April 9th: Ritter Sport Haselnuss Krokant

Kcal 563 Fat 37.0g Carbs 52.0g (per 100.0g)

Last week I brought to you the first of three new Ritter limited editions, the Ritter Sport Bourbon Vanille (See HERE). Well guess what!? Today I bring you numero dos from this new spring collection - the Haselnuss Krokant variety. On the back of the wrapper this offering was described as 'milk chocolate with a hazelnut creme, hazelnut & almond brittle and rice cereal'. As I have stated in many of my previous reviews Ritter Sport are renowned for the prestige of their fillings, and it isn't very often that they let us consumers down - this bar had real potential.

Prepared in the same style packaging as the Bourbon Vanille flavour, this Haselnuss Krokant variant similarly struck a fresh and appealing look. The pastel colours again struck me as bright and welcoming, whilst the pictures of the hazelnut and almonds communicated the flavour of theme of the bar and in an non-overly elaborate manner. Unzipping the 100.0g bar from it's resealable packaging, the 4x4 quadrants broke up with relative ease, and the beige coloured centre filling looked very appealing and plentiful in it's implementation. Inspecting the chocolate more closely the nutty smells that emanated from the chocolate weren't the strongest but they did a sound job in maintaining my interest.

What more is there to say about Ritter Sport milk chocolate that I haven't said in the previous 40+ Ritter Sport reviews I have written before!? To be honest there isn't, it just did the same average job of carrying the inner filling with little fuss and delivered the usual chocolate flavour hit that I have come to used to. Moving on to more important matters, I have the bad news of telling you that the inner nut filling wasn't quite up to scratch. Starting off with the positives the smoothness of the creme contrasted nicely with the crunchy nut and cereal elements which did at least bring a degree of interest in the textures. Unfortunately though the taste just wasn't up to scratch with Ritter's previous showings. I found that the creme and nut brittle constituents didn't deliver the desired nut flavours, whilst the rice cereal was unsurprisingly very mild and didn't contribute anything in terms of flavours. What really surprised me was that neither the hazelnut or almond came to the fore of the taste. The nut brittle pieces offered little apart from minor bursts of brown sugar, with the nutty influences were very much in the background of the taste. The totality of this all was that the flavour longevity was pretty limited, thus I didn't find that chocolate all that satisfying.

Overall my conclusions about this bar are very similar to my thoughts around the Ritter Sport Bourbon Vanille in that whilst it was hardly a bad tasting chocolate, but it was disappointing nonetheless. Disappointing is exactly the word that describes this bar best - when you think about what the bar promised (hazelnut creme, hazelnut & almond brittle) I bet you were thinking that this was going to be yet another review with me raving about how well Ritter Sport produce nutty chocolates. This assumption couldn't have been further off the mark as the nuts played such a minor part in the overall taste. To be honest I think someone with a nut allergy would barely get a rash eating this chocolate (joke!!) - it was that underpowered. Nipping all my criticism in the bud this still wasn't a disaster of a chocolate - yes it was poor in the light of the implementation of the nuts, but the chocolate and variable textures from the creme, cereal, brittle still offered some interest. Long story cut short - not a Ritter bar I would recommend but you could do worse.

6.8 out of 10