Thorntons Milk Chocolate With Banana
Say hello to yet another in the (seemingly endless) line of Thornton’s slabs. Honestly, I’m beginning to think there are as many Thornton’s slabs as there are Japanese KitKats, and that really is saying something.
This one uses 37% Ecuadorean cocoa milk chocolate and organic dried banana. The majority of the ingredients are either fairly traded, organic, or (in the case of the sugar, cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar and banana – both). Full marks all round for ingredients, as ever.
I’ve reviewed a handful of banana/chocolate combinations for Chocablog, and have always seemed to preface these reviews with a few lines expressing my opinion that this is a difficult combination to get right. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I’m sure there are many of you who enjoy banana and chocolate in all of its many variations, and if you do you’re very likely to enjoy this.
Each piece of this slab is packed with tiny pieces of dried banana. The good news is that it isn’t the brittle dried banana you might find in a wholefood shop. The bad news (for me at least) is that it tends to overwhelm most of the flavour of the chocolate which, when you consider that Thornton’s have gone to the trouble of selecting good quality cocoa from Ecuador, seems a bit pointless.
The banana makes up only 14% of the overall weight of this slab, but that’s quite a large percentage – remember that most salted chocolate contains only 1% salt or thereabouts. Once the chocolate has melted away you’re left with a fairly hefty amount of soft, chewy banana to chew on. The banana itself isn’t all that bad. It certainly dosn’t have that overpowering, sightly fermented taste that some banana confectionery seems to have. It’s just that this chocolate bar with banana is more banana than chocolate.
Given my wariness around banana chocolate (and my slightly negative opinion) I thought I’d offer it round a few friends and see what they thought. I’m afraid their reactions were very similar to my own, which did little for the chocolate but made me feel better about the way I felt when I first tried it. If you love banana and quite like chocolate, this is the bar for you. If you’re more interested in the taste of chocolate, I’d give this one a miss. As fruit and chocolate combinations go, it’s not the best thing I’ve tried. Not by a long
shot.
Information
- Buy it online from:
- Contains milk chocolate (37% cocoa solids).
- Cacao Origin: Ecuador
- Filed under banana, fairtrade, milk chocolate, organic, thorntons, uk.
I liked the banana chocolate they used to sell at Yautacha. Shame they’ve done away with all of it now.
I reviewed this on my blog recently and felt the same – the banana overwhelmed the chocolate, it was too strong. In my case, there were no chewy bits of banana at all, that I could detect, I’d almost have thought they pureed it and mixed it into the melted chocolate!
With the apricot and mango blocks, the chocolate was distinct and the fruit an extra dimension.
With the banana, it was like eating a chocolate banana muffin.
Hmmm…I wonder if this approach would work better with a dark chocolate, which might balance better with the sweetness of banana, and with such a chocolate that has a nice, slow melt so that you weren’t left with so many banana bits at the end.