Sainsbury Belgian Salted Caramels Selection

Ah, the salted caramel. Once considered to be something a little wild and crazy, this particular chocolate has come a long way in the past five years or so, from being something one could only find at high end chocolatiers to this supermarket assortment. Yes, salted caramels have gone mainstream.

So what have Sainsburys done with this little ball of gooey loveliness? Well for a start they’ve opted to use surprisingly low-cacao content chocolate for the shells. The milk chocolate has a mere 30% cacao while the ‘dark’ version weighs in with a weedy 49%, which in my book makes it bittersweet, not dark. (White chocolate is not chocolate, of course.)

The shells are quite thick, which was a pleasant surprise, and the salted caramel was in no way offensive. I could have done with a little more salt, but other than that it was a good caramel with a smooth mouth feel and good flavour.

The problem is the chocolate. It’s average at best. Very average, and of course less cacao in your chocolate can only mean more of other things, mainly sugar. Every 100g of these chocolates contains 50.5g of sugar.

And then there’s the margarine.

Margarine?

“Palm Fat, Water, Coconut Oil, Soya Oil, Rapeseed Oil, Sunflower Oil . . .”

How much oil can they cram in here? Engine Oil? Tanning Oil?

To be frank, at this point I was quite happy not to eat another, and I understood why they were so reasonably priced. It’s because they’re made with a lot of cheap, nasty stuff that I’m quite keen to avoid eating. This is the sort of fat & sugar laden chocolate that is contributing to our national obesity problems, and as such I would personally avoid these like the plague.

I suggest you do likewise.

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