Kit Kat Conspiracy (2002)
everything2.com
everything2.com
Prior to David Peter's invention of solid milk chocolate in 1875 chocolate was known as a drink. One of the challenges of making the, now familiar, milk chocolate bar was reducing the water content of the milk to make it easier to emulsify and set the chocolate. This had to be done in a way that kept the creaminess and didn't burn or scorch the milk and that wouldn't spoil. The Swiss got there first it. Cadbury figured it out (or just copied the Swiss). Hershey struggled. He had a chocolate manufacturing plant that was closely guarded not to avoid someone stealing his chocolate recipe but to avoid anyone discovering he didn't have one.
One day in 1904 he cracked it & depending on who you believe, either by perseverance or by parsimony. Hershey's advocates will tell you that late one night, after many failed attempts he & his colleague John Shmalbach discovered just the right slow evaporation of non-fat milk that produced a creamy, faintly bitter chocolate. Hershey's detractors will tell you how a tight-fisted Milton Hershey did not want to waste a large delivery of milk powder that had soured and instead used it & found it sold surprisingly well. Either way that's when Hershey's distinctive "sour" flavour was introduced.
Then the Great War happened. Supply problems & rationing hugely restricted Cadbury & the other European manufacturers. Hershey, despite producing what many thought was a worse product had fewer supply issues and, without European competitors, a US market largely to himself. By the time Europe has finally picked itself up after the Second World War the American palate and taste for chocolate has long since been fixed.
TLDR: Americans have terrible chocolate because in 1914 a Moravian took a wrong turn and got an Austrian shot by a Bosnian
p.s. I love chocolate. I can't stand Hersheys.
That's like saying America has terrible cheeseburgers because of McDonald's.
E.g. yogurt is sour (fermented) milk, and is quite delicious. Or you might think it's terrible.
How about we both agree that Hershey's chocolate has a "distinct, sour flavor" and leave it at that?
When it comes to food we should remember that the Bay Area is a total bubble. Some of the finest food in the world is produced here and some very innovate and ground-breaking work in the various food movements came from here.
Sorry, but Hershey's gets me worked up.
That's a tautology.
You can have your opinion, and down-vote me all you like, but it's really disrespectful to call an entire country provincial because you disagree with a particular taste palette.
So, white wines in general are inferior to reds. I always chuckle when I come across red descriptions that read "hints of leather and chocolate" or similar. I never taste what's described. Either my palate is severely underdeveloped (as with any good peasant) or there's a lot of Emperor's New Clothes going on.
Over the last few years, however, the elite seem to be relenting at least somewhat. Reislings have begun to cross over at least to the extent that you won't lose your trust fund for sneaking down a glass now and then.
That description sounds a lot like the chocolate milk we drank in Indonesia; it tastes very watered down with added sugar. Totally undrinkable. Chocolate milkshakes were the only way to get something chocolaty, milky and drinkable.
Interestingly, lots of stuff about Indonesia struck me as surprisingly American (for a former Dutch colony in Asia), but I hadn't considered that this could also be true for their chocolate milk.
EDIT: As in fact nnq does (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276196)
They said that the Hershey taste was based on milk that had spoiled by the need to transport without refrigeration. That on changing the flavor (sic) USA consumers had demanded a return to the former recipe.
We then got to taste the Hershey chocolate. The entire theatre erupted with [largely] mock retching and disdain calls of how vile the product was. Thankfully we had water and a pack of other chocolate treats to taste as part of the lecture.
Vomit was the overwhelming flavour agreed by all those around me.
But then I was listening to a radio programme about Ethopians eating goat intestines with bile sauce squeezed over the other day; apparently the chef was hugely excited to eat the dish, the Europeans present less so.
A chacun son gout.
I think a few people here in the UK are getting a little annoyed with Americans buying our chocolate companies and wrecking them. Could you stop, please?
p.s. British
It depends on what is most useful to the animal. The definition of gross varies between animals.
That Europeans aren't falling over themselves to condemn the revolting nature of Parmesan suggests to me their dislike of Hershey's is largely based on snobbery.
It just amuses me that people bring up the vomit thing (actually butyric acid) like it is some laughable feature of Hershey's and inherently horrifying.. but they never mention all the other foods that are high in butyric acid, and are in fact loved by foodies.
People can dislike hersheys, but going on about how it "is made to taste like vomit" like it is a shocking revelation, is a double standard.
Europeans have access to the real thing: Parmigiano Reggiano. Butyric fermentation is kept under control because it can ruin the cheese's taste and aspect in a very obvious way (by creating holes).
