I have two bars today from Hebert’s.  The Rocky Road and the Cookies and Cream bars.

I found these two bars in Massachusetts when I was heading to Cape Cod.  The packing is more like a “sports nutrition bar” than a chocolate bar.  Especially since it is completely sealed and not wrapped in paper with foil inside.  I think I have seen them now here in NY state as well.

The first thing that caught my eye was the “fully loaded” statement across the top.  So I looked at the ingredients to see what they were loaded with.  Real vanilla (good sign!).  Partially hydrogenates oils (bad sign!).  But then I saw (on the cookies and cream one) titanium dioxide.

Titanium dioxide?

Yes.  For those who don’t know what this is, titanium dioxide (TiO2) is a metal oxide which is extremely stable.  It is the white opacifying agent that is in most paints.  This is what was used to replace lead oxide in paint, which was definitely a good thing.  Its also the white they use in “clown white” for face paint.  Its a marvelous compound.  I know that TiO2 is an approved food pigment and that it is entirely nonreactive inside your body.  I had just never seen it in a chocolate/candy bar before.

Because TiO2 is so non-reactive, purification is done by a special reaction.  They first react it with chlorine gas to make TiCl4, which is a gas, which can be easily purified as other junk in the raw TiO2 ore fall out.  Then the TiCl4 is reacted with oxygen to yield extremely pure TiO2.  The reaction with oxygen is spontaneous and was used during WWI (WWII) to create smoke screens since the TiO2 falls out of the gas-phase reaction as a very fine powder.  Unfortunately, hydrogen chloride (HCl) is a by product of the reaction, which becomes hydrochloric acid upon contact with water (such as on your skin, in your nose, in your eyes, in your lungs, etc.).  Walking through such a smoke screen would not be very pleasant.

So, I thought it was kinda funny to see one of these bars fully loaded with TiO2.  As far as I can determine, they use the TiO2 to make the “cream” part of the cookies and cream, look more white.   Hmmm.

So here’s what the bar looks like.

That’s actually the “back side” of the bar.  The front is just smooth with “Fully Loaded” on it.  My guess is that when they make this, they pour the chocolate into the mold, and then dump the cookies and cream bits on the top while its still soft.

The taste is ok.  Very sugary.  Like eating a giant M&M, with the crunchy bits of cookies and cream.  The white bits are crunchy like a piece of sugar.  This bar may as sugary as the Wonka bar, but not as nasty as that.  Alot of people might like this, but its far too sweet for me.

The Rocky Road bar has a similar appearance to the Cookies and Cream, but a very different taste.  Not quite as sweet and not as crunchy.  You can definately taste the walnuts, and looking closer I see that the white chunks on the Rocky Road bar are walnut bits.  This one is ok, but a little too sweet for me.

That’s it.  Have a good weekend!

I had a chance to try the Jembrana bar from Amano Chocolate this week.  This bar is made solely from beans grown in Bali, in the Jembrana region (typically called a “single bean origin” bar).  I don’t think I have had a bar yet made from beans in Bali.

Sorry for the terrible pictures of this bar.  I had trouble getting the lighting right.  Can anyone see the sneaky photographers reflection?  :D

This chocolate was (once again) a delight to taste.  Serious dark flavor, but not biting, and the bitter doesn’t hang in your mouth, it just fades softly.  Very smooth and quite delightful.  I especially liked how it melted so nicely.  Many 70% cacao bars that I have tried, have been a bit waxy in that they were very slow to melt, so you felt like you had a chocolate flavored plastic piece in your mouth.  This bar begins to melt instantly so you can enjoy the chocolate goodness right away.

Another thing about the chocolate I get from Amano is that it is wrapped well.  If your chocolate is wrapped loosely or with a piece of cardboard inside (as I have seen elsewhere), then it ends up tasting funny because chocolate absorbs odors really well.  You need to be careful in your wrapping.  These bars have a nice foil wrapper inside, no cardboard.

Once again, another winner from Amano Chocolates!

