Many of Mars UK’s biggest selling chocolate products are no longer suitable for vegetarians from this month because Masterfoods has inexplicably decided to start using animal rennet in its chocolate.
The affected products include:
- Mars Bar
- Snickers
- Twix
- Maltesers
- Bounty
- Mily Way
- Minstrels
…in other words, just about everything that Mars makes.
According to BBC News, Mars says this was a “principled decision”, but if you ask me it’s one of the most stupid business decisions I’ve ever seen. Not only does this preclude roughly 10% of people in the UK who call themselves vegetarian from eating Mars products, but it’s not going to win any friends with the rest of us who just don’t want squished up baby cows’ stomachs in our chocolate.
If you feel strongly about this issue, you might want to visit the Masterfood’s web site and leave them a nice comment.
My opinion? Well it’s quite simple really. I want chocolate in my stomach, not stomach in my chocolate.
(Thanks to Shabnam & Charlie for bringing this to my attention)
Another offering from the J. D. Gross / LIDL stable of chocolate (which, as we now know thanks to our astute and helpful readers, is made by Rausch).
So enthusiastic and knowledgeable are our readers that I received a comment about this particular brand before I had even had time to review it (thanks Ulli) so I thought it time I posted this in case any of you were wondering what this one is like.
As you can see, this particular variety comes in a handy ‘three-stick’ package, and is somewhat more expensive than an individual bar of J. D. Gross ‘Ecuador’ ( about 30% more expensive, in fact). Given the relatively low price of a bar, this is hardly great cause for concern – especially if you’re in the habit of shelling out £2 or more for the good stuff.
Now to my mind, 75% cocoa sits in the upper limits of palatable chocolate – any more than that and I tend to think of it as cooking chocolate, simply because at 80% or above there isn’t enough sweetness to cut the cocoa flavour. Anyone who eats high-cocoa content chocolate will also tell you that when you get above 65% cocoa a relatively low increase in cocoa content can make a huge difference in taste.
These bars are branded ‘Extra Bitter’, and the smell of them certainly hints at a dark, rich taste. The chocolate is almost black, and the first taste is definitely bitter on the tongue, but as the chocolate began to melt my mouth was flooded with a mixture of bittersweet cocoa flavours. The underlying taste is most definitely dark, rich and with a very pleasing bittersweet finish, with less of the sugariness that you sometimes find in other brands, and it has none of the fattiness that you sometimes find in cheaper brands (possibly due to the use of different types of fats?)
Overall, I would rate this as an excellent dark chocolate for everyday consumption. It’s very easy on the palate with a distinctive flavour, and at around 40p per bar, it’s certainly easy on the wallet! It will be interesting to see if Rausch decide to sell their chocolate at similar prices if and when thy launch in the UK, because chocolate of this quality could certainly be sold at a slightly higher price.
I’m sitting her with half a piece of Hershey’s Extra Dark 60% cacao chocolate melting in my mouth, and I still can’t decide if I like it or not.
I’m delighted to report that it tastes like chocolate. With only one exception (Dark Chocolate Kisses), every single piece of Hershey’s Chocolate I’ve tasted has made me screw up my face in horror. For some reason I always get an awful aftertaste, almost as though the bar had been stored in the wrong conditions, or near something powerful tasting, or just for too long.
My Polish grandmother would hoard sweets in her wardrobe for months on end, eventually presenting us with out of date ‘treats’ with a distinct whiff of camphor. It was always terrible having to drop them in the bin (after testing a in the vain hope she’d somehow managed to avoid turning chocolate to poo, of course). My Hershey’s eating experiences have always been somewhat similar.
“Oh, Hershey’s. Hmmm, well I’ll give it a go. Oh, no! Yuck!” and so on.
This time I can report that I have no such problem with these little squares of dark chocolate. They taste perfectly chocolate-like. My problem is that they contain an inordinately large amount of sugar. Perusing the list of ingredients and ‘serving size’ information, I was shocked to discover that a ‘serving’ (40g) is over 30% sugar! Everything else is there – good quality chocolate, vanilla, organic lecithin – but poor old Hershey’s seem unaware of adult palates.
What I think we have here is a US/European difference. Everyone knows that Europe produces an incredibly diverse range of chocolate from most of it’s countries; Belgium, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden all have long established chocolate makers who continue to create wonderful ranges of confectionery.
I’m sure there are chocolatiers working in the US who continue the European traditions and add their own twists and styles (and I’d love to hear from you!) but I get the impression that Hershey’s may well be starting this journey, that they have yet to grasp the differences between continents. Instead of the dark, rich, bittersweet tastes of European Dark chocolate, we seem to have an overly sweetened ‘youthful’ product which may well be aimed at the majority of American palates.
I’d love to see this product on offer with a significant sugar reduction, keeping the same ingredients and adding nothing more. If anyone from Hershey’s should happen to read this, I’d say ‘A’ for effort but you definitely need to drop some of the sweetness. This product might well get some of the milk chocolate eaters over to the dark side, but I doubt that anyone with a confirmed love of dark chocolate would make this a regular purchase.
Ask any British child of the 70s to name their favourite childhood chocolate bars and you can pretty much guarantee Curly Wurly will be right up there. Back in the day, there was nothing cooler than to be seen walking down the street munching on a giant bar of Cadbury goodness.
Unfortunately, in recent years Curly Wurly seems to have suffered the same fate as Creme Egg. It’s shrunk considerably. And I’m quite sure it’s not just that I’ve got bigger.
But what is Curly Wurly? Well, it’s very, very simple. It’s a long, flat lattice of caramel covered in milk chocolate. Kind of a squashed double helix. In fact, if God had experimented with making DNA out of chocolate and caramel then accidentally sat on it, we’d probably have ended up with Curly Wurly a few hundred million years earlier.
The caramel is thick – almost toffee like – and very, very chewy. It gets softer as it warms in your mouth, but you’re pretty much guaranteed it’ll get stuck in your teeth. Which is part of what makes it so good.
The chocolate is typical Cadbury milk chocolate and works perfectly with the caramel. It melts away before the caramel, giving you two distinct flavour ‘hits’.
But what really makes Curly Wurly special is the shape. There’s nothing else quite like it. Even in it’s modern, shrunken form (it’s only 26 grams), it’s just about the longest chocolate bar you’ll find in the shops.
Curly Wurly is delicious, incredibly chewy, and more importantly, it’s iconic. There’s nothing else quite like it. It’s just a shame it’s not quite as big as it used to be.
But if you’re really desperate for a bigger Curly Wurly, you could try making your own 1 meter long version…
