Tirol Chocolate – Milk Nougat
This is the OG – the original, the one that started it all. Back before what I assume was their big rebrand in the 1990s, this chocolate apparently had it’s beginnings in 1962. The branding and name sake of the chocolate was because the creator of the snack at the time enjoyed the alpine landscape of the Tyrol region and wanted to associate that with the chocolate. Hence the little red mascot of the original brand.
The chocolate was originally in a rectangular stick form – where the chewy milk nougat and peanut filling was covered in your typical milk chocolate. The bar was roughly the size of three mini bars combined into one, and sold for about 10 yen at the time. Needless to say you wouldn’t find it that cheap, but if memory serves the price hasn’t gone up enough to be unaffordable nowadays.
This particular bag is sporting 25 pieces. A perfect size for sharing. Or getting a daily fix for almost a whole month. No judgement. Something about the branding and colour scheme gives off generic “Swiss” chocolate. something about the light white against the red accents and the gold foil bring back memories of those tiny chocolate squares you would find everywhere and anywhere that tried to be fancy or hospitable. Maybe that’s the intention, but I am not a huge fan of that. Some memories are best buried.
As mentioned, what we have here is a combination of milk nougat and peanut filling, and milk chocolate. This definitely seems more of a snack meant for warmer climates, as it’s somewhat hard and tough in the current climate I am consuming these in. Though the dead of winter makes many things cold, these are a bit tough on the teeth if you try to bite straight through immediately. Instead, if you let it sit on your tongue and warm up a bit, you get a nice chewy, slightly sticky nougat with tiny bits of peanut. It combines with the chocolate pretty well and I can see why this is a classic.
It also has a retro feel to it, and reminds me of some snacks that were popular back in the same time period in North America. While nothing comes immediately to mind, it falls into the category of what I consider heirloom snacks. Things that are somewhat timeless but also you can tell it’s from the olden days. If that’s the type of thing you yearn for and want something to bring you back to a “simpler time”, this is a pretty risk free way to do that. I can’t imagine these would be too hard to find given that it is the OG Tirol.