OH!  And guess what I found on YouTube!  I found a video of Art Pollard (founder and chief chocolate Czar of Amano Chocolate) talking about his company and making chocolate.  The video has some fabulous footage of his chocolate manufacturing operations and he talks about making chocolate, chocolate business, and growing beans.  He shows a couple different kinds of cocao pods (and yes, I was jealous because I have to wait until my trees mature).  As I watched the video, I couldn’t help notice the absolute joy in Art Pollard’s eyes as he talked about making chocolate and the art and science that goes into it.  All I could think is that this guy really loves his work.

Happy Chocolate Friday!

I bought these two items because they were so intriguingly strange, I just had to try them.  I’m sure the marketing people are tickled pink about that.

The first one is “chocolate mix Skittles”. Yup, chocolate.  You know Skittles (made by our good friends at Mars).  Skittle are the tangy, fruity, chewy candies that are generally enjoyable to eat and have cool commercials on TV.  Well, they actually made chocolate flavored ones (If you listen closely, you can hear the whirrrr sound of Forrest Mars spinning in his grave).  Same chewy consistency, but now in S’mores, Vanilla (how did that get in with chocolate?), Chocolate Caramel, Chocolate Pudding, and Brownie Batter flavors.

So I tried eating each one and they all tasted about the same, that is, awful.  I think with my eyes closed, I would be hard pressed to taste the difference between them, with the exception of the Brownie Batter, which seems to have a faint nutty flavor.  Even so, they are just really, really gross, not even resembling anything remotely chocolate. Save your money, save your tastebuds, save yourselves, skip this one please.

As if that wasn’t enough, the next thing I bought was Wonka Tinglerz.  I have to point out that, in the past, anything I have bought with the name “Wonka” on it has turned out to taste horrendously bad.  Typically it has excessive amounts of sugar and very little chocolate flavor, which is so disappointing because that movie makes chocolate look so wonderful (the movie with Gene Wilder, not the eminently creepy Johnny Depp doing his Michael Jackson imitation).

Wonka, as you know, is a brand of Nestle, whom I feel spend far too much time making things other than chocolate (e.g. pet food).  As I was spying on their website, I came across this statement:

“Nestlé is…the world’s foremost Nutrition, Health and Wellness company.”

It made me laugh out loud because, seriously?  Nestle?  More so than all those silly pharmaceutical companies, making those silly little drugs and researching cancer and stuff?  Thank goodness for Nestle selling dog food and ice cream, because without that, we’d all be dead.  Seriously?  Shut up Nestle.

Speaking of shut up, the Tinglerz are just what you suspect: chocolate covered Pop Rocks.  Remember Pop Rocks?  Those weird candies from the 70′s that fizzle in your throat and stuff?  They were a fun novelty at the time, but then everyone got sick of the gross flavor and eventually found the popping feeling to be damn annoying.  They stopped manufacturing them when angry mobs began forming outside the factory.  I think Kraft bought the brand and now it is owned by some other small company (probably someplace far away from the crowds with torches and pitchforks). The flavors were gross back then, but someone at Nestle (the Nutrition Health and Wellness Company) realized that chocolate has such a strong flavor, that it would mask the gross Pop Rock taste.

Let me be honest.  They still taste awful.  Once you get over I-can’t-believe-I’m-eating-Pop-Rocks-again feeling, you realize that they taste horrendously bad and you have to run for something to rinse the taste out of your mouth.  Blech!!!  The combination of chocolate with Pop Rocks was a horrendous idea, and we can only hope that people with pitchforks and torches are able to locate those responsible and bring them to justice.

None of these things are really “chocolate”.  They have the word “chocolate” on the wrappers, but they are far from it.  I just tried them because they looked odd.  I hope you can appreciate the sacrifice I am making on your behalf.

These are two more chocolate bars I bought in Korea.  They were vaguely familiar to me already.  The KicKer bar looks like the KitKat bar here in the US.  Not surprisingly, it tastes just like like the KitKat bar also, with the exception that it seems to be thicker on the chocolate, and less on the wafer stuff inside.  The chocolate also is bit more sugary.  I am also hoping that they do not contain melamine.  As it turns out, Kit Kat bars in Korea do contain melamine, but Kic Ker bars apparently do not, at least according to this website.