Parmigiano Reggiano's direct italian competitors - Grana Padano and Trentingrana - "cheat" by using lysozyme to inhibit the bacteria responsible for producing butyric acid.
I feel like there's probably a good opportunity to make a business selling just slightly higher-quality products.
But stuff in the US is also usually less expensive. So I guess it is just an effect of the free market: US buyers preferring lower quality but less expensive products...
But I have to admit I might be a bit elitist about this. Lidl, which I hear a lot more good about, also doesn't really meet my standards for a supermarket. And Albert Heijn, which is often considered pretty good, is not considered all that good by me.
But then, whilst i don't live anywhere near an Aldi, i have become something of a connoisseur of the baffling Teutonic delights of my local Lidl, so perhaps i'm biased.
Then again, I saw just recently a dirty one in Luxembourg, so my first comment should read "it depends" (which is kind of a non-comment) ;)
There is a very evident difference between american and european supermarkets (and the food culture); in the former, the core idea is to present and mass-sell products, in an almost anonymous and very inexpensive way; comparatively speaking, food is more expensive in Europe, but also less anonymous.
My guess is that there is relatively little market space for products in between the cheap and the premium brandings.
Important note - with "anonymous" I don't refer to the brand, but to the quality of the product.
Whole Foods?
Globally food prices have been increasing consistently.
American branded "milk chocolate" (and specifically the process that Hershey's does) has much lower cocoa solids (and additive control) requirements than elsewhere.
"I plan on purchasing an adequate amount of, "KIT KAT," product while I am here in Japan to run double-blind taste trials when I return to US, as I have done with some European and Canadian product in the past. I will inform you of the results of these trials."
http://nitecloak.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/hersheys-classic-m...
Similarly, to me corn bread is meant to be savoury, not so sugary it's like a slightly caramelised cake like I had in one place in NO.
Cheaper than airfare. :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9#Controversy_and_cri...
Good stuff should be above 57% cocoa. If it's less than that, buy high-quality milk chocolate.
That said, other commenters on this thread are correct that it's not too hard to find good chocolate if you just know what to shop for.
My all time favorite is Valrhona. It's by far the best chocolate of them all. Obviously that's personal preference.
We're lucky that we have at least two awesome local brands in the Bay Area. Recchiuti chocolate is awesome, the only location I know of is in the ferry building. Tcho chocolate is the other one and I've been told that they do some interesting stuff with analytics to create the ultimate chocolately goodness.
I care little for Ghirardelli. I went to Ghirardelli Square as a kid and it was fun, but it's just not my thing now.
That said, I once tried a Hershey's chocolate bar on a work trip to the US. I was almost physically sick from the taste. It is truely, truely awful.
Replacing cocoa butter with cheaper fats is also a good way to turn chocolate into a crappy chocolate-like product.
The bad taste is due to less cocoa content and more filler, like palm oil, or even paraffin (yeah, candle wax).
You typically will not find noticable amounts of added emulsifiers in cooking chocolate, as they detract from the taste and texture of the final product. Furthermore, pure cooking chocolate should be able to be melted, reshaped and reset (tempered) over and over again with no degredation in quality.
Chocolate with added emulsifiers, however, is easy to spot because when it melts and re-sets, it has white splotches on the surface. If your milk chocolate has white bits, that typically means its a lower quality, like basically every mass produced chocolate in US / Australia / probably elsewhere.
If you really enjoy chocolate, you should consider buying cooking chocolate. :)
Being long-term situated outside the U.S., I frequently find myself wishing the Hershey-made Kit Kat bars were available to buy up and take to the movies here, but instead end up passing over the comparatively less appealing Nestle version and purchasing M&Ms, which mostly taste the same the world over (though I haven't had them in Hong Kong), instead.
Hershey's uses paraffin (wax), copious amounts of oil, and so forth to ensure that their product has a uniform texture. If a "nontaster" would prefer any product, it would surely be Hershey's, not a good European chocolate bar.
M&Ms don't taste the same the world over. They taste very different abroad. So you might want to rethink your claim of being a supertaster, since you apparently can't taste most of the differnces the rest of us can!
I grew up with Hershey's, and it was obvious to me from a very early age that it was nasty. I could barely even bring myself to eat pure milk chocolate from them. The only thing that was bearable was if they put peanuts or something else in it to hide the taste.
