Tirol Chocolate – Retro Cream Soda & Pudding
It seems these days everyone is caught up in thinking about the good ol’ days, or the way back when. I get it, nostalgia is strong and it’s not always about the product or item, but how we felt in that point in time, like a distant memory calling to us to remind us of what we once were. It’s because that feeling is so strong that we find ourselves drawn to things that remind us of our past. Companies know this and realize it’s the path of least resistance to a quick buck or two. Just look at how many reboots and remasters of old products and media we get these days. It’s just easier and safer to rehash old stuff.
Tirol isn’t pulling any punches here, they are quite literally trying to sell a product that triggers nostalgia. Admittedly this one is a bit more esoteric because the goal here is to encapsulate very popular flavours that emerged in a specific time period. This one happens to be between 1926 to 1989 in Japan. That’s admittedly a very big period, but back then things moved slower so I guess it makes sense. The two flavours here are cream soda and pudding. Pudding I can understand, but I’m a bit shocked cream soda was as big as it was in Japan.
I’m not sure if Tirol got the memo or what, but I am honestly a little shocked to see 8 whole pieces here. For a while they trimmed it down to 6 from the usual 7, so to see it go up is a bit of a shocker for me.
This cream soda flavour is familiar – it’s actually smells more like a melon soda than a cream soda. The catch with this one is that it has bits of popping candy in the middle to give it the popping sensation that is to remind you of soda, I suppose. Flavour wise it also tastes more like a melon soda than a cream soda, though it could also be my perception of the green that’s affecting me.
The texture is nothing special, it’s really just a block of chocolate with different flavours and some popping candy in the middle. Overall I’d say the texture is not bad but the flavour of soda in a chocolate is still off putting for me. It has an almost curdled aspect to it that I can’t quite describe. Almost like when you try to put ice cream into a soda and leave it for too long. That could just be me though.
The pudding one is interesting because I haven’t had it before, but also because it’s a pretty good approximation to what I expect pudding to be. To be clear though, in the context of Japan, pudding refers more to what we would in the West call flan or baked custard. Similar to flan, it’s a combination of eggs, sugar and milk, with a layer of caramel on top.
The chocolate has a pretty generous helping of a gooey center that’s kind of like a custard, and there’s a few crunchy caramel bits to add some texture and flavour of caramel. The flavour itself is pretty straightforward – after all, how hard is it to get the flavour of flan and custard? Overall this piece is a winner.
If they made the custard piece again, I would get that for sure. The cream soda though, hard pass unfortunately. And with that, this pack gets a 50/50 from me.