The other bar I have heard alot about on the web.  The name is just odd.  I guess it was meant to sound like “crunchy”.  I have always wanted to try it.  As it turns out, its like a Nestle Crunch bar, only with 10 times more rice.  So its very light and has a strong rice taste to it.  Once again, I am hoping for no melamine.  According to this pdf document, it has satisfactory levels of melamine.  I’m hoping that means zero.

So that’s it for today.  I think I’ve eaten enough chocolate this morning.  Please pardon me while I continue with my post-Thanksgiving coma.

I bought some chocolate while I was in Korea.  Well, I THOUGHT I bought some chocolate (can anyone translate Korean?).  I picked out this box on the shelf because it had a picture of cacao pods on it.  I knew they were some sort of cookie, but there’s cacao pods on it, so it HAD to be chocolate somehow.

I was wrong.

They are not chocolate.  They are some kind of mushy, crumbly, ginger cookie with a spongy jelly center and so unchocolate-like that I think corn chips would be more chocolatey than these.  I can’t even describe the level of disappointment and heartbreak I felt after tasting these.

Oh, sure, they are good enough for cookies, but when you bite into something, expecting it to tast like chocolate, and it ends up tasting like some giner cookie, it rips your very soul from your body.

Who the heck eats ginger cookies anyway?  People who hate chocolate, that’s who.  I find them everywhere.  Sure they seem nice enough at first, but then after talking with them you realize they aren’t who they pretend to be.  Chocolate-haters.

Fortunately, the Koreans were able to redeem themselves by selling chocolate in a can.

Oh yes!  I was very excited to see this little gem on the shelf.  It was about $5 for this baby, but well worth it.  I mean, c’mon, chocolate in an air-tight can.  Nice!

I’ll tell you why this excites me.  You see, chocolate is usually wrapped in paper with a foil wrap inside and a piece of cardboard to keep it rigid.  Well, the problem with that is that the chocolate has access to the air, and it absorbs smells from the air.  Also, it becomes susceptible to humidity too.  BUT, if you put it into a can, no more issues.  I liked this alot.

So the can has a little plastic seal on the top that you pull off to reveal the bits inside.  Now unlike the previous item, this one really was chocolate.  Heck, it even said chocolate on the can, rather than some deceptive picture. 

These were actually pretty good.  I liked the texture and the taste.  It wasn’t spectacular, but its wasn’t a Hershey milk chocolate bar either.  A slight aftertaste, which is probably vanillin.  Reading the label on the front, its talking about 50 mg of something.  But 50 mg of what?  I’m thinking it is antioxidants or something like that.  There’s even a warning label on the side telling you something about 25 C, which I take to mean don’t go over that temperature or your chocolate will be mush.

I happened to find a small word on the side near the expiration date (and no, it is not an “expiry” date).  The word wass “HAITAI”, which I first thought was the country, before I realized I couldn’t spell.

It turns out that its the name of a Korean confectionary company, Haitai Confectionary.  One of their plants is in Cheonan, which is where I bought this.  Looking on the site, I didn’t find this product, but its possible that it is only distributed by them.  They even have a page talking about their R&D facility.  Only 1 PhD?  Aren’t these people serious?

Anyway, that’s all I have for now.  If anyone out there can read Korean, I’d certainly love a translation of any of these packages.

I bought a few of the Choxie chocolates I’ve been meaning to try. I wait until they are on sale because they are ridiculously overpriced. But I was in luck last week, they did have some on sale. So I picked up the Dark Chocolate Cocoa Nib Truffle Bar and the Dark Chocolate Ceylon Spic Bar.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that every “spice” chocolate I have ever tried has been horrendous. This may be true, but I’m willing to give it a try in the name of science and Chocolate Friday.

