Sugar Pressure

New Ritter Sport Bars - Sweets and Snacks 2011

I have a bias towards Ritter Sport bars. I absolutely love them. I've probably mentioned that a few times in my other reviews of them (see Ritter Sport bar reviews here). The photo above shows the new flavors we'll see in the U.S. They've added two new flavors, Almonds and White Almonds, along with three repackaged German bars, hazelnuts, Noisette (milk chocolate with the delicious taste of roasted hazelnuts) and Extra Fine Milk Chocolate. These are available in a new 65g (2.3 oz) size. These bars are apparently made on a line that used to make all natural and organic bars that didn't do very well in Europe. The impression I received is that Ritter Sport U.S. is making these to sell in places that do not have shelf space for the larger bar. I have a sample of each new flavor and I'll be reviewing them soon.

Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate with a la Mousse au Chocolat

I'm still on a quest to try every version of Ritter Sport that exists. You can read my previous reviews here. Unlike a few of my other reviews, this version of the Ritter Sport bar IS available in the U.S. We Americans can purchase 16 different Ritter Sport bars while Europeans enjoy 50+ versions. They also have special edition and seasonal bars in Europe that we cannot get in the U.S. I'm not bitter, well, okay I am. Europeans get Ritter Sport and we get what? Skittles? I like both but come on, it's great chocolate!

This Ritter Sport bar was not what like what I anticipated. When I hear 'mousse' I think of light and airy chocolate dessert from France. I was really excited to see what I thought was a French/German marriage of desserts with this bar. The dark chocolate was the normal dark chocolate formula from Ritter Sport. Not bitter, just great dark chocolate flavor that's light on the sugar and nice and tasty. I don't care for an entire sold bar of Ritter sport dark chocolate and Ritter Sport fillings are what their bars are all about in my opinion. I think they must use a lot of milk to make this dark chocolate taste so good. Or they use more than other companies do in dark chocolate. It's not Dove creamy smooth, but it has a very nice even melt to it.

First of all, as you can see in the picture below, the mousse is heavy, thick and solid, which didn't remind me of mousse at all. However, it does melt easily and quickly and it does remind you of eating a mousse dessert. Strangely, it reminded me of eating Jello's chocolate mousse dessert, but of a much higher quality and not in a plastic cup. When the mousse melts with the chocolate it does give you a very nice mixture of flavors. It makes the chocolate richer and it's odd, but it also seems to make the chocolate feel lighter when it melts into it.

I liked this bar, but I wouldn't say it's great. It sits somewhere comfortably in the middle of the Ritter Sport line for me. I like it much better than the solid dark chocolate and even the Alpine Milk Chocolate, but it seems to be missing that winning combination my favorite Milk Chocolate Ritter Sport Cornflakes has.  I've come to expect some "oomph" from Ritter Sport, something that really grabs my taste-buds' attention.  So many of their flavor combinations do that, but this one didn't.

Jim's Chocolate Mission has a great review of this bar too.

Taste: 3/5 Liked It
Calorie Counter: 6 pieces = 1 serving = 200 calories, 14g fat, 19g sugars
Price: $1.97 purchased at Target
Ritter Sport Web Site

Ritter Sport Milk Cream Almond

I know it's not fair, but I'm going to review another Ritter Sport bar you cannot buy in the U.S. This bar was sent to me by the Ritter Sport U.S. company and is one I had not heard of before. At first glance, I thought it was similar to the Alpine Chocolate Ritter Sport, since that is a very creamy and milky chocolate but after the first bite I knew instantly why I liked this bar.....it's the chocolate.

My favorite Ritter Sport so far is the Cornflakes Ritter Sport, which I have reviewed before. I especially like the chocolate in that bar and when I translated one of the descriptions of this milk cream almond bar, it reads like this:

Almond bits in a rich milk cream, coated in full milk chocolate with a particularly high portion of noble chocolate made of Papua New Guinea and Madagascar.

The description is important because this bar uses the same chocolate mixture as the Ritter Sport Cornflakes bar. You can find the description of that bar here, and I've posted it below:

 

Milk Chocolate made with cream

 

Our Milk Chocolate made with cream spoils you with its soft, creamy taste and full-bodied, creamy flavour. To make it, we use a basis of West African cocoa, which we round off with fine cocoa beans from Papua New Guinea and Madagascar. Only* our cornflakes are allowed to be coated in it. In doing so, they become our unique RITTER SPORT Cornflakes.