As a kid, I always assumed that it was because they loaded it up with corn syrup and industrial fats rather than actual cocoa butter. And it turns out I was right... only about 11% cocoa in the "chocolate." It's like Taco Bell and their meat which they're legally not allowed to call meat because it's mostly not from an animal. Using soured milk is just the cherry on top of the shit sundae, as the Angry Video Game Nerd would say.
Please read the Wikipedia article, or any research on, what a supertaster is. It is not a "person with more distinguished tastes", since these are wholly subjective and cultural constructs. Just as you believe in your own superiority for preferring Swiss chocolate over American chocolate (might you have refined taste in wine as well? [1]), a Chinese citizen no doubt realizes how superior his tastes are to yours for preferring his largely sugar-free chocolate to your (in his eyes) sickeningly sweet, additive-laden, and clearly unrefined dessert of choice.
And if your argument is that Hershey must certainly be producing what it produces in order to "take advantage of lax standards", you've much to learn about the nature of big business. Visit Asia some time, and you'll notice quite quickly how American chain Pizza Hut, which has adapted to the tastes of the locals by changing its recipes and producing all manner of pizzas largely unappealing to Americans but very appealing to Asians, is rapidly outcompeting other American chain Papa John's, which has stuck with its original American recipe, remaining tasty to Americans... but not so tasty to most Asians. Branded food businesses win by serving the market, not by cranking out crappy tasting morsels that cost less to produce. Those that go the latter route fail in their respective markets.
If Hershey is producing what it's producing to "take advantage of lax standards" and not because it's what the market wants, then the American chocolate industry is wide open for someone more willing to produce in line with what Americans want - and with a market as large as the dessert market in a nation of obese individuals, that'd be a pretty tempting niche to fill (maybe Nestle could do the job?). Yet, unless you can point to tremendously high barriers to entry keeping new entrants from the market, or somehow forcing Americans to buy Hershey instead of some of Dove, Nestle, Ferrero Rocher, etc., your premise seems flawed; the far simpler solution is simply that Hershey is winning the chocolate race in America not because it's skirting the rules, but because it's producing what its (so obviously unrefined) customers all want.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...
But before we go off on a tangent about how certain markets encourage production of low quality goods, let's go back to your original claim that somehow qualitatively some people prefer texture over flavor. As I already pointed out, except for the functional difference between supertasters, food preference is purely subjective and not worth arguing about.
What is objective is the amount of cacao and milk fat (amongst other ingredients) used in the manufacture of chocolate candy. If what you desire is something with actual chocolate in it, American manfuactured candy (pick your brand, it doesn't matter), it will, objectively, contain less chocolate on average than most other places in the world.
What Hershey's does to their milk chocolate is called adulteration. It is manipulating the amount of the key ingredient in something to produce it is as cheaply as possible. It's the same thing fast food vendors do to their meat to make it go farther.
It may very well be true that American tastes prefer lower-quality chocolate, but that's a chicken and egg problem that I'm not prepared to debate.
I actually find it ironic that you would suggest that supertasters who prefer taste over texture would prefer American Kit Kat bars, as everything I've been led to believe suggests that those who actually prefer taste would lean towards the chocolate with higher milk fat and cacao and less palm oil and wax. The later would provide a more consistent mouthfeel, but would sacrifice taste (which, in my humble opinion, is exactly what happens with American chocolate).
Of course, because supertaster is not a better/worse proposition, but just a different experience with tastes, perhaps there's something about the bitterness of high percentages of cacao (like coffee, green tea, or grapefruit juice) that is unpalatable to someone with a heightened sense of taste.
Pizza Hut's success isn't necessarily down to adapting its pizzas, though. They do two other things differently: the Pizza Hut menu includes chinese dishes like fried rice, and their branding/decor is super-fancy, whereas the decor at Papa John's says "pizza place".
Also, Papa John's isn't exactly hard to find (in Shanghai, anyway). It's one of a few joints (like Ajisen and KFC) that I think of as ubiquitous.
It's as if you don't trust consumers at all. We need government policy to define exactly what chocolate needs to be, otherwise no one will make anything good.
How bout this? Buy a nice bar of Godiva chocolate. Or one of the many premium chocolates you can find at most grocery stores or online.
And yes, American KitKat's are shit.
If a corporation is looking out for shareholder value, producing chocolate with the least amount of the most expensive ingredient is a savvy move. Even more savvy when the bulk of your clientele doesn't know your chocolate is so bad. Thus, it's quite hard to find an American chocolatier that actually produces high quality chocolate. You can argue about the evils of gov. regulation till the cows come home, but the reality is that you can't really trust consumers because, as a group, we're really bad at communicating our desires and corporations are really good at informing our decisions.
