According to Ritter Sport, over at Jim’s Chocolate Mission, this offering is the runner up on the worldwide best selling Ritter list. As I have reviewed both number one and three on that list, I thought it only fair to review this one as well. To be up front I am a little surprised that this one was able to conquer second place as I found it somewhat disappointing. While I did not think the world of either the white and milk varieties, at least I can understand why they have such a broad appeal.
Ritter Sport dark Whole Hazelnuts has a whopping 23% of whole roasted hazelnuts and a minimum of 50% cocoa solids. The declaraton to this bar reveals that it contains butter fat and shellac. In my book, as I have stated before, I think it a misnomer to label a chocolate “dark” if it has any dairy product in it (even if this is allowed by EU and/or national regulations), though perhaps I should be more lenient with this one since it is a “filled” chocolate (the Ritter hallmark). In addition this bar is glazed with shellac, a substance from insects, presumably to give the bar extra shine. I will leave it to you to judge whether this is acceptable or not, but to me dark chocolate should only have five basic ingredients plus those for the filling. I am not sure why shellac is necessary here - and I invite anyone to leave a comment on this subject.
As with the wrapper of the other two of the top three, I am not to fond of the “Photo” wrapper, though I consider this one, with its dark colour, the most elegant of the three wrappers. The chocolate has a nice dark brown colour and a nice shine. Also, the bar looks nice in cross section with whole nuts protruding. Still, I think the wrapper is a bit misleading, in that it is not dark chocolate and hence fails to accurately convey what this bar is about. For this reason I will have to assign it a low score presentation wise. Appearance: 6 out of 10.
That this is in fact less than a full bodied dark chocolate is also confirmed by the aroma of the bar which is sweet smelling of dairy chocolate. There are good aromas of roasted hazelnuts that might be more pronounced though. Overall I think the aroma is so dairy that it detracts from the aroma profile of a dark chocolate. Aroma: 7 out of 10.
The hazelnuts bring a good crunch to the bar, but ut us for some reason that the nuts and chocolate, in terms of mout feek, do not play well together, being to “fragmented” in the mouth. The chocolate has a slow melt which lasts until the hazelnuts are munched. It sticks a little to the mouth. Texture: 7 out of 10.
The hazelnuts do provide a nice taste but I think they could and should have more flavour and character than they have here. Instead, the chocolate steals the show and unfortunately I did not find the chocolate to be of a very good quality, making the nuts unable to put up a fight. It has a rather strange taste, as if it is not “real” chocolate and a bitter and unpleasant aftertaste with no fruit or complexity at all. There are slight hints of vanilla. On the positive side the bar is not too sweet, probably due to the generous amount of hazelnuts. Flavour: 6 out of 10.
Average score: 6, 5 out of 10.
Ingen kommentarer:
Send en kommentar