Shakolad: Milk and Dark Caramels

Caramel is tricky but serious business. If you’ve ever tried making it yourself, you’ve probably wound up with a pot of burned sugar.

It’s ok. It really is. If you’ve done this, it probably makes you appreciate well-made caramel even more. Since I’ve burned at least 4 pounds of sugar trying to make caramel in the past year, I am one who appreciates a good caramel, and was eager to see what the caramels from my Shakolad box had to offer. I started out with the dark, assuming that there would be a little more flavor contrast.

The dark chocolate that surrounds the caramel is earthy and offers a coffee undertone. It’s a good thing, because there’s no other flavor in this caramel.

The caramel itself is sugary and chewy, with absolutely no hint of salt, vanilla, cream, butter, or other very common caramel tastes. Aside from the sugar, there is absolutely no taste in the caramel. Though the dark chocolate offers some flavor to compliment the sugary caramel, I was not very impressed by this particular caramel and would likely bypass it if creating my own box.

After that disappointment, I had no choice but to see if the milk chocolate caramel offered anything better. The milk chocolate coating on that caramel has a bit of a caramel undertone itself, but it’s fairly weak, and the chocolate is creamy but otherwise flavorless.

The caramel inside was nearly identical to that in the dark chocolate: sugary, chewy, and flavorless. However, this particular caramel didn’t even have the benefit of dark chocolate to contrast the sugar, so while there is no offensive flavor here, that is essentially because there is no flavor. I’d certainly select another chocolate in place of this caramel, as It offered nothing but a blood sugar spike that I probably didn’t need.

What underlying flavors do you think a caramel should have?