Nestle Nescau - Chocolate Energy Biscuits

What is it about the imported variety of Nestle biscuits that is so... weird? I remember hating Bono just as much. Nestle's Nescau comes all the way from Sao Paulo, Brazil and is apparently a variation of energy biscuits. Energia Que Da Gosto in Portuguese roughly translates to 'Taste that energy'. Although, the biscuits seem to have no glucose or any special component that might give the said energy.

The wheat flour, though, is fortified with iron and folic acid, and there are other regular ingredients like sugar, cocoa, vegetable oil, flavouring, milk powder, etc. I fail to see how such commonplace components can create such hideous flavours. The biscuit isn't tastleless, it is positively cardboard-y.

The cream is not rough with a sugary, crude taste. The taste of chocolate is weak, if anything. Reminds me of the cheapest kind of chocolates sold at local groceries here. You definitely shouldn't be paying INR 50 for a 140 g pack, however enticing the packaging may look. I know it has a superhero appeal, but the taste is anything but super.


RATING: 1/5

Nestle Alpino

By now most people will have seen the Alpino TVC, where a husband makes a big faux pas and then appeases the wife by offering her these chocolates. Mush seems to be the selling point of this new product from the Nestle stables. Also luxury. Nestle India makes its debut in the high end chocolate segment with the introduction of Alpino, which is a centre-filled wafer chocolate.

Also called bonbons, Alpino seems to me as the first real competition to the wildly popular Ferrero Rocher. Similarly packaged in golden colours, the product is meant to exude luxuriousness. Inside the plastic wrapper is a card tray printed with the words "mine" and "ours" upon which sit the two bonbons. On opening the gold foil wrapping, one can find 'love' messages printed on plastic strips.

My pack, as you can see, had these two extremely cheesy lines: "Two of us fit together like these two bonbons in the pack", and "Dogs are for you, cats are for me. This is for us." These remind me of fortune cookies or Dove chocolates (the Indian version is called Galaxy), which have similar messages inside their wrappers.

The chocolate itself is ho-hum. The texture is great, but as always, I find it disappointingly sweet. The sweetness of the milk chocolate overwhelms and takes away all finer points. The taste would have balanced so much better had the centre filling been dark. However, most Indian consumers will find it palatable. What they might not like is the price. Two bonbons, weighing 22 g in all, cost INR 25. But because the product is being positioned as a luxury one, people might just buy into it.

RATING: 3/5

Nestle Bono Chocolate Biscuit

This one seems to have travelled all the way from Brasil to my local supermarket and to my kitchen and into my mouth. And boy, what a wasted trip! I picked up a pack of Nestle Bono impressed by the fancy packaging, and also because I haven't reviewed imported chocolate biscuits in a while. And what a pity that Nestle, Brasil should dent the brand's image with this sorry product.

So, beneath this pretty pack are some of the lousiest chocolate sandwich biscuits I've reviewed. The cookie is overdone, and that makes it taste slightly burnt. It might be a faulty batch, but that's just too bad. One would expect stringent quality control from a brand this big. 

Coming to the cream, there's very little of it in every sandwich. The layer of dark-ish chocolate is so thin in the sandwich that the taste hardly registers. So I did what all good children should do; licked the cream straight off the cookie and that didn't impress me much either. A complete waste for my INR 50 for a 200 g pack. So, here's rating it poorly for taste, value for money and quality.

RATING: 1.5/5

Nestle Aero

I finished the many pending posts of Chocosophy yesterday after much badgering by chocolate stakeholders at home. Because without my photographing them first, no one gets to open a new chocolate bar. This baby had been sitting in the 'collection' for quite some time and boy, I didn't know what I was missing!

Bubbly chocolates are an absolute joy. There are many brands making this kind of chocolate today, but Nestle was the pioneer with Aero. It has come up with many variations over the years like mint, orange, white chocolate and even biscuit, but the USP of the product remains its amazing texture.

Aero is basically an air chocolate, which is made using a complex process invented by one Mister Rowntree in 1935. Head to Wikipedia to know more about this process. The bottomline is, the air bubbles in the chocolate increase the taste experience manifold and look like coarse foam material on the inside - see this?

I was so mesmerised by my first air chocolate experience that I almost didn't notice how sweet the milk chocolate bar was. Aero also apparently has a couple of dark chocolate variants - plain and orange, and it would be quite something to taste those. Other Aero products include caramel and truffle bars and even hot chocolate!

If you haven't tried an Aero or any air chocolate yet, do. The laws of chocolate addiction compel you to! At INR 65 for a 41 g bar, it is every bit worth your money and more.

RATING: 4/5

Nestlé Milkybar

This is one of those reviews that must be written because there are Milkybars in the market. I wouldn't be caught dead with one, because who the fuck eats white chocolate? White chocolate isn't chocolate at all! Yeah, yeah, it's made of cocoa butter (and milk solids and sugar and salt), but what does not have cocoa  solids in it, and therefore none of the goodness of the theobromine and other thingamagics, is as good as useless. Basically, chocolate without cocoa = no sexy compounds = no serotonin = FAIL! I mean, there should be something in chocolate besides its waist thickening properties, right?

So, basically white chocolate is useful only for your enemies to get fat and yes, aesthetics! A slab of white chocolate is a beautiful thing to look at and touch with its creamy, ivory surface and makes for excellent chocolate porn. ;)

Okay, coming back to Nestle's Milkybar, it still sucks. I ate a bar after I don't know how many years, and it still is that sickeningly sweet product that put me off white chocolate as a child. It is smooth in the way all white chocolates are, given the amount of cocoa butter they contain. But taste wise, it is below average than even most other Nestlé chocolates.

Unsurprisingly, few other indigenous brands make white chocolate in the country. Chief players, Cadbury and Amul, have no white chocolate products for example. But if Milkybar has managed to stay in the market for as long as I remember, it must have a strong enough demand. At INR 10 for an 18 g bar, I guess it has enough takers. Milkybar even comes in variations like Milkybar Choo (in Strawberry and Chocolate flavours) and Milkybar Crispy Wafer.

  
 I don't know who eats them. I certainly don't [but for the love of this blog].

RATING: 2/5