I decided to try this one and type as I am tasting it, without editing because I want to have my very first thoughts recorded rather than after thoughts. The Ceylon spice bar doesn’t say exactly which spices they use, except for the front description that says Ceylon cinnamon and piquant pepper and cocoa nibs. Ceylon cinnamon (which is common cinnamon) comes from the plant Cinnamomum zeylanicum, where Ceylon is the former name of Sri Lanka from which is originates. But Ceylon makes it sound fancy, and chocolate is all about the experience. Real vanilla. Yea!

So here we go with my thoughts.

1. A foil wrapped pouch! The chocolate is not in the traditional foil wrapper, but a sealed pouch. Maybe to keep the flavor in?
2. smells like regular chocolate
3. tastes like…
4. i can taste a little tingle
5. uh oh. tingle in the back of my mouth
6. big crunchy cocoa nibs
7. ha! Very, very slight spicy to it. In the back of my throat, but not burning.

That was very good! I was expecting the spiciness to get stronger (like others) but it never did. I’m very sensitive to hot foods. This has a slight spice, but not overpowering. I’m really pleased with this. I was expecting something horrible. I couldn’t really taste any cinnamon though. When I’ve used that in the past, the chocolate always covers the flavor.

The truffle bar was very good also. Very smooth, not too bitter, so if you don’t usually like dark chocolate, you will probably like this one. The cocoa nibs were pretty scarce in this bar even though it says on the front that it has them. I really like cocoa nibs, so that was a little disappointing. Apparently, the inside is filled with “dark chocolate truffle”. I can see the difference looking at the cross section, so maybe its a lighter chocolate with more sugar? Again, like the Ceylon bar, this one has real vanilla. Nice! Stupid bit of trivia about this bar: it has a trapezoidal cross section.

Target did an excellent job selecting these for their Choxie brand. I don’t think I would buy the spicy one again, just because I am not so into spicy, but for people who do like spicy this is definately a bar to try. I would recommend the truffle bar to anyone if its on sale (normally about $5).

I was in Target this week and spent a few minutes digging through their assortment of chocolate. Most of it is not so very special, but I spotted a new variety from Mars, more specifically, a Dove product.

At first they looked like the regular Dove chocolates, but then I noticed the packaging looked different. The “smooth” milk chocolate was now labeled “Beautiful” and the “rich” dark chocolate was now labeled “Vitalize”. Closer inspection revealed that these two chocolates were the same as before only now they were VITAMIN FORTIFIED!

I’m kind of on the fence about vitamins these days, especially since that Copenhagen study came out saying that people who took multivitamins were more likely to die early than the non-vitamin folks. I don’t know why we all feel we need more vitamins. Maybe if all we eat is french fries and doughnuts, then adding vitamins is warranted.

Apparently, the milk chocolate has extra vitamin C and E in it. I checked the old label and indeed it has more. Plus the ingredient list shows it has been added. So now you get 10% of the US RDA of each of calcium, vitamin E, biotin, vitamin C, niacin, and zinc in 5 pieces of the milk chocolate. Swallow down 50 and you are good for the day (just ignore the 2200 calories). So how does it taste? I don’t care for it. There’s anodd fruity smell to the chocolate, like its a filled chocolate candy. It almost smells like the chocolate candies you get in a box. Like the chem lab smelled in college when they were doing ester synthesis. It lacks that familiar taste of Dove milk chocolate. The flavor seems really bland. If the regular Dove milk tasted like this, I would think it was spoiled or very old.

The dark chocolate has “energy releasing B vitamins”. The label says you get 10% of calcium, thiamine, B6, pantanoic acid, riboflavin, and biotin. Same 5 pieces per serving. The dark is pretty bad. It has a strong medicine taste in the background which lingers in your mouth long after you are done eating it. Not pleasant, not at all.

Some time in the past 10 years, marketing departments decided we all need lots more vitamins. They vitamin fortify everything. There’s even water with vitamins and people buy it by the 6-pack and chug down bottle after bottle. Its become a completely frantic marketing frenzy. I think by adding vitamins to candy, it somehow feeds (pun!) our need to justify what we are eating, rather than eating better. We feel good when someone tells us we don’t have to change a thing to eat better. Chocolate has become health food, and now people feel like they are eating themselves healthy. It just doesn’t work like that.

