20 May 2013

Tayto – Milk Chocolate Bar With Cheese & Onion Crisps (Limited Edition) [By @Cinabar]



I’ve reviewed a lot of strange chocolate. I’ve tried Marmite chocolate, vinegar chocolates, wasabi chocolate and a whole host of other ingredients that you wouldn’t immediately think would go together. Some have been successful, others not so. The one thing that is consistent is the fact that I can’t resist giving these new flavour combinations a purchase! So when I heard Tayto Ireland had released this odd concoction of a bar, I found myself on Ebay paying an extortionate price to import a tiny bar.
Tayto is one of the larger crisp manufacturers in Ireland, and are the main make you’d find on supermarket shelves there. They don’t usually make chocolate however, and this weird bar is strictly a Limited Edition. Despite it costing a fair amount of money for just 35g of chocolate, I didn’t immediately open it. I was trying to find the right moment but oddly enough that never came. Eventually I did cautiously open the pack. The chocolate looked harmless enough, just a regular milk chocolate bar, with patterned pieces marked out. When I broke the first piece, and I mean down to just half a cube, I could see some little flecks of yellow sitting within the chocolate... oh boy, I knew where this was going.
The aroma from the chocolate wasn’t too bad; it was mainly of chocolate, with just the tiniest giveaway sign of musty cheese. I choose to stare at the bar a while longer, then eventually went for it and ate the half a piece. Now the flavour is strange, but not as bad as I’d feared it might be. It wasn’t quite pleasant, but I didn’t hate it. The musty cheese is quite strong, as is the onion, and the crisps texture does add a bit of a crunch to the milky sweet chocolate. This bar doesn’t quite work, those flavours weren’t meant to go together. The only positive part was that it triggered a bit of nostalgia in me, it returned me back to being a kid on Friday night and being allowed to snack on both chocolate and crisps. As a kid I’d sometime open both together and alternate between chocolate and cheese and onion crisps, and the flavour of this bar took me back to then. I’ll be honest it’s not something I’d buy again, but it was ok, not fantastic, not amazing, but weird and almost pleasant weird.
My mum tried some of this chocolate and was unimpressed. She comes from Yorkshire a place where they mix sweet and savoury like no other “fruit cake and a chunk of cheese” is a common snack there... but she couldn’t palette this chocolate. She’s right though it’s a long way off being great.
So what should I do with the rest of the bar? I think it will be going with me to work, as they are quite open to trying out some of our weirder Foodstuff Finds. I’ll report back, and see what the office opinion is! Surely it can’t go down worse than the Hersheys?
By Cinabar

3 comments:

Jim said...

Great review! We so have to review this!

cinabar said...

Yes you should - would love to read your opinion :-) If you buy off ebay just keep in mind that the bar is tiny when you bid.

cinabar said...

I tested this around the office today, the consensus was it was a bit weird, but not horrid. Nobody was rushing out to buy their own bar though!