White chocolate with caramel and puffed quinoa, from Meurisse — Belgium's oldest chocolate maker, established 1845. Organic, Fairtrade, plastic-free packaging.
CONTAINS MILK
White chocolate is made from cocoa butter, milk solids and sugar. Milk is a named EU allergen and it is a defining ingredient here, not a trace. Check the wrapper for the full declaration and any traces.
Two things you will see on other listings for this bar
Worth naming rather than passing over, because both mislead.
The first is "butter biscuit" listed as an ingredient. That belongs to Meurisse's milk chocolate bar, not this one — and it matters, because butter biscuit means wheat. Anyone avoiding gluten who reads that will put this bar back on the shelf, or worse, assume the same is true of others.
The second is cocoa mass in the ingredient list. White chocolate contains no cocoa mass by definition — that is precisely what makes it white. If a bar contained cocoa mass it would not be white chocolate.
Please check the wrapper for the definitive ingredient list. This page is written from the product name and from what white chocolate actually is, and we have raised the discrepancy with the supplier.
What white chocolate actually is
The thing most people do not know: it contains no cocoa solids at all.
Under EU law white chocolate must contain at least 20% cocoa butter, at least 14% milk solids and no more than 55% sugar. Cocoa butter is the fat pressed out of the cocoa bean; cocoa solids are everything else — and it is the solids that are brown, bitter and full of the compounds people discuss.
So white chocolate is made from the fat of the bean and none of the bean itself. That is why it is sweet and creamy and tastes nothing like chocolate, and why the flavanols and theobromine in dark chocolate are essentially absent.
It also explains why white chocolate burns so easily when melted: no cocoa solids means less to buffer the milk proteins and sugar, which scorch at a low temperature.
Puffed quinoa
A better choice than puffed rice for this. Quinoa is a pseudocereal from the Andes — related to spinach and beet rather than to grasses — and it is naturally gluten-free. Puffed, it gives a finer, more delicate crunch than rice and a faintly nutty, slightly bitter note, which is exactly what very sweet white chocolate needs.
Quinoa seeds are coated in bitter saponins that have to be washed off before eating; that is why quinoa is always rinsed, and why unrinsed quinoa tastes soapy.
MEURISSE - est.1845
MEURISSE - est.1845
MEURISSE - est.1845
MEURISSE - est.1845
