not carob, but compounded chocolate. Still, I chomped on. It tasted chewy and sweet with a hint of salt in the caramel mix, building up to a powerhouse of sweetness that had me reaching for a glass of water. Or two. The chocolate was the least noticeable aspect being comprehensively overtaken by the intense sugar punch that was so mighty it made my fillings ache.
There’s supposed to be some wafer in there somewhere, but like the confounded compounded chocolate it was completely lost amongst the challengingly chewy caramel filling that left a slight metallic after taste.
This is best left to the kids, or better still, avoided entirely unless you’re completely starving and don’t have enough money to buy a better bar. In which case, wait until you get home and eat some better quality chocolate and encourage your kids to do the same. Life is too short to waste on a painfully sweet second-rate mess that still throws nearly six grams of fat at you even though it’s only a tiny 30 gram bar.
Not surprisingly, Cadbury don’t exactly put their brand anywhere prominent on this label, instead hiding their identity in miniscule print just about the sealed fold at the back. In even smaller print, they write: “Cadbury Means Quality.” Nope, not in this case it doesn’t.
These 60% dark chocolate slabs from Camaya are just two examples of what they’re producing for lovers of darker flavours.
The ginger and orange slab comes studded with small wedges of candied orange and has the ginger element concealed in the chocolate. There are plenty of little fragments of crystallised ginger here – enough to impart the warming flavour in every bite.
The chocolate itself is smooth and light on the palate and has a quite delicate set of flavours. Light, slightly citrus notes sit well with the ginger and orange but it’s the ginger that really throws itself out onto your palate. When eaten with a wedge of orange the two flavours are all over the chocolate, offering a flavour combination that’s fruity and warming on the tongue, but don’t expect to be able to discern the finer points of the cocoa flavours.
The second offering was a chilli slab. One onf my first ever Chocablog reviews was a chilli bar, and I’ve sampled a few since then, but this is the first time I’ve come across a bar which had an intact dried chilli sitting on the surface! I have to confess to allowing the seeds to fall from the shell before trying a bite of this bar.
The heat of the chilli is there the moment you pop a piece of this slab in your mouth – there’s no escape at all. As the chocolate starts to melt, the cocoa flavours start to come through the heat. Lightly citrus, slightly woody robust cocoa flavours flood out through the chilli heat to give a well rounded, bittersweet finish. The chocolate has a good mouthfeel and a clean finish.
This is definitely a bar for the seasoned chilli lover. There’s no escape from the heat with this slab, so if you’re of a delicate disposition or just don’t like hot foods, I’d avoid this one. On the other hand, if you like your chocolate a little fiery then I’d recommend tracking this down. It’ll certainly make your tongue tingle!
The winner of our Easter competition was Rebecca Virgin.
Unfortunately, Rebecca isn’t replying to emails at the moment, so this is simply a call for her to get in touch so Handy Candy can send her the prize.
Rebecca – if you’re reading, get in touch!
This hot chilli bar comes to us from Scorchio.co.uk – an online retailer of all things chilli-related – and is made exclusively for them by Cocoa Loco.
According to the packaging, it’s made with 0.3% Naga Jolokia chilli powder. That may not seem like a lot, but Wikipedia helpfully informs me that Naga Jolokia is the hottest chilli pepper in the world.
Still… it’s only 0.3%… it can’t be that hot, right..?
Hmmm. OW! Arrrgh! Ow! Ow! OWWW! Mmmm! Ow!
…was my reaction to slipping one tiny chunk into my mouth. This is hot stuff. Really hot stuff – right at the other end of the scale to the Thorntons chilli bar I reviewed recently.
You can guess by the very fact it’s made for a specialist chilli site, that this is more of a bar for chilli lovers than chocolate lovers. The heat is intense and almost overpowering. But there are actually some rather nice cocoa notes underneath all that heat – and although the label doesn’t give much away, it does state that it’s 73% cocoa solids, with the only other ingredients listed being sugar, vanilla and that chilli.
The one thing the label does have is a warning that it may cause skin and eye irritation. That’s something I haven’t seen on a chocolate bar before.
All in all, this is clearly made from quality ingredients, but it’s really more of a gimmick than anything else. It’s well known that chilli and chocolate go together well, but this is taking it to extremes – the kind of thing you’d buy to share with friends and see how much you can take, rather than for the enjoyment of the chocolate.
Or of course you could just remove the packaging and that warning and give it to an unsuspecting victim friend… not that I’d ever do such a thing… oh no…
