Tirol Chocolate – Salty Pretzel
I haven’t been keeping up with Tirol a whole lot lately, so my finger isn’t exactly on the pulse these days. I bring this up because I’m not sure if this flavour is them coming late to the party, or if they have already done this and it just slipped by me. I’m going to choose to believe it’s the former so I can make a joke about tardiness and missing the curve. Better late than never though, amirite?
Three flavours to work with here, and sadly only 6 pieces. I thought we moved past the shrinkage, but I guess 2 of each flavour is their excuse to cut us down from 7. Sigh. As I mentioned, pretzels and chocolate are not a new combination at this point, at least not over in the western hemisphere. The combination of chocolate and pretzel goes quite a ways back, but it seems to have made somewhat of a bigger splash and resurgence in recent years. I wonder what the pioneers like Rold Gold thing about this, given that they’ve been doing chocolate covered pretzels in what seems to have been forever ago.
First up is chocolate – it’s a typical milk chocolate affair, but with the contrast of the salt from the pretzel it makes for an interesting dynamic. Incidentally the same reason chocolate and pretzels are an age old combination.
The reason milk chocolate works with the pretzel despite it being sweet is the salt from the pretzel helps to balance things out. The chocolate itself is nothing that special on it’s own, but the addition of pretzel does help to elevate it into something that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. A good start, I’d say.
White chocolate is identical in every way other than the chocolate itself. White chocolate tends to be sweeter, so I find it actually benefits more from the salty pretzel to balance things out.
As someone who is not a huge fan of white chocolate in general, I do feel like this is more straight forward combination of salty and sweet than the milk chocolate, and feel like this is more interesting as a result. Strange as it sounds, I like this one a bit more than the first one.
Caramel is sort of weird because how do you do caramel flavoured chocolate? Isn’t that just sweeter milk chocolate? Well, either way it’s nothing interesting or special. It just tastes like if you took caramel and added some thickeners to make it somewhat chocolate in consistency. It’s kind of weird and not particularly good, but it does still work with the salty pretzel so I guess there’s that.
It’s a bit of a mind freak because there are parts where I’m somewhat reminded me of an actual chewy caramel piece, but this is just melty like chocolate. It’s not off putting or anything, but it does throw me off a bit.
The texture is the same across all three pieces. It’s a solid block of chocolate with bites of pretzel and bits of salt strewn about. It’s a pretty solid combo and it’s hard to mess up, so you can imagine these are quite easy to go down. It’s just the chocolate covered pretzel in a slightly different format.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is a great flavour, but it’s passable and if you handed these to me I’d be excited. But not excited enough that I would go out of my way to find or consume these. They’re just like how I feel about most chocolate pretzels, I’ll eat them but I won’t go out of my way for them.
