Sugar Savvy

Ever since my first trip to Germany, I’ve loved this brand of chocolate.  My favorite is the milk chocolate with hazelnut bits and raisins.  Part of the secret of this chocolate is the addition of hazelnut paste, which creates a richer tasting chocolate.

The Milka brand was founded by Philippe Suchard.  Yes, the Suchard that makes the Swiss Suchard chocolates.  The company was later acquired by Kraft in 1990; a purchase that included Cote d’Or and Toblerone.  (This seems to explain the wider distribution of these brands.)  From the description on the Kraft site, Suchard was the Hershey of Europe making chocolate accessible to the masses - the way Milton Hershey did when he created the 5 cent chocolate bar.

This dark chocolate bar remains very sweet with sugar as its first ingredient.  It can probably also be chalked up to the lower cacao content.  In the chocolate there are slight hints of the dark side - a slight roastiness and acidity.  A lot of the flavor is tempered by the skim milk (third on the ingredient list after chocolate and the hazelnut paste.  The hazelnuts are not as assertive as they are in Nutella.

I enjoyed this bar, although I would treat it as more of a milk chocolate bar than a dark chocolate bar.

According to the Kraft website, they’ve begun producing Milka bars with Oreo cookie bits in them.  That sounds very promising.  Very promising indeed.