I had a gross learning experience this week. You see, I don’t particularly like milk chocolate and will always choose dark chocolate instead. Not super dark, but the kind that isn’t particularly sweet and has around 70% cocoa solids.
When we lived in Aachen, we discovered the Lindt factory there and I fell in love. I still get Lindt’s 70% dark chocolate bars from the Tesco here. In my mind, this is the minimum expectation for dark chocolate. So when my husband picked up Cadbury’s Bourneville classic dark chocolate, I shrugged and figured it would do. Cadbury is a reliable brand of chocolate, right?
WRONG.
As it turns out, there is no government definition for dark chocolate — it’s just “chocolate” and only needs a minimum of 35% of cocoa solids. And Cadbury only has a “36% minimum” of cocoa solids in their dark chocolate. It also has twice the sugar that the Lindt chocolate has (58 g versus 29 g of sugar per 100 g of chocolate). Bleh.
It only took one bite for me to make a face, and although I finished the piece I’d broken off I kind of regret even that. It was pretty nasty, just way too much sugar for my taste. That taught me to read labels a bit more carefully!
Expat Linguist 