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The Taste Test: Milk Chocolate

If you’ve read my dark chocolate post or, er, met me, you will know that I am a chocolate person. There are so many chocolate related posts on this blog that I couldn’t even begin to link to them all. I started with the dark chocolate taste test because it’s seen as the complex and sophisticated older sister to milk chocolate, and because I use it so much in baking. But for eating, I do love good milk chocolate. Or, sometimes, bad milk chocolate. Depending on how the day is going.

With dark chocolate, it was fairly easy to find products with 70% cocoa solids for a direct comparison. With milk chocolate, it was much trickier to find samples that were so directly comparable, and so I’ve got a bit more of a range. You can quite clearly see even from the picture below that some of the chocolate samples are darker, but I didn’t get the information from the packaging regarding which products had which levels of cocoa solids until after the taste test, in an effort to keep the tasting as blind as possible.

As before, I feel I need a rambling disclaimer: obviously, I am doing this in my kitchen and not in a lab and I am not a scientist. These are the opinions of one person – that said, one person who has been trained to taste for quality. Also, the products used in this series are just examples – obviously each supermarket has, say, eight or nine different types of milk chocolate or whatever the product may be, and I’m not going to try every single one because what am I, made of money?

Finally, I should highlight that I tasted all the products blind, and at the time of tasting and making my notes I didn’t know which product came from which shop. I sat in one room while my glamorous assistant (er, my husband), prepared the samples in another. Any notes added regarding packaging and so on were only done after blind tasting, when I learned which supermarket had made A, B, C, D, or E.

The Blind Taste Test: Milk Chocolate

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Milk Chocolate
per 100g
£*
kcal
fat
carb
fibre
protein
salt
Aldi – Moser Roth (32%)
1.03
563
36
52
2.8
6.8
0.19
Lidl – Bellarom (33%)
0.60
568
36.5
52.7
1.9
6.2
0.25
Sainsbury’s – (31%)
1.45
558
35.2
50.6
2.3
8.5
0.25
Chocologic (36%)
1.50
484
36.2
33.7
17
7.9
0.62
Waitrose (49%)
1.88
618
47.0
39.0
3.4
8.0
0.17
Green & Black’s (37%)
2.00
565
36.0
48.0
3.0
9.8
0.23

A – Chocologic – 3/10

  • Visually one of the darkest. Breaks nicely with a good snap. Smells fine but not a great taste or texture – a bit chalky and bitter, with a particularly unpleasant aftertaste. Not sweet at all. No creaminess. Wouldn’t eat again.

B – Aldi – Moser Roth – 4/10

  • Light in colour. Very creamy, and notably sweeter than A – possibly too sweet. Nothing terrible, but nothing interesting. Just a sweet milk chocolate.

C – Sainsbury’s – 8/10

  • Creamy and smooth, with a hint of hazelnut. Immediately much nicer than A or B, with more flavour. Not too sweet, but not bitter. Really enjoyed this.

D – Green & Black’s – 9/10

  • Firm, with a good snap. Dark in colour. Full and rich in flavour. Creamy and smooth. Tastes like it’s good quality. Sweet, as you’d expect milk chocolate to be, but not overly so. My clear favourite.

E – Waitrose – 6/10

  • Initially looks similar to D, but not as nice. Certainly not bad, but not as enjoyable as D. A slight bitterness, especially in the aftertaste, which I didn’t really like, and less creaminess.

F – Lidl – Bellarom – 4/10

  • Light in colour. Sweet, rather than rich or complex in flavour. Tastes like cheap milk chocolate: not terrible but nothing special in terms of flavour.

Conclusion

This time, I tested a brand leader (Green & Black’s) against supermarket brands, to see how it compared. I have to say, before I started I was quietly confident that I could pick out Green & Black’s in a blind taste test, and I turned out to be right. Once I’d finished the actual tasting of the milk chocolate, I tried my hand at guessing which blind sample was which, and I got full marks.

This is partly because I’m a bit of a crazy chocolate freak, and partly because there weren’t really any surprises here. The Chocologic ‘no added sugar’ chocolate really didn’t taste sweet enough to be enjoyable. The cheapest options did taste less luxurious and complex than the more expensive products. My favourite milk chocolate here was the most expensive of the bunch.

So, I guess I can’t go subverting expectations every week.

*Prices correct at time of writing.

4 thoughts on “The Taste Test: Milk Chocolate

  1. Alice

    This was a really interesting one as I also love a good bit of milk chocolate, but I also would usually choose a more expensive bar if I was just going to eat it. Mostly, green and blacks really. Would have been interesting to also throw lindt in there too, because I think their chocolate is recognisable, but then the shape would have given it away too much I guess! If you had to choose between them, are you a Galaxy girl or Dairy Milk? Alice xxx

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    • Hannah

      Personally, I tend towards Lindt more for baking than eating, and think of them more for dark chocolate than milk. Habit, I guess! And Dairy Milk allllll the way. I grew up on Fruit and Nut Dairy Milk. Mmmm. How about you? xxx

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