Hershey’s Gold
You know, I write a lot of stuff on this blog and I can’t entirely keep track of what I have and haven’t ranted about. What I am sure of is that I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of North American chocolate in general due to how sweet it is, and especially not milk chocolate. I find milk chocolate in general, regardless where it comes from tends to be overly sweet, and I tend to prefer dark chocolate.
I guess technically the bar I’m trying to day isn’t milk chocolate, but my gripe still holds. My guess is this is using a white chocolate base, which I have even more issue with. White chocolate is basically just sugar and milk powder. This bar is made of caramelized creme, peanuts and pretzel pieces, hence the Hershey’s Gold moniker. It is interesting to see them try a different kind of chocolate base. Caramel creme is not something you see often.
It smells very peanut buttery. Had I gone into this not knowing what it was, I would assume it’s some sort of peanut butter chocolate bar. It certainly doesn’t help it’s case, the fact that it looks like that peanut butter brown colour. I will say the way the bar breaks is interesting. You end up with some pieces bigger while you get a few smaller pieces. A minor detail, but it makes it interesting when sharing with others. Being the glutton I am though, I won’t be sharing this one. Mostly, because it’s fairly small for someone of my stature.
The issue I have with North American chocolate is evident in this bar as well. It’s fairly sweet, like a white chocolate sweet, without but else in terms of flavour to balance it. There’s a slight hint of saltiness from the peanuts and pretzels, but it’s largely overpowered by the sweetness. Imagine white chocolate as the base, and with a caramel flavour to it. When you think of it that way, it’s hard to imagine this bar not being overly sweet. I feel like part of my issue with it is also my age. I feel like this would be a perfect bar for kids who don’t mind the sweetness.
The texture is nothing too special either. Pretzels and peanuts are a great idea, but in practice they fall a little flat in this bar. I attribute it to two things – first off, the bar is relatively thin, similar to their usual bars like cookies and cream. This means there isn’t much room to work with in terms of height, so they have to chop the peanuts and pretzels into finer pieces. This leads to the second point, where the pretzels and peanuts don’t have much crunch to them because they are chopped into fairly small pieces. While it makes this easy to chew, and you could just let it melt in your mouth, when I get a candy bar with peanuts I like to actually get a decent crunch out of them. These sadly do not deliver in that aspect.
I feel like the problem with this bar is it tries to hit too many notes, and becomes a jack of all trades, master of none bar. It tries to hit the sweet and salty lovers, as well as the caramel lovers. It’s not that I don’t think it’s impossible to hit those points, but in a bar at this price point, it’s pretty tough to make something with mass appeal at a cheap price. Of course, I also mention this because there’s a silver lining to it – if you want something at a cheap price but has a bit of caramel, sweet and salty to it with some slight texture, than this bar could do the job for fairly cheap. It’s also readily available, so finding it isn’t at all difficult.
Personally, if I find myself craving a Hershey’s bar for whatever reason (these things do happen), I would probably spring for something more classic like cookies and cream if I have a sweet tooth, or one of their almond bars or dark chocolate bars. I want to say that this was an interesting bar to try, but it didn’t bring anything unique to the table, so I can’t really recommend it to most people. But if you are adventurous like me and want to give everything a try for the heck of it, be my guest. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
