Square. Handy. Good. (Ritter Sport Chocolate)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Ritter Sport Chocolate
Date:	04/07/03 (392 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Posher than normal chocolate, Cheaper than "proper" posh chocolate

Disadvantages: No ethical reasons to buy it, despite the recipe

…is the Ritter Sport slogan, but it does sound an awful lot better in German.

Ritter Sport is a chocolate brand well known on the continent and becoming more widely available in the UK. It’s no “normal” chocolate because it doesn’t come in usual sized bars as Dairy Milk might. Instead the two sizes available are mini (25g, 4 tiny squares, definitely just a small snack) and large (100g like the outsized Galaxy available). They’ve recently launched a new 40g size which would be perfect for a proper snack or pudding, but this size is so far limited to some new flavours only just on the market, not those like milk which have been around for ages. The other issue concerns the shape: while most chocolate bars are tablet shaped (Mars bar, Toffee crisp, Dairy milk and Galaxy again), Ritter Sport comes in squares. The pieces are square rather than rectangular (or cubes rather than cuboids) and the whole bar itself is, well, square. For eating this presents no problems whatsoever, but if you were to use it for cooking you would soon notice that it melts quicker (and is therefore more likely to burn) due to the smaller surface area of the chunks, and it can also be tricky to grate because it’s wider than most bars, and in many cases will exceed the size of the grater. Each flavour comes in a different coloured wrapper, and the milk chocolate one is a rich, sort of royal blue. So now you know what you’re looking for, what does it taste like?

The milk variety is a simple bar. There is no filling to confuse you, or funny coating for decoration - the entire bar is nothing but pure milk chocolate. It’s not all that creamy, more silky (heading away from Dairy Milk, towards the Galaxy end of the scale) and the taste isn’t quite as sweet as normal milk chocolate, which leaves you with the problem that you can eat more in one sitting that you really should. The packs are designed to be re-sealable, and though
this always works, my will-power sometimes fails. The bar is a strong brown colour – light enough to show you it’s milk chocolate rather than the verging-on-black dark chocolate stuff, but without the grey tinges that scream “low quality cack”. The surface is also smooth – none of that cheap powdery feel for these Ritter Sport chaps, and the pieces snap off when it’s been refrigerated, or bend off when it’s been in my desk draw for a few days. A slight problem with the square design means you almost always need to touch two pieces to break one off, unlike with something like Galaxy where you can just break off one chunk at a time – since every square is parallel to at least one other, unless you want the whole strip, it involves some touching, and on hot, sticky days this can get a bit messy.

If such a thing is possible, it tastes more expensive than bog standard bars of chocolate. While not quite being up to Lindt’s rich standards, it does have a sort of classy feel to it, which makes it more of an adult bar than a children’s one (and since Ritter Sport do some other “children’s only” flavours, this isn’t a problem). The flavour has a hazelnutty tinge to it, and though it doesn’t contains nuts as such, it’s produced in a factory that makes the versions that do, so they cannot ensure it will be nut free. It’s a good chocolate to eat if you can only get your hands on the tiniest packets because it is very slow melting. Yes, you can bite it if you want, but put a piece on your tongue and let it melt away, and you can make the 4 cubes last a good 15 minutes. They’re also nice for when you *need* chocolate but can’t justify eating a whole bar. If you’re hungry, though, you end up buying 2 or 3 or 4 of the little ‘uns which is never good. Ritter Sport also do a “diet” version of the chocolate – meaning one which I suita
ble for diabetics. This is not as sweet as the normal variety due to the sugar substitute they use – Maltite, instead of the usual fructose – but it tastes almost as good. Though the recipe has African and Papa New Guinean influences, the chocolate is still made solely in Western Europe, so it’s not one you can eat to alleviate your conscience as with the fair trade and other similar set-ups.

www.ritter-sport.de/en/index.html is the English language version of the German website, and can tell you more about the varieties available. The 100g bars cost about 60p in the UK, and 66 cents on the continent. Though none of the online supermarkets seem to have it on their sites, I’ve seen it for sale in various branches of Tesco and Safeway before, and in smaller, specialized chocolate shops, so keep you eyes open for it, and you’ll probably find some somewhere near you.

It’s a simple bar, but it is just a smidge nicer than run-of-the-mill milk chocolate. A way to get better quality chocolate without the price tag, it’s certainly worth trying if you have a sweet tooth.

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