*note this is for the U.S. Ritter Sport bars, the bar I'm reviewing is from Germany, so it CAN use the same chocolate.

 

One of the reasons I like the Cornflakes bar so much is because of the rich and creamy chocolate that has a nice strong cocoa flavor. This bar has that exact same taste. Not all Ritter Sports have the same chocolate mixture, I think they have 9 chocolate recipes, and I do like some better than others.  What sets this bar apart from the Cornflakes bar is the milk cream center. Most of the time, the additions to the chocolate are the centerpiece...the chocolate is good, but it's the fillings that really make these bars taste so fantastic. In the Milk Cream Almond bar, the filling has very little flavor. I confirmed this by peeling back the chocolate and scooping out some filling and eating it plain. It had very little taste to it, except a milky and creamy texture and taste. What the filling does in this particular bar is that it makes the chocolate richer and creamier, which is absolutely incredible. While the chocolate in this bar tastes identical to the chocolate in the Cornflakes bar that I love so much, the texture is completely different. This bar melts in your mouth and then turns into a milky/creamy chocolate that makes it feel like something Dove would make. I'm not kidding.  This is the first Ritter Sport I've had that made me thing of Dove chocolate with it's silky smooth melt and texture.

As always, the nuts added to this bar were the perfect size and Ritter Sport did not skimp on the almonds. This combination was really good.  The chocolate was fantastic and Ritter Sport never ceases to amaze me with how they make such interesting combinations and flavors.

Taste: 4/5 Really Liked It
Calorie Counter: 25g = 4 pieces = 1 serving = 140 calories
Price: Free Sample provided by Ritter Sport U.S.
Ritter Sport Web Site

Ritter Sport Olympia

I've had this Ritter Sport bar hidden in the refrigerator in the basement wet bar for some time now.  (Oh no, now you know where I hide my chocolate!!)  This bar, along with several others, was sent to me by the very kind people at Ritter Sport USA. This bar is not available in the U.S. market as far as I know. This is a bar found in Germany specifically and probably parts of Europe. Jim's Chocolate Mission and Candyblog were able to fill me in on the origins of this particular bar. The links take you to their reviews.

According to those two very informed writers, this bar was introduced in 1980 during the Olympics. If you don't remember this particular Olympics, it was held in Moscow and the United States and several other countries boycotted those games. I'm not old enough to remember that particular Olympics, but it's fine to learn history isn't it?  Knowing that, the name and gold wrapper kind of give away that this was an Olympic bar.  It was taken out of the Ritter Sport family of chocolate bars in 2004. Since then, there has been a campaign by the bar's fans to get the bar back into production and the picture you see is of the returned bar.

I for one am very glad to see this bar return. I'm a huge fan of Ritter Sport bars and I was dying to try this one. Translating the wrapper tells me that this bar has yogurt, honey, hazelnuts and grape sugar in it. I'm a HUGE fan of the Ritter Sport yogurt bars so I could not wait to try this one. The chocolate is good, but gets pushed aside very quickly by the tangy and somewhat creamy yogurt filling. I love the rich tangy yogurt flavor in this bar. It is different than the other yogurt Ritter Sport bars I've tried in the past. You can taste bits of honey in this bar, but it isn't a dominant flavor. It is very subtle and the honeycomb pieces are crunchy, gritty crystals that I found enjoyable. I also like the hazelnuts because of their smaller size. The hazelnuts were meaty and gave a very good nutty flavor to this bar. I like this smaller size better than the giant hazelnuts found in the milk and dark chocolate hazelnut Ritter Sport bars sold in the U.S. In this bar, it is a hint of hazelnut, rather than the dominant flavor.  Overall, the flavor was fantastic and if you have a friend in Europe, ask him to send you one of these as they are worth trying.

I wish they would bring this bar to the U.S. Ritter Sport USA could rotate this bar in every other year or only during the Olympic years. I think it would be great marketing for them. It would be similar to a cupcake bakery we have here in town that rotates flavors on certain days of the week and has a special flavor every month. It probably drives up sales and people that love cupcakes (I'm one of those people) follow the flavor changes very closely. I often hear people talking about a certain flavor they like and then hear other people talk about how they'll rush out and buy it. It is that word of mouth advertising that is invaluable, and something Ritter Sport should use to their advantage.

