I am going to do my best to post candy reviews now and again. I found some foreign chocolate bars in the market, and decided to give them a go, although I barely eat Swiss chocolate, find Ritter Sport pretty disgusting, and don't really like Cadbury (too sweet). This is not to say that I like Hershey's all that much, either.
That said, the first candy bar I tried is the Nestle Tex Bar from South Africa. I almost bought a regular "Aero" bar, which looked like aerated milk chocolate from the picture on its wrapper. The wrapper says that the Tex Bar is partially filled with Aero chocolate. Well, judging by this bar's taste (admittedly, it's holding up great for traveling halfway around the world and still has more than 8 months to its expiration date), I'm glad I didn't get the Aero.
First off, it's a pretty big candy bar, weighing in at 40 grams. The brightly-colored wrapper offered me an "instant win" in a contest for 1.5 million Rand in airtime & cash prizes. Only problem is: the contest ended on August 31st. Oh, well.
Tex is made of "rich, creamy Nestle milk chocolate with AERO centre and filled biscuit wafers." The filled biscuit wafers are similar to the ones found in KitKats, otherwise known here in the U.S. as "creme-filled wafers." By themselves, they are thin, sweet, cardboardy foam cookies with slightly crunchy sugary filling. Here in Tex, that's what they are all right, but the only taste is "sweet." The AERO is undoubtedly the thick stripe of brown chocolate in the center of the bar. It's fairly hard, crumbly chocolate that might be aerated, but that's about it. The outer chocolate coating is thin, with faint striations on the top to give it that "appetizing" look that a clod of chocolate just doesn't have. The outer chocolate doesn't have much flavor, but upon opening the wrapper, a nice, sweet cocoa smell did waft out.
The Tex "texture" is great - crispy and crunchy. However, the Tex taste leaves a lot to be desired. It's not very chocolatey despite the AERO centre of pure foamy chocolate. It doesn't have much of a vanilla taste, either. Mostly, it tastes like its main ingedients: cane sugar, closely followed by "wheaten flour."
I only ate half, and can feel a stomach ache coming on. While it's exciting to try a candy all the way from South Africa, and I admit, it may have suffered in its travels, though it doesn't seem horribly stale and there's no bloom on the chocolate, I think I'll leave Tex to its aficionados. On the Casil Candy Scale of Godawful to Divine, I'll give Tex a "toss up between the dog and the trash can," which is basically about one point up from Godawful. I'm not Mikey, but I do spit things out. I bet they love this bar in District 9.