I’m really disappointed to see Mars take the low road like this. Its a stupid gimmick and the chocolate came out pretty bad in the end anyway. They need to just stick with good chocolate and fire the doofuses in the marketing department. I’d be happy to go help them out. Mars? If you’re reading this? Call me. We’ll do lunch.

I received a long awaiting package in the mail yesterday from far across the sea.  Thanks, Jack!  :)

I tried a couple last night, being very mindful of not overdoing it as this is the first chocolate I’ve had in a month.  The first one was the Alpia Alpenmilch, which is a milk chocolate made by Alpia.  If you know German, have a look at the site, it looks kinda funny.

I tried a small piece last night and then more this morning with breakfast.  It has a very mild chocolate flavor.  If you are used to the Hershey “cow” taste, this is very different from it.  They add whey to the chocolate, which I seem to find in alot of the German chocolates that describe it relating to the Alps.  Seriously.  I’m thinking that its a type of flavor people come to expect or something.  The thing I find funny about this is the color of the packaging.  Very different marketing as opposed to the US, because in the US, almost every chocolate bar is in brown wrapping.  Something pink would be expected to be strawberry flavored.  Curious.  I liked the chocolate.  Yes, it have vanillin but the flavor is not apparent in this bar.

The next one was a Lindt product I had never seen.

It was their Creola bar, which I don’t think they sell in the US since it isn’t on their US website.  The German website is being revised so I couldn’t get details on the product.  Basically its a long narrow bar with milk chocolate on the outside and a white creme inside with cocoa nibs.  Altavista Babelfish just about choked when I asked to the translate “Splinttern aus Edel Cacoabohnen” which I think is “nibs of fine cocoa beans”.  The taste reminds me of a chocolate truffle from an Italian company I had back in Michigan.  We got these as gifts from a vendor and some had this flavor, only those had some type of rice instead of the nibs.  This bar is very addicting.  There is a strange aftertaste in this one but from what I can translate on the wrapper, it uses vanilla extract and not vanillin, although there is a word “aroma” which Babelfish calls “flavour” and that may be vanillin.  Not sure.

So, excellent cool stuff from far away that I would never have seen in my life otherwise.  Thanks again, Jack!

In other chocolate news, Godiva is for sale.  Apparently, Cambell’s Soup who owns them is trying to shed the unhealthy image of candy and focus on MSG and sodium filled soups instead.  Lots of potential buyers out there.  The article points at Wrigley and Hershey.  My money’s on Hershey out of those two, since Hershey has been pushing very hard to grab some of the fine chocolate business.  While Godiva is no Valrhona, it has a certain level of sophistication associated with it (even if it is sold in the mall) that might help Hershey.

I was curious if Cadbury Schweppes was eying Godiva too, although you may have heard they have some other troubles to deal with.  Apparently, they had to recall some chocolate for salmonella contamination.  You might want to check your shelf in case you have one of those bars hiding somewhere.  They had to recall about a million bars and they were fined £1m.  Somebody find out what the conversion to dollars is, but I bet its alot.  I think Cadbury has their soft drink business up for sale right now, maybe they are saving up for Godiva?

I was in the store a while ago and came across something chocolate related. I say “related” because it could have been for anything, but it just happen to be related to chocolate. It was a can of hot chocolate that heats itself. Hillside Hot Cocoa comes in a can that you “activate” to heat it up.

Here’s how you do it.

Flip the can over and there’s a pop-top on the bottom.

Remove the pop-top to reveal a plastic “button”.

Its not really a button-button, more like a knob. Anyway, press down on that and the green liquid you see inside flows out – into someplace.

Then you sit and wait about 3-4 minutes. On the side is a little pink dot that tells you if its warm or not. If you are like me, you don’t like to wait for pink dots. You get out your digital thermometer and check it out. I’m not sure if you can read that but its about 132° F. Alternatively, you can feel the hot container and know that it is hot.

