Tirol Chocolate – Unagi
Tirol does so many flavours I’ve kind of placed them in the gimmicky brands in my mind nowadays. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but the approach I take with them, and the expectations are different. It’s for that reason that when I hear that they have a flavour with unagi (Japanese style BBQ eel in it), I raise an eyebrow, but not enough to stop myself from giving it a fair shake. Again, going in with lowered expectations.
Yes you read that right. unagi as in eel. If the purpose of this flavour was to just grab my attention through shock value, well it worked. Although for me, it’s less of a shock value candy and more of a curiosity candy. Growing up in a traditional Chinese family, you get exposed to a lot of seafood very early on, so certain snacks and flavours that register as overly fishy or strong seafood flavour tend not to phase me. While the Chinese style of eel is arguable fishier than the Japanese style, ultimately its still seafood. If anything I’d argue unagi has more mass appeal, since it’s generally de-boned, and has a nice teriyaki sauce glazed over it. Tasty stuff.
The chocolate doesn’t smell fishy or anything, but it does smell really sweet. It smells kind of sugar like a pie or baked treat like maybe a sweet croissant. I’m beginning to doubt if there’s any unagi in this. Maybe it’s like essence of eel or some sort of ground up powder that they added in? You know, like those companies that add in just enough that they can legally claim it’s got a certain product in it.
It tastes kind of like the pastry based flavours in that it reminds me of a crust or crispy waffle cookie, and the eel bits are almost undetectable. If I try really hard and squint at another piece while eating it, I can kind of make out something that’s like dried unagi. For most people though, I doubt they would be able to detect it until it’s too late. And by too late I mean in the after taste.
The texture is also a lot like biting into a chocolate that has crunchy cookie bits in it. It’s not bad by any means, it’s just a little underwhelming if you are expecting unagi like I was. A part of me was expecting the consistency to be a little chewy from dried unagi bits, but it’s a pretty clean crunch. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but again, not what I was expecting or sold on.
As a general chocolate, this isn’t bad, but if you’re expecting something interesting, novel or somehow revolutionary, this won’t be it. If for some reason you can find this readily available and you like the taste of pastries or croissants in your chocolate, this actually stands up pretty well as a flavour for that purpose.