Hell, Hershey's doesn't even temper half of their shit, that's why old Hershey's bars (or other chocolate candy bar) develop a white powder over time. That's the milk solids separating from the cacao. This doesn't happen in high-quality chocolatiers.
The Hershey's "milk chocolate" recipe or the lax standards?!
Gee, or maybe it's the fact that you enjoy what you grew up eating.
This is not some kind of hierarchy. A "supertaster" (25% of the population; NOT a rarity, for people talking about "claims" as if I said I helmed one of the Fortune 50 or could see through walls) is not superior to someone with a normal amount and distribution of tastebuds in his mouth or someone with a lower than normal amount. He does not have an exquisite palate, and he doesn't have naturally better "taste" than others. In fact, it makes your "taste" far worse: coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, and the majority of fine dining options are all but unpalatable.
As for people accusing me of liking Hershey's milk chocolate itself - I don't like Hershey's chocolate bars or kisses. Never did. We're talking about the difference between two kinds of Kit Kat bars here, not all of Hershey's vs. all of some other chocolate brand.
My comment was a counter example to the article. The author made a very subjective post - which is fine - but then went on to argue that Hershey is clearly engaged in some sort of conspiracy to deny people delicious Kit Kats, which is not fine unless everyone shares his opinion that the alternative to the Kit Kat Hershey makes is more delicious… and not everyone does. My response could go one of two ways:
1. I could be angry and emotional (as some of my respondents were here), and call the guy a clown and an incompetent, and argue that he's all wrong because Hershey's Kit Kat is fine just the way it is, or
2. I could sit and see if I could come up with a possible reason why two people, one who's "accustomed" to Kit Kat in the United States, and the other, who also grew up accustomed to eating Kit Kat in the United States, had such different reactions on consuming Kit Kat outside the United States. Based on the author's description of his experience eating Kit Kat, which focused entirely on mouthfeel, he seemed to be judging "taste" by texture, which is what taste is to a nontaster.
To those who resorted to insults because their feelings were hurt, next time, before you break out your pitchfork, sit down for a moment and see if you can reason out the (non-emotional) difference between you and an article or comment author, rather than turning to insults, which are entirely unproductive and make you look like someone crying in his milk.
In the UK try a bar of Cadburys and a bar of Galaxy. To me the Cadburys bar is grainy and the Galaxy is smooth. Other people may feel Galaxy is greasy, I guess.
Neither of them have the 'snap' of a good chocalate.
My favourite used to be Michel Cluizel. There's a bit of a problem with high end chocolate, as there is with audiophiles or wine tasting. "It sounds nice" or "it tastes nice" are all that matters (after you have a minimum quality) but high end products make odd claims. I am doubtful of the effect of 'single plantation beans' on the end product. I'd like to see double blind trials on that.
Apparently this clown did. Real chocolate is bitter, so it is no surprise he might like the inferior Hershey's version.
I suspect it's a similar phenomenon with people who prefer HFCS Coke to cane sugar Coke. If you're used to palm oil, cocoa butter will make your chocky bar taste "off".
http://www.nestleprofessional.com/uk/en/SiteArticles/Pages/F...
The kitkat made in India, was nearly a market leader in the 90's and even early 2000's. But over time it lost out to new products from Cadbury. The Kitkat here recently improved when someone woke up from a slumber in the kitchen of Nestle.
I have eaten Kit Kat brought from middle east, specially from U.A.E/Saudi Arabia multiple times. Some imported, some directly bought.
The difference in Indian and Middle-Asian Kit Kat is also noticeable, the MA version being firmer, but Indian version being more heavy both in cocoa content, and wafer in recent years.
In fact, Kit Kat only suffers in India because of it poor pricing strategy. For a lot of time, it was price at INR 6/12, which is kinda pain when buying stuff.
In 2008 Hershey started taking the cocoa butter out of many of their chocolates[1], noticeably reducing their quality for many people.
Because of the terms of the licensing agreement with Nestle, Hershey was not able to do this with the Kit Kat, maintaining its quality.
I, too, found it almost unreadablee due to all the links. Silly.
http://everything2.com/title/The+difference+between+Everythi...
$('.content blockquote a').each(function () { var regex = /^http:\/\/everything2\.com\/title/; regex.test(this.href) && $(this).replaceWith(this.textContent) })I can't say it's better than Swiss or than Cadbury chocolate, but it's not worse either! It's just a different experience!
