This chocolate bar from Trader Joe’s is clearly a giant copycat version of Ritter Sport’s dark chocolate with hazelnuts bar. I was expecting it to taste pretty much the exact same too. So I was pleasantly surprised to find it tasted better, although there’s still much room for perfecting. The chocolate is more flavorful than the Ritter Sport which lacks any real zing.
Reading through the ingredients, I see that Trader Joe uses cocoa mass and cocoa powder processed with Alkali. Cocoa powder is processed with Alkali in order to reduce the bitterness of the chocolate. In my opinion, this also reduces the intense flavor of dark chocolate. I’m not surprised to see it in milk chocolate products since milk chocolates are for people who like watered-down chocolate. But for dark chocolate??? All in all, it claims 50% minimum cocoa solids which I guess is their version of saying it’s a 50% dark chocolate bar.
Here’s the chocolate bar opened up:
The squares are cute and you can see it’s choc full of hazelnuts.
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Just got a bar for Christmas gift. Yummy Yummy, I need to buy more for myself after consuming this in a day, couldn’t make it last, it was too good. Definitely better than the Ritter Sport, I wonder how much it costs, the Ritter Sport costs $3.00 in my local store, hopefully this is a better deal like most of Trader Joe products.
-KAS