Taste: 4/5 Really Liked It
Calorie Counter: 25g = 4 pieces = 1 serving = 140 calories
Price: Free Sample provided by Ritter Sport U.S.
Ritter Sport Web Site

Ritter Sport Schokocreme

This gigantic Ritter Sport bar was sent to me by the very nice people at Ritter Sport. The photo above is a comparison between a normal 100g Ritter Sport and this King Sized 250g version. It's 36 squares of chocolate goodness instead of the standard 16.  I thought American's had the market cornered on King Sized candy but the Germans have proven me wrong with this Ritter Sport bar!

Schokocreme is a chocolate cream bar and the packaging says this was made with "select high quality cocoa beans and crispy rice-crispies". I have to admit, I was very intrigued by this combination. I thought this might be chocolate mousse or pudding by looking at the wrapper, but the chocolate cream is solid with the suspended rice-crispies inside of it.

I thought this king-sized Ritter Sport had a great taste. It is much sweeter than any other Ritter sport I've had before. I think it was the combination of chocolate with chocolate cream. My wife ate a few squares and said it was too sweet for her, but SugarKid stepped up and ate a square and pronounced it the best chocolate he'd ever had. I'll have to disagree with both of them.  It is not the best chocolate bar I've had in my life, but it certainly did not taste too sweet to me. I think the best way to describe the inside of this bar is to think of chocolate mousse because that was the texture the "cream" had to me. The best way to eat this was to let it slowly melt and the combination of Ritter Sport chocolate with the chocolate cream was really very good. My only critique was that the rice-crispies were too small for me but if you let it slowly melt they took on a larger feel than if you chomped through them. I can't describe that feeling, but it was almost as if you let it all melt away and then you were left with the rice-crispies, then they were the perfect size. However, if you chomped through the bar, they seemed very small and didn't add to the overall taste. This bar was very chocolatey, very decadent, and very sweet. I had a hard time eating more than a few squares of this and with such a large bar, that means this thing is going to last for quite some time.

I'm not sure if this bar will make it to the U.S., but I sure wish they'd create some of these king sized versions of the bars we do have. I love how the wrapper and chocolate keep the same look and feel of the normal 100g sized Ritter Sports. Since I'm such a huge fan of Ritter Sport, I can't begin to describe how cool it was to open this bar and see six squares of chocolate across the top instead of the normal four. I would like to thank Ritter Sport again for sending me this bar and I can't express how happy it made me to see a king-sized Ritter Sport.  Now I am dreaming of a king size Ritter Sport Cornflake bar....even at 36 squares, I could eat that in an evening!

You can also read reviews of this bar at two of my favorite sites, Jim's Chocolate Mission, Candyholic.com (site is in German)
Taste: 4/5 Really Liked It
Calorie Counter: 25g = 4 pieces = 1 serving= 145 calories, 10g fat (no sugars given and the other numbers are my rough estimates, as the label is in German
Price: Free Sample Provided by Ritter Sport
Ritter Sport Web Site

Ritter Sport Halloween Campaign

I love a good advertisement and I like this interactive one Ritter Sport has done. Here is the Ritter Sport blog post about this campaign. They sent me the code below to link to their campaign and I just had to do it. Click on this link for all my Ritter Sport reviews.

Ritter Sport Peppermint

If you are a regular reader of my site you'll know that I'm on a mission to try every flavor of Ritter Sport bar out there. In my opinion, Ritter Sport makes some of the best higher end chocolate bars that are widely available. Don't get me wrong, there is a ton of great chocolate in the world, but it's not as easy to find as a Hershey bar, Snickers, or Ritter Sport bar. Almost every "big box store" you go to has at least 1, 2 or maybe even 5 varieties of these bars.  You can't say that about most high-end chocolate!

I had read a review for the Ritter Sport Peppermint bar some time ago on both Candyblog and Jim's Chocolate Mission. The only problem was that I couldn't find it. So, I resorted to Amazon.com and purchased one from one of my favorite sellers there, Euro Food Mart. The bars are expensive when you add in shipping, but I usually save up a few items and then buy a bunch at a time. They keep for a very long time in a refrigerator.