...I like the "rugged" and slightly "sour-ish" taste of Hershey's and that fact that it actually fills your mouth with a strong flavor. And that it doesn't just melt instantly in your mouth, but you can actually chew it. And that it doesn't feel like "50% sugar": to me all European chocolates are just too fucking sweet, except for the dark chocolates. But I like milk chocolate that is not so fucking sweet and doesn't just fucking melts in your mouth before you even had the chance to taste it, and the extremely subtle yogurt-ish flavor of the Hershey added on top just makes it perfect to me. Cadbury too has some of these attributes but the Swiss brands taste just wrong to me.
Even if it was a historical accident, to me Europe just misunderstood chocolate (except for the dark high cocoa chocolates that they did get right), and I really hate it that Hershey's is so hard to find in Europe.
I honestly don't mind it when compared to European chocolates in the same price bracket. It's obviously not the same product, but also not a worse product. At the end of the day given a choice between between cheap shitty Hershey's and cheap shitty Cadbury, I'll choose the Hershey's, mainly since Cadbury is far too sweet. It's also probably the only time ever where an American product is less sweet than its European equivalent.
Of course if I'm in a store spending my own money I'll chose neither and buy a more expensive, but smaller, piece of higher quality dark chocolate.
You can love more than one thing at a time for different reasons.
Seriously do not buy Hershey's products.
Coke's response about their use of high fructose corn syrup is a claim that their customers are not able to tell the difference. bollox I say.
I visited the World of Coke in Atlanta a couple years ago, and at the end of the tour they had machines dispensing samples of all kinds of their international sodas. I was disappointed to find that Mexican coke was not offered, although in retrospect, not surprising as they probably would prefer not to advertise how much better cane sugar Coke is.
Even very young me could taste the difference. As a young child, one of the things I always looked forward to when visiting my grandparents is the States was to drink American Coke since I though it tasted so much better than stuff they had in Europe.
This extends to more than just chocolate though. The Big Mac using mechanically recovered beef would be a big unpleasant surprise (which doesn't happen here except for the nuggets).
Mix that in with cultural differences, you have plenty of horrors (I've heard egg mayo is blended in US rather than mashed together so it's chunky, which has horrified many a Brit). However, anywhere worth holidaying has great food to eat do I don't think it's fair to say its 100% bad. In my opinion, the bread in Spain sucks (unless fresh) yet I've eaten at many great restaurants and bought great snacks.
See, it's a quality of life thing. I don't want to have to go to specialty stores to get a treat that doesn't taste like vomit at 3pm on a Thursday afternoon. I don't want to have to make my own ice cream to get a nice chocolatey flavour. I don't want to have to bake my own biscuits to get edible triple chocolate chip cookies. Etc. You get the idea.
Divine chocolate (Whole Foods) and Ritter Sport milk chocolate are even better. I mean, really, take your pick. There's so much variety. (EDIT: Though, in retrospect, I guess they aren't made here. But I still say that Ghirardelli and Godiva are pretty good, even if they're not the best chocolate I've ever had.)
They were AWESOME.
Well it could just be me :/
Don't discount this idea too much. There was a sea change in my dietary inclinations around the time I was 20-21 years old; I started preferring fatty foods to sugary foods. I'll still eat candy, but I'm much less attached to it now.
I don't want to be the angry old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, and I see that in many ways we have superior options today, than when I was a kid. As a vegetarian of over 20 years, my food options have widened in the intervening years. But, I also don't really like what mainstream food has become, or rather, what Big Ag has turned mainstream food into (as it wasn't an accident, it was a massive campaign of misinformation and regulatory capture).
If I'd logged in later today, I might have missed it!
https://news.ycombinator.com/best
and the other options like
https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
This article sits at number 66 on the list (at least for me), but it's there :)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FKQ6X46/
or
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Kit-Kat-Maccha-Green/dp/B007O...
Amazon Japan Kit Kat search: http://www.amazon.co.jp/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?__mk_ja_JP=%E3%82...
All that seems a little beside the point, though; they have their own (terrible) writing system. I'd kind of expect any brand using roman letters to look foreign.
Basically UK vs. US Mars/Milky Way bars.
Taste of kitkats seems kinda trivial when protesters are being shot in the Ukraine (on same HN page).
Here we have(Spain) a refugee from Africa that was forced to kill his parents as a kid, his sisters were raped in front of him and then he never saw them again. Now the war is over on the paper, but it is not for the population.
I for one welcome Kit Kat trivial stories. There is a problem about news, we focus only on the worse news of the world, so the only "approved behavior" is to live chronically depressed(there will always be bad news).
That seems relevant to HN.