Contrasting tastes can be fascinating to explore, as can contrasting textures. Sweet with tart, smooth with crunchy, bitter with malty. Not all against-the-grain pairings work, but when they do, they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
To that end, eating a spoonful of sugar is boring because it’s one-dimensionally sweet without anything else to challenge your taste buds. We add sugar to things because it adds something to the flavour of the other thing, not because the sugar itself is satisfying all on its own. The magic of taste is in finding the right mix of elements — and the more unexpectedly perfect the combination, the more enchanting it can be.
Within the last decade, the trend of adding salt to chocolate has gone fully mainstream. Sure, things like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have been paving the way in the sweet/savoury chocolate market for nearly a century, but more explicitly salted chocolates and caramels are a relatively recent addition to the mainstream. Lindt offers salted caramel chocolate orbs, as well as dark chocolate bars sprinkled with fleur de sel. And then there’s one of my favourites in Canada: the selection of Himalayan Pink Salt Caramels from Purdys Chocolatier.
Fun with flavour wild cards
The catch is that one person’s yum can be another person’s yuck. Is there a more polarizing pizza combination than ham and pineapple? I love it, probably due to the interaction between the sweet and tart pineapple, the salty ham, the sharp tang of tomato sauce, and the salty, chewy, stringy texture of mozzarella.
(Aside: When I was a vegetarian, I swapped onions for the ham. The resulting pineapple and onion pizzas varied greatly in quality depending on the pizza place’s choice of onion type, and whether they buried the onions under the cheese, effectively steaming the onions, or scattered them on top of the cheese, roasting and caramelizing them in the oven’s heat.)
Several steps over the oddity line from Hawaiian pizza, I also once taste-tested a shortbread recipe that incorporated blue cheese. To add to the flavour chaos, the cookies’ edges were rolled in coarse sugar to counter the soft shortbread texture. These were wild choices, but they somehow worked – even though they weren’t everyone’s cup of tea.
So, why all the preamble? Because there’s something similar happening with these holiday-edition fudge-coated Ritz crackers.
Puttin’ (fudge) on the Ritz
Ritz crackers are staple of children’s lunches, basic cheese and cracker plates, and charcuterie boards prepared by people who don’t need everything to be locally sourced, artisanal and full of seeds that get stuck in your teeth. They are airy and light and dry and salty — and not at all fancy, despite what the name suggests. So what happens when you combine a very basic cracker with a sweet “chocolatey coating”?
On their own, standard Ritz crackers are a wee bit bland. They sell a whole host of different flavours beyond the original for folks who want a bit more flavour (especially if you’re eating them on their own, without cheese or a dip), but the base here is the plain, original variety, where salt is the only real seasoning.
The first bite is crisp. They give a satisfying crack, and the coating is neither too hard nor too soft or smeary. The chocolate is as basic as you’d expect, but there’s just the right amount, and it coats the whole exterior of the cracker. Curiously, based on the order in the ingredients list, the chocolatey coating is actually the first ingredient, meaning there’s more chocolatey coating than any other single ingredient. There are also still crunchy bits of salt in the cracker, just like with the standard salted Ritz, so when you hit a crystal of salt, it’s a treat.
These may be a nice bonus in a packed lunch around the holidays, or could make for a fun addition to a cheese plate when guests visit over Christmas. (I tried a few of these with a simple pepperjack cheese, and yum!) And if you leave a few out for Santa, I doubt he’d mind.
The Details
Price: $4 on sale for a 212-gram box at Safeway in Edmonton, Canada.
Value for Money: Fine.
Availability: Limited edition. My Safeway has had these during the holiday season for the past few years, but they vanished as soon as Christmas was over. Check larger grocery stores, and especially around the end units of aisles where they feature other Christmas stuff.
Nutrition: 160 calories per 4 crackers (33 grams). It’s a hybrid chocolate/cracker, so I’m not sure if that’s high, low, or par for the course.
British-ish?: These remind me a bit of the chocolate-coated “digestive” cookies (biscuits, sorry) that are an everyday staple in British life, and that aren’t terribly hard to find in Canadian grocery stores. So if you’re used to chocolate digestives, these may have additional appeal.
Verdict: Perfect for holiday snacking. Try adding to a plate of cookies, crackers or cheese at a holiday party.