I think this is cool technology (there are nine patents listed on the can). It uses quicklime, and mixes it with water to heat up the can. As you know, quicklime is calcium oxide, which reacts with water in an exothermic reaction (makes heat) producing calcium hydroxide:

CaO + H₂O –> Ca(OH)₂

I suspect they called it “quicklime” on the label since that sounds less like a chemical and will be less likely to freak people out. But be serious. Its a can of hot chocolate that heats itself. Did people really think it wouldn’t involve chemistry?

The lid has this plastic lip you are supposed to turn to allow you open the top. The lid on mine was almost impossible to move, which sucked. Also, the drink tastes like crap. I mean just plain bad. Maybe they had to add stuff to it so it would taste good coming out of a can (e.g. cargeenan), but it is not good to drink. Cool trick though. I’d like to see it with instant soup. This is distributed by Ontech. If you want a full animated video that tells you exactly how it works, go here.

I also bought the new Hershey’s Whole Bean chocolate. “Made with the goodness of the whole cocoa bean”. I’m not sure what they meant by that. As if they threw in the shells and stuff or something like that.

The package brags of 40% less sugar and 7 grams of fiber per serving.

Here’s a big chocolate warning. Any time you see “X% less sugar” in candy, it means only one thing: artificial sweeteners. And that is exactly what is in Hershey’s Whole Bean. They may have included the goodness of the whole bean, but they also included the goodness from the laboratory. Sucralose, i.e. total poison.

Now some people like this crap, but I do not. Do you know what sucralose is? This is the stuff they pedal as Splenda. But do you know what it is? Its mutated sugar. Mutated like David Banner. Here is sugar (sucrose):

Your body breaks this apart into glucose which it can metabolize for energy. Its chemistry and stuff, but know that your body is designed to do this and does it very well. And by the way, the ONLY thing your brain can use for energy is glucose. But do you see all those OH (hydroxyl) groups on the structure? Watch them closely now…here is sucralose:

Did you see what happened? Some of the OH groups have been replaced with Cl (chlorine). Yes, sucralose is chlorinated sucrose. Your body does not recognize it as sucrose and can’t process it (does not leave the GI tract in notable quantities either). It still has a “sweet” taste because the chemical structure is similar to sucrose, and so it reacts similarly at the taste receptors on your tongue. Since your saliva can’t break it down, the “sweet” taste lasts longer than sugar, which breaks down in your mouth into glucose which tastes differently. This is one reason you’ll find artificial sweeteners in general now in almost every chewing gum on the market. Aspartame and sucralose both retain their “sweetness” as long as they are in your mouth because they are indigestible (although aspartame breaks down in acid into other compounds which your body cannot process for energy).

By the way, most chlorinated hydrocarbons are toxic to your body. They dissolve in the fat and hang there forever. Like PCB’s. But sucralose avoids that since it is not fat soluble. Clever chemistry that.

Hershey also adds inulin fiber, calcium carbonate, and (ofcourse) vanillin to this product (doesn’t seem appropriate to call it chocolate). A little asterisk in the ingredients list marks inulin, calcium carbonate, and sucralose as “ingredients not typically found in chocolate”. The calcium carbonate is added so they can say one serving has 25% of the USRDA of calcium.

So how does the Hershey’s Whole Bean with Sucralose taste? Like Satan puked in your mouth. Horrid, sticky, thick, gritty, bitter, dreadful. I had one of the pieces and that was enough for me. I don’t know how they got away with adding sucralose and calling it chocolate. Its poison. I will be throwing the rest away. Hershey’s needs to stop with this crap and get to making real chocolate. This was a GIANT step backwards for Hershey’s.

Last item. My Mom gave me some dark chocolate covered blueberries from Krause’s.

They are a local shop and a HUGE favorite for people in this area. The chocolate covered blueberries were very unique. Blueberries generally are not good for adding to foods when dried. They are mostly skin and seeds. These had the consistency of a small raisin, but the blueberry flavor was very easily detected. Certainly worth a try.