Candy Bar Lab

By themselves, plain old Kit Kats are great. Good caramel is also great. So, wouldn’t it be great if the two were combined? Well not so fast. Candy bars are a delicate balance of flavors and textures. Adding something, even if its tasty on it’s own, might not make the product any better than what you had to begin with. If it were that easy, candy manufacturers would just throw all of the goodies they could round up into a single bar.

So, back to the product at hand - a Caramello stuck to the top of an over-sized Kit Kat stick. Let’s see if this is an improvement over the regular Kit Kats many of us have come to love.

Structure
This is a molded bar with two cavities. The bottom one is filled with a layered wafer and the top one is filled with caramel.

Texture
Biting into Kit Kat Caramel is interesting. Your top teeth will first make their way through the caramel cavity before getting held up by the thick, middle layer of chocolate. Once they’ve broken this barrier, they will proceed easily through the crispy, wafer layer. What you end up with is a “ka-clunk” sound in your head with each bite. I wasn’t a big fan of this. It feels like you’re biting through two separate bars.

Taste
You’ll taste a lot of milk chocolate. The quality of which isn’t bad, but not great either. The wafer is pretty tasteless, but that’s fine. It’s only job was to provide texture. The big disappointment is that you can’t really taste the caramel, which is mild and gets overpowered by the chocolate. Wasn’t the addition of caramel the whole point of making this product? It would have been better if the caramel was saltier.

Verdict
I definitely don’t recommend this bar. The thickness of the middle chocolate layer is the fatal flaw. It ruins the texture and masks the caramel. I’ll be reaching for classic Kit Kats over their caramel cousins every time.

This is the type of caramel you’d find in Twix or Snickers.

If you’ve ever researched caramel recipes, you may have come across some like this. I’m not a fan of this method. In fact, I don’t even consider it real caramel because the sugar never actually caramelizes. Instead, this method relies on vanilla extract for flavor and gets it’s color only from the Maillard reaction of the heated amino acids in the cream and butter.

The recipe below is darker in color with a fuller flavor, yet remains soft and won’t stick to your teeth.

Ingredients
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup corn syrup
• 1/2 cup water
• 4 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 tbsp salt

Equipment
• 2 or 3 quart, heavy-bottomed pot
• candy thermometer
• whisk

Step 1: Prep
Get all of your ingredients out and measure everything ahead of time. We’ll move quickly through the last step, so you won’t have time to measure then. Also, it helps to cut the butter into four 1-tbsp pieces and mix the salt into the cream.

Step 2: Caramelize the sugars
In the pot, mix the sugar, corn syrup, and water over low heat with a whisk until the sugar is completely dissolved. Raise heat to high and boil mixture up to 315° F. Remove from heat and swirl the pot gently. You’ll notice the mixture start to darken a bit. The residual heat will bump the temperature to 320° F, the point of caramelization for sucrose.

Step 3: Incorporate the fats
If we stopped at this point and let the mixture cool, we would have a hard mass of dark sugar. To turn this into the soft caramel we’re looking for, we need to introduce some fat (i.e. the cream and butter). Drop the butter pieces into the pot and whisk until the butter is incorporated. Next, pour in the salted cream and again, whisk until blended. Note: The butter and cream both have water, so they will cause the pot to bubble up and release very hot steam. Make sure to wear an oven mitt to protect your hands and forearms.

Step 4: Cool
The caramel will thicken as it cools. If you’ve done everything correctly though, it should remain soft and gooey at room temperature.

Following up on my earlier review of the Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, I’m breaking down another Reese’s product; Whipps. This product bills itself as “lighter than air, but a whole lot tastier”. We’ll see about that.

Structure
The inner core is peanut flavored nougat, which is surrounded first by a thin layer of peanut butter and second by a coating of milk chocolate.

Texture
The soft, thin chocolate coating is barely perceptible upon biting in and the next layer of peanut butter below is a little dry. The inner nougat mass accounts for most of the bar’s texture. The nougat is soft and airy. It becomes chewy for a split second before dissolving. Whipps feel very similar to a 3 Musketeers.

Taste
The favor profile is very straight-forward; peanut butter and vanilla (the chocolate never showed up). The peanut butter flavor is much lighter than other Reese’s products, which isn’t a necessarily bad thing. Ultimately, what makes the bar work for me is that its not too sugary. Even though it delivers only a mild hint of peanut butter, it still manages to come through.

Verdict
This bar is simple in both texture and taste. I will acknowledge that it is a whole lot tastier than air, but I won’t go much further. With that said, I enjoyed Whipps and recommend them if you like 3 Musketeers and peanut butter. I’ve seen some very negative reviews of this bar, so I might be in the minority, but I wanted more when I was done. Ultimately, that’s the only thing that should matter when evaluating candy.