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When you can taste the enshittification of everything.
This has been that way for a while now. Reeses and Hershey's suck. They use a PINCH of cocoa powder and their chocolate tastes and feels like wax. The peanut butter filling is basically peanut flavored sawdust. They spend crazy amounts of money reduce ingredient costs while still maintaining a somewhat edible product. They end up with "chocolate favored wax/oil and sugar". Boycott them. You can get way better chocolate at Aldi.
"We are proud to announce our products are completely free of any natural ingredients!"
Reminds me of CHOW, the "non-food food" marketed by Famine in Good Omens.
It's like a full synthetic oil change, but for your gut.
I didn't know Hershey's used Cocoa, I thought the main ingredient was vomit.
It's fine, it's only sold in the US.
I’m assuming you of course are aware, but that is a tasting note. As in hersheys will specifically call out that tasting note as intentional if you do a tasting tour. It explained why I only ever liked their special dark and hates their regular bar.
It's a tasting note, because the original Hershey's milk chocolate chemist accidentally spoiled the milk as part of his process.
It took a decade or two to figure out what was wrong, but by then the American public was used to vomit tasting milk chocolate.
No. It's part of their process because it makes it more shelf-stable. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231221-why-british-chocolate-tastes-the-way-it-does
Accidentally? I thought he had a large batch of spoiled milk powder and was looking for a way to use it up.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hersheys-chocolate-tastes-like-vomit_l_60479e5fc5b6af8f98bec0cd
Even if you are familiar with the process, I'll leave this here for anyone interested in the why. Article is a bit apologetic to Hershey's, but still seems to be good info.
Guys (and gals), there's simple solution to all that: learn to bake.
We are a community of makers. We write our apps ourselves, we host our shit by ourselves, we stream our music and our movies by ourselves. So what should we do when bad corporations are taking away our snacks? Make them yourself!
Recipes are free and open. The tools are not expensive (not much RAM in the oven). There's nothing stopping us.
So, do we need baking community?
This has basically been my mantra for the last 5 years. "Fuck off, I'll do it myself."
Cooking nerd here. You can kind of make your own chocolate.
You almost certainly can't make chocolate from scratch. You could, in theory do all the steps but even in the old days it was an industrial process and it's nearly impossible to get the quality control tight enough at home. The fermentation, roasting, and grinding steps all have to be done under very precise conditions or you won't get good chocolate.
You could just go really old school and use the Aztec recipes but that's not "chocolate" as most people would know it. It's more like a spiced tea.
Home cooks can buy chocolate (it's worth it to splurge and get nice chocolate if you're going through this much trouble) and mix it and shape it. You can make a wide array of flavored ganaches, coat things in chocolate, fill chocolate shells with stuff, etc.
The hardest part is tempering. Chocolate is actually a crystal. The short version is that if you don't control that crystal formation through careful temperature and movement control, your chocolate will get weird and chalky; if you get that all right it's smooth and snappy. There are books and videos on it but you'll need to mess up a bunch of batches before you learn it.
So, do we need baking community?
Chocolate is often candymaking, not baking, though.
That's just bread. I'm talking about cakes.
Chocolate is candy but brownie is cake :)
Baking is relatively easy, but how do you make your own chocolate? I don't think you can properly do that at home.
You can, but you also don't have to make it from scratch. Various forms of real, non-ultraprocessed-and-candified chocolate are guaranteed sitting lonely and forgotten in grocery store baking aisles around the world at this very moment. There's also the option of finding a reputable local chocolatier, if you have one. I've never lived anywhere where there aren't at least several local options, if not countless, but maybe I'm just lucky that way. Even if not, there's always online ordering.
It can be done, but it's not easy.
I've seen recipes, which are basically just cocoa butter and cocoa powder, and they seem pretty simple, though I've never tried them.
Most chocolate "making" just starts with chocolate callets. Melt them, temper it, put it in moulds, and add filling. I've done this, and it's not that difficult. Of course, the quality here depends on the quality of the callets, so if you start with Hershey's (not sure if they even make callets), it'll still taste like vomit.
I recently made brownies from scratch, and they came out so much better than the box brownies that I usually make, that my entire family noticed, and really loved them. It wasn't that much more work than the box, you just had to measure out the flour, sugar, and cocoa, but the difference was huge. Well worth the slight extra effort.
Did you use butter and milk or oil and water in the box mix? That's usually the only difference. The box mix is just flour, cocoa powder, salt, etc. The quality of those ingredients doesn't vary too much.
Yes. Host recipes. Get productive.
I don't understand how they cant see that once we leave we leave. If you bite into that and hate it its a cycle broken and we we unlikely to trust the product ever again.
That's what happened to me and Oreo's during the switch from soy oil to trans-fat-free oils. They were NASTY during that transition.
It's what happened with Bassets Winegums. Used to be my absolute favourite candy. Wife came back from the UK with a box,I opened it and the taste was... Different. Googled - turns out they changed the recipe after being purchased by some large conglomerate. I haven't had one of their candies since 13 years ago. Fucking idiots.
Well if they all do it, who are ya gonna run to?
I eat candy because it tastes good. If it all tastes like shit they why should I eat it?
Not eating candy is always an option for adults with an ounce of self control.
I mean, you can make your own peanut butter cups...
i will have to give it up. it will be easier if its crap anyway. Learning to pay for what you actually want vrs you think you want are two different things.
The thing is, they won't ALL do it. The big names will. Real chocolate will become more of a luxury thing you have less often (which, to be fair is probably a good thing) and the established brands might survive on some blind brand loyalty, or die out.
There are plenty of companies still selling actual chocolate, and since it's chocolate and not chocolate-flavoured sweets I think it'll just become smaller and/or more expensive. Which is fine.
Ozempic!
They'll phase anything but sugar.
Laughs in corn syrup.
laughs in brazillian sugar cane industry
... high fructose corn syrup has entered the chat...
Laughs in aspartame
Club, one of my childhood favourites with the advert song of "If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club" -- no longer has enough cocoa to be legally called chocolate.
Madness.
But the real appeal of mass market chocolate like Hershey’s has always been its cheapness.
There it is.
They ain't even that cheap anymore.
I’ve had some products that use ChoViva (fake chocolate made from sunflower seeds and oats) and they were ok. On the other hand my only memory of Hershey’s chocolate is just pain, even 30 years ago (last time I was in the US). So maybe it’s not replacing cocoa as such that’s the problem.
US chocolate...presumably Cadbury will also be affected though.
Cadbury ruined their best product, the Creme Egg, some time ago. It’s nothing like it used to be. A shame too, because they could raise the price and I still would have bought them, but as it is, I don’t remember the last time I had one.
Have they finally admitted they made them smaller yet? They're like half the size they used to be. Like a laughably noticable difference, but they're still like 🤷♂️ you're imagining things, same as always
My local store instead had to discount them to 25 cents each. And that's when I started buying them up!
I remember when it changed from creamy to just sugar goop that makes my teeth hurt.
Cadbury has been garbage for years now unfortunately.