As for other ingredients, sugar, milk of some kind (butter fat, whey, milk powder, for example), cocoa mass and cocoa butter all feature. Some include flavouring, either vanilla extract (good) or just “flavouring”, which will (if unspecified) probably be artificial. Emulsifiers (mostly lecithin) help keep the molten chocolate smooth, runny and easy to handle, so they are there to make life simpler for producers, not more delicious for us. Sunflower lecithin is less processed than soy lecithin, but it is more expensive and some people reckon they can taste it in the chocolate. A few other emulsifiers feature (some bars had as many as three) but the more expensive bars manage without.
But no, you don’t need to spend a fortune if it’s everyday comfort you are after, for a milk chocolate cake topping, or a sweet chocolate caramel sauce, say. For this, skip by the big-brand bars, and even the supermarkets’ own-label mid ranges. The clever money is on budget milk chocolate bars.
Unlike many of the more expensive standard offerings, none of the budget bars I tried (Asda, Aldi, Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsbury’s) contain added palm or vegetable fat. All were over 26 per cent cocoa solids, and all Rainforest Alliance certified. Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons have real vanilla extract. One, you’ll discover below, is an absolute cracker, with a far better flavour (and higher cocoa and milk solids content), than Dairy Milk or Galaxy but at less than a third of the cost.
