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Review: Nestle Peppermint Crisp
Nestle Peppermint Crisp
Posted: 21 June 2011
6.0
If you judge this bar solely by the quality of its chocolate, you're not in for a treat.
The milk chocolate in the Nestle Peppermint Crisp is very, very mediocre. The real gimmick to this bar is the crackly peppermint within. And yes, it does crackle and offer a nice twist on
a mint and chocolate combination. Non choco-connoisseurs, like my wife, are impressed.
Avg
price/gram: USD 0.058
Cocoa %: 20
Size: 35g
Aspiring Korean playboy Wan
Hyuk Park recently returned from Australia bearing gifts.
His mother sent him to Australia to perfect his English.
He enrolled in one of those dime-a-dozen language institutes
in Perth. Nearly all the students are Korean, and he
rented a flat with three other Korean playboy wannabees.
One year later, his Korean language skills are better than ever. The
most valuable thing Wan Hyuk took out of Australia was the
ability to append the word "mate" on the end of every
sentence.
Well, the second most
valuable thing. The most valuable consists
of several different chocolate bars for review on the Chocolate
Republic, bars I can't find in Thailand. My wife
buys kimchi on a bi-monthly basis from Wan Hyuk's mother.
Wan Hyuk's mother wanted to thank us for being steady
customers and partially justify that Wan Hyuk's trip to Oz
hadn't been a complete waste of time.
This Nestle Peppermint Crisp
bar was Wan Hyuk's favorite, "the best chocolate bar
I've ever had, mate," he said. He created a Korean-language
blog dedicated to the peppermint crisp bar and drafted
several poems about it. Originally a South African
creation, Australia, through Nestle, has made the bar one of
Oz's
native sons and honored it with Australian citizenship.
Could it be that good?
When I heard the name, I
thought of a milk chocolate bar with crispy mint wafers
throughout, something like the Thin Mints Girl Scout cookies I
ate as a kid. Those Thin Mints were tasty, and I could
readily sympathize with Wan Hyuk's world being turned upside
down if this Peppermint Crisp, by 2011's standards, were as
remotely tasty as those Thin Mints by 1977's standards.
The Peppermint Crisp is nothing like a Thin Mint. It's
a very, very thin layer of milk chocolate coating a
collection
of peppermint toffee straws packed tightly together.
This crispy peppermint sugar is known as kracknel Down
Under.
I had to do a bit of research
online to find out the bar's cocoa solid content. Like
all mass produced low-end bars, this was not on the label.
An enquiry to Nestle Australia took a week to get answered,
and when they finally replied, from an e-mail address I
could not respond to, they referenced a promised attachment that was
never added to the e-mail. No surprise to find the
cocoa solids are at an ultra low 20%.
If you judge this bar solely
by the quality of its chocolate, you're not in for a treat.
Nestle is a mass producer of chocolate. Everyone knows
they don't manufacture high quality stuff, although their
Nestle Club line, only available in Oz, shocked me with how
good and reasonably priced it was. The milk chocolate in the
Nestle Peppermint Crisp is very, very mediocre. The
real gimmick to this bar is the crackly peppermint within.
And yes, it does crackle and offer a nice twist on the mint
and chocolate combination. Non choco-connoisseurs,
like my wife, are impressed.
But let's peel away the
gimmicks, shall we? This bar isn't particularly cheap
per gram. A glance at the ingredients off Nestle
Australia's web site shows ample vegetable fats,
emulsifiers, and preservatives. Hey, use the cheap
stuff if you feel you must, but at least fool me with chemicals that I'm eating a product that tastes better than
it really is. Nestle doesn't have the chops to pull off
that illusion here.
By all rights, this bar
shouldn't even be on the Chocolate Republic. It's a
peppermint sugar confection with a bit of chocolate.
The chocolate is an afterthought. So little
thought went into this milk chocolate that the
chocolate-making in this candy could have been outsourced to a Bangladeshi
chocolate factory with zero experience and the bar wouldn't
have tasted substantially different. The Chocolate
Republic would prefer the chocolate in the bars reviewed
here to be the first thought.
A better investment from
Nestle for a chocolate and mint combo is their
Nestle Club Mint
Infusion. The chocolate and mint in that one are
both real and not something created by committee of
chemistry experts -- and it costs 30% less per gram.
Enjoy it as a kid.
As an adult, move on to bigger and better things.
Australia has the Nestle peppermint crisp. It's an Australian chocolate bar with mint kracknel.
Come to the chocolate republic with Doug of Doug's Republic