Meiji Black Chocolate Bar

Back in 2009, when returning to America was more of a vague plan than a reality, I decided that I'd do comparison reviews of all of the plain milk chocolate bars produced by major Japanese food conglomerates. This mean Meiji, Lotte, and Morinaga. Lotte's Ghana won and Meiji came in last.

None of them were "bad", but mostly Meiji's had more of the bitter coffee-like aftertaste that is so commonly experienced with Japanese chocolate. I will note that most chocolate in Japan has this note because it has a somewhat bittersweet or semisweet quality. This would be fine if it didn't taste like Meiji's offering was bittersweet chocolate with a bigger dousing of sugar to tamp down the bitterness. It's as if someone hasn't figured out how to mellow out those notes without oversweetening.

I checked out Meiji's page for its current chocolate line up after sampling this "Black" chocolate bar. I noted that the wrapping designs have gone all san serif and lost all of their old-fashioned charm. I figured that "Black" meant it would be dark chocolate. After tasting it, however, it seems more like a description of the color of the wrapper. It tasted very much like the milk chocolate version that I tasted before.

There's plenty of sweetness. Perhaps the bitterness scale was about a 6 and the regular bar a 4 on a scale of 1-10, but it would almost certainly gravely disappoint ardent fans of dark chocolate. The site claims that it has a "sharp sense of cacao" and is "full-bodied". It doesn't have much in the way of sharpness, but it is a little deeper in it flavor profile, but it is just a bit too sweet to really feel well-rounded.

If you look at my picture, the bar (black is shown on top) doesn't even look all that much darker than its milk chocolate brother. The basic recipes seem to be so close as to not really make one distinguishable from the other. The calorie values are also nearly identical with the dark one coming in at 22 calories per square and milk being 24.

The main drawback to me of any plain Japanese chocolate, and some other types is that it's always soft and lacking in snap. Usually, you can taste and enjoy chocolate better at room temperature, but this softness always makes me want to put it in the refrigerator and have it cold. Placing a cool square in my mouth and allowing it to slowly melt is the best way to enjoy these, but I think I'm much more sensitive to chocolate having a "snap" and firmness than most people.

This is a good chocolate bar, but it's not great. I'd sooner have a Ritter Sport dark chocolate bar if I was looking to go to the dark side as I think they tend to be deeper in their chocolate flavor and hit the stronger bitter notes without the added sweetness. I certainly don't regret having this, especially since I only paid 99 cents for it as all Meiji bars were on sale at Nijiya market for that price. It was a good opportunity to try something pretty basic and common in Japan without paying the high import costs as I paid the same for it here as I did there.

If you want to buy this, well, the usual suspects (online sellers) don't tend to carry it because it is pretty basic. The truth is that you'd have to be a candy expert to want to spend the extra dough on these as those who do carry it (largely on eBay) are charging $4-5 for something which is usually sold for 100 yen (about a buck) in Japan.

If you sorta-kinda like dark chocolate but generally find it too intense, this is your baby and if you can pick it up for a lowish price, I'd say it's worth a try. I like it, but I wouldn't necessarily seek it out again, particularly when I have so many other options which I like even more.

For those who are interested in some Japanese papercraft, there is a page dedicated to downloads on Meiji's "candy land" site. It includes boxes, "flags" to put on your cupcakes (print and attach to a toothpick), coloring pages for kids, and a paper tree. The page is here for the time being (I expect the contents will change after Christmas).

Chestnut Oreo Chocolate Bar

Back when I was a kid, in the late 1400's, "Oreo" meant one kind of cookie. Of course, when I was a kid, it meant one kind of cookie that my mother never bought because we were too poor for name brand snacks. When she bought "sandwich cookies", they were the store or generic brands which came in enormous packages and cost 99 cents. There were usually three rows of them, two ostensibly chocolate and one supposedly vanilla. Neither really tasted like much. In fact, the chocolate ones tasted like some sort of alkali mixture with minimal amounts of cocoa. The vanilla tasted like sugar and flour-like substances.

So, it wasn't until I'd matured and gotten employment that I actually ate an Oreo. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never ate one until I came to Japan and at that point they were rather hard to locate. So, unlike the rest of you over-privileged snackers who grew up with your Hostess snacks, Nestle's Crunch bars, and Oreos, I don't have a nostalgic attachment to them. That whole twist and make a double-stuff thing? It doesn't work nearly as well with cheap cookies which tended to crack and break apart when you attempted this. Also, the gritty cream filling wasn't really the type of thing you'd want to double up on.

So, I am filled with bitterness and resentment at all of you who have a nostalgic sense of consuming a pure Oreo cookie and can look back on the experience with child-like delight. On the other hand, I can approach this chocolate bar without any of your emotional "baggage" and not focus at all on how this is less than it's parent product. I can experience it without making comparisons. So, there!

The bar smells a lot like Oreo cookies and cheap chocolate. Considering that constitutes 95% of the bar, since the package claims that 5% is chestnut, that is no surprise. The quantity of cookies inside is quite generous and brings the bitter chocolate nature and crispy cookie goodness of part of the Oreo cookie that is less likely to send you into sugar shock. The first bite or two is largely chocolate on chocolate with something else just at the end. There is a slight finishing flavor of chestnut. At first, it is very, very faint, but the flavor intensity slowly builds up as you eat more of the bar. By the end, you have a much better sense of the chestnut aspect.

It's rare for me to eat an entire chocolate bar at once, but this is a flat bar which doesn't seem so heavy or filling. It's 190 calories for 34 grams (1.2 oz.). The texture really is the main draw and it's quite satisfying on that front. However, I don't think this is a cut above a normal Oreo chocolate bar. There just isn't enough of a chestnut punch going on. I think it would have been more impressive if the coating were chestnut rather than chocolate, but it is what it is, and, yeah, I'd buy it again because it's a nice bar regardless of it's lack of strong novel flavor.