As you can see in the picture this is the German/European packaging but there is a Peppermint version sold in the U.S. (with English wording on it). This is a dark chocolate with a peppermint filling. The dark chocolate is not as dark as you would think. It isn't bitter or dry and doesn't really have the qualities you'd find in what I'd consider dark chocolate. I'm thinking of Patric Chocolate which is a real dark chocolate. This has more of a milk chocolate texture with a darker chocolate color and slight dark chocolate taste. The mixture is pretty darn good and the dark chocolate is a perfect match to the peppermint filling. The filling is a melt in your mouth smooth creme that has just the right amount of mint flavor to go with the dark chocolate. I can't really put words to how great this combination is and how perfectly matched the two flavors are. I would seriously put this at the top of my list for the best mint/chocolate combination I've ever tasted. One of the nicest things about this bar is that it coats your tongue and tends to linger in your mouth and the taste gets better and better. I found it hard to eat more than 3 or 4 pieces of this at a time. It's very rich and tastes so good, but I was satisfied very quickly.  I am pleased to check this bar off my list of "Ritter Sports I Still Need To Try", but believe me, the perfection of this one just makes me more excited to try the next!!!

Taste: 5/5 Loved It
Calorie Counter: 6 pieces = 1 serving= 190 calories, 11g fat
Price: $2.69 + shipping purchased at Euro Food Mart on Amazon.com
Find, shop for and buy from Euro Food Mart at Amazon.com

Ritter Sport Stack

I have a few Ritter Sport bars to review! Ritter Sport sent me several of these and I've purchased a bunch of these too. You can never have enough Ritter Sport on hand.

Ritter Sport Milk Chocolate with Strawberry Creme Update

The great people at Ritter Sport sent me the new Ritter Sport Milk Chocolate with Strawberry Creme in a large package of Ritter Sports to review. I thought I'd post the photo here as an update to my earlier post of the Ritter Sport Erdbeer Joghurt I reviewed. These should be on sale soon, since October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Look for the package below and enjoy some great chocolate while supporting a great cause.

Ritter Sport - Stracciatella

Ritter Sport is a German company that makes some of my favorite chocolate bars.  While they make a few dozen flavors in all, only about 15 varieties are available in the United States. Lucky chocolate lovers around the world not only have access to more flavors every day, they also have access to the limited editions. The Stracciatella Ritter Sport is a Summer 2010 special edition that was created to taste like Stracciatella ice cream. This is a popular ice cream in Germany and something those of us across the pond know nothing about.

Stracciatella is very similar to chocolate chip ice cream in the United States. However, instead of large bad tasting chunks of chocolate, Stracciatella has very fine, melt in your mouth, tiny bits of chocolate. You can read a little bit about it here.

This is a milk chocolate bar that is the same great Ritter Sport quality I've come to expect from this company.  The chocolate is rich and creamy and has a fantastic flavor and melt. Inside the bar is the Stracciatella filling, which has a wonderfully strong vanilla flavor with tiny bits of chocolate throughout. The vanilla isn't your weak American vanilla ice cream flavor. It reminds me of the vanilla my wife and I make by soaking vanilla bean pods in vodka for several months in a cool dark place. It has WAY more flavor than the imitation or even the real vanilla you buy off store shelves.  This is exactly the flavor I tasted in this bar. This bar had a flavor that also reminded me of ice cream, but I'm not sure if that was only because I had ice cream on the brain. I also thought the creamy Stracciatella filling had a bit of a coffee finish to it, which really added a nice flavor to this bar.

Sadly, this bar is not available in the U.S. and that is a real shame. I think this bar would sell extremely well in the American market. We sure do love our ice cream here and I'm sure if you called it a Ritter Sport Vanilla Chocolate Chip bar, it would be a #1 hit. I'd like to thank the great people working at Ritter Sport U.S.A. for sending me this sample. I savored every single bite knowing it would be the only one I'd ever have.

Other reviews of this bar by: Zomg Candy!, It's All About Limited Edition, Jim's Chocolate Mission.

Taste: 4/5 Really Liked It
Calorie Counter: This info. was in German
Price: Sample provided by Ritter Sport U.S.A.
Ritter Sport German Web Site