Ritter Sport is a 100g (3.5oz.) square chocolate bar from Germany. Although frequently sold in gourmet and specialty shops here in the US, in its German homeland the Ritter Sport is roughly equivalent to a Hershey bar – the one chocolate bar you can buy at almost any news stand, gift shop or gas station.
I’ve loved them for years, especially the Voll-Nuss (hazelnut) and Alpenmilch (extra milk) versions. But when my local Walmart started carrying them, I was intrigued by one type I’d never seen before:
Yes, it’s a chocolate candy bar… with cornflakes! I had seen them on several trips to the store, but this week temptation got the better of me and I finally bought one… and they’re indescribably delicious!
First of all, there’s the Ritter chocolate. I’m sure there will be chocolate snobs out there that will sniff and call it “pedestrian” and lament that it’s not “quality chocolate” like Michel Cluizel, Amadei Chuao, Vahlrona Noir Amer, or even (gasp!) Scharffen Berger. And that’s fine. As I said, it’s Germany’s Hershey bar, so I’m not expecting life-changing stuff here. But it’s good, solid chocolate, with a fine balance of sweet and bitter and plenty of milk. I’d equate it with a regular Cadbury’s bar (and I mean British Cadbury’s, not the “American Cadbury” stuff made by Hershey’s). In short, it’s everything you could want in a run of the mill chocolate bar.
But ooooooohhh… the cornflakes! Biting into this bar is initially like biting into a Nestle Crunch bar. In fact, the texture is almost identical. But you quickly notice that whereas the “crunch” part of the Nestle Crunch quickly dissipates, the crunch of the cornflakes sticks around. Almost every single nibble is crunchy, and it’s a substantial crunchy, too. In short, the comparing the “crunchiness” of a Nestle Crunch with this bar is like comparing the flavor retention of Fruit Stripe gum to Stride. Or maybe it would be better to say that this bar is like a “Crunch bar on steroids”.
What’s more, the Nestle Crunch’s crisped rice brings almost nothing to the table as far as flavor goes, whereas the Ritter bar has a pleasant corn taste that melds surprisingly well with the milk chocolate. I didn’t detect much in the way of “salty” from the cornflakes (and why would I?) so it’s not a “sweet and salty together” taste like, say, chocolate covered potato chips. It’s just a nice corn aftertaste that lingers on your tongue, doing a happy dance. It’s really awesome! You shuld try one sometime!