Tirol Chocolate – Okinawa Salty Caramel
Okinawa is known for it’s sugar, so it should come as no surprise they would have claim to having regionally specific caramel too. Add in salt and you have a viable product flavour! Caramel on it’s own is usually a bit too sweet for my liking, so adding salt does tend to make it more palatable and balanced for normies like me.
This is a solid block of chocolate with both bits of caramel and bits of peanuts. Also likely some salt in there too? There’s a juvenile joke in there about salty nuts which I will leave to your imagination. I wasn’t really paying attention when I got these, so colour me surprised to discovered nuts in my chocolate. Insert another pun here.
These sort of remind me of if Reese’s pieces added actual bits of peanut to them. The star is supposed to be the salted caramel, but the peanut bits really do add a lot to the flavour. It has a sort of peanut butter quality to it, with the sweetness of the caramel being balanced out with the salt and the peanuts. The caramel is a fairly typical one, and if there’s anything special about it I can’t really tell. As expected the salt helps balance things out, but overall nothing too groundbreaking here. Caramel and peanuts work really well together, as history has shown.
The texture is a classic combination of chocolate a peanuts, and it does it well. There’ also a few bits of caramel and salt but the star is really the interplay between the chocolate and the peanuts. I think if these were advertised as just caramel, they wouldn’t catch as much attention. The addition of peanuts is quite smart, and admittedly my favourite part of the chocolate, as opposed to the caramel. The caramel is interesting, but the peanuts are more interesting.
This is a flavour I went into expecting it to be something boring or I’ve had before, but wanted to try it just to cover my bases. It was pleasantly surprising and while simple, is executed quite well. This is definitely one of the better Tirol seasonal flavours I’ve had thus far. Good job. I’m hoping to see this one again in the future in some way, shape or form.
