Kit Kat Tourism: Chocolate Overload(!)
Chocolate Overload. What can I say? What can you possibly say about a chocolate bar that has entitled itself thus? There isn’t really any wiggle room here. There isn’t space for technicalities or loopholes. The verdict has been passed and there will be no appeal. Chocolate Overload is full of chocolate. It is overloaded with chocolate. If there were more chocolate, it would achieve some sort of transcendent status, some sort of meta-chocolate state, where chocolate itself actually ceases to have meaning. Did I mention it has chocolate?
Do you like chocolate? If you are reading a review about a Kit Kat I suspect that you do. Would you like to eat chocolate? Again I feel can safely answer yes. Would you like to eat highly condensed chocolate, with varying textures—layers of different sorts of chocolate, but ultimately just basically a whole fuckload of chocolate? What I’m basically trying to say is that writing a review about the Chocolate Overload Kit Kat is like writing a review about Jesus. Either you feel it or you don’t. If you follow a different sort of faith—say, you believe that the messiah is embodied by strawberry, or caramel—there is simply not anything for you here.
This is good, actually, because it leaves me a bit of room to call Nestle out on their whole Kit Kat agenda. Last time I wrote jokingly about dubious Kit Kat flavours, but as it turns out I was not far off from the truth. Research has revealed varieties that are not merely amusing, but will actually make you question your reality: Rock salt? Beans? Corn?
You might think that Nestle has a truly disturbing corporate culture if it things these are roads worth going down: a pit of imbred insanity, sisters marrying each other and adopting a baked potato to raise as a child, etc. But the real punchline is that all these esoteric flavours taste exactly the same. There is a joke, here, and the joke is on all of us—we, who believed in the multifarious possibilities of an unbridled palette. Somewhere, a supercomputer robot designed to crush dreams is sitting in a corner office and laughing maniacally.
Yes, I am calling you out Nestle. The time has come to answer for your crimes. Bonbons at dawn.
Kit Kat Tourism: Muscat of Alexandria
Something very exciting happened the other week. My friend Chris Botman went to Japan - home of the most varied and dynamic selection of Kit Kats - and he brought me back the most crazy Kit Kat he could find. While most other Kit Kat flavours have pretty generic names like Mint Chocolate or White, the flavour Chris brought back for me is a very hilarious and specific flavour of grape. Not only is it muscat grape flavoured, but it’s muscat of Alexandria flavoured. Awesome. I can only hope this the start of a new era in Kit Kat flavours - Overripe Tomato of Lexington, Wisconsin or Crunchy all Natural Peanut Butter of My Fridge, perhaps?
I once had a grape flavoured gummy candy that was coated in milk chocolate, and it was about one of the 
Best Things Ever. I was hoping for a similar taste experience with Muscat of Alexandra. Sadly, Muscat of Alexandria is just grape flavoured white chocolate (which isn’t even real chocolate anyway). The Kit Kat came in two individually wrapped packages (two standard finger sized bars in each, pictured right), snuggly packed in a larger cardboard box (pictured above). This seems to be the standard with Japanese Kit Kats (the Japanse do love their pretty yet totally unnecessary packaging), whereas the ones in Australia and Canada are just one standard bar in one wrapper.
Now, I’m not usually a fan of Kit Kats that aren’t chocolate based. I like 
my Kit Kats with milk chocolate and caramel and/or some other delicious creme filling. However, I found the grape flavour refreshing (good for a hot day, when milk chocolate is too heavy) and rather realistic in the way that Jelly Bellys taste exactly like what you’d imagine the candy version of Pear or Peanut Butter would taste. However, I can’t really say that it tastes specifically like Muscat of Alexandria, which is supposed to have a sweet (check) and earthy taste (definately not check). Yes, I know this seems ridiculous to point out (we aren’t talking about wine here), but if you’re going to make a very specific flavour like this one, don’t forget the slight earthy flavour!
So, not my cup of tea (or… box of chocolates?), but definately worth trying once. If you love grape flavoured candy, you may just fall in love.
Kit Kat Tourism: Cookie Dough
Special guest blog by celebrity time traveling food blogger / jazz pianist extraordinaire David Fono
In the year 2008…
The world has only one chance
And only one Kit Kat
KIT KAT COOKIE DOUGH:
Cookie Dough & Caramel Layer over Crunchy Wafer Finger covered in Smooth Milk Chocolate
When Kate asked me if I wanted to a review a new Kit Kat flavour, I was initially suspicious. I know that Kate is quite fond of her esoteric Kit Kats, particularly when they’re in limited supply. Plus, having followed her long, tortuous journey through the warped world of Nestle’s imagination, I’ve long been suspicious of an eventual decline into the “regrettable” range of flavours: Decaying Flesh, Childhood Trauma, Poison. Fortunately, it just turns out we’re dealing with Cookie Dough here.
Unfortunately, things went a little awry before I had a chance to dig in. You see, the “first” half of the bar was purloined by Kate before I could sink my teeth into it. You know the half I’m talking about: the half with the initial bite, the bite that is pure chocolate. The bite that cleanses the palette, sets the chocolaty baseline in advance of the complex flavours to follow. Without this half, a meaningful reading of the complete experience is difficult to fathom. For all I know, half of the Cookie Dough chocolate bar could be covered in moss, or filled with rotten teeth. Maybe that sort of thing is big in Asia. You’ll have to ask Kate. In the meantime, all I can do is my best.
My initial impressions went something like this: There’s not much going on here. This is certainly one of the more conservative Kit Kat offerings; it’s quite a ways from the explicit, unabashed flavour of Mint or Strawberry. That doesn’t make it bad, mind you. When you think about it, Cookie Dough flavour is perhaps the logical zenith of the core Kit Kat trajectory; the Kit Kat, after all, is largely a cookie. So if you add more cookie-ness, are you really doing something new? Or are you just lifting the traditional offering to a new level? As a fan of the fundamental Kit Kat prototype, I’m not against this way of doing things. I’m enjoying this Cookie Dough Kit Kat — it feels like coming home to an old friend, who has just purchased a slightly larger house with a pool. It’s nice to hang out with my friend, but it’s even better when we have a pool.
However, upon passing the first draft of this review to my editor (Kate), she stormed over to my desk and demanded to know what kind of hack food journalist considers caramel and cookie dough uninteresting. I informed her that all Kit Kats had caramel, and she reminded me that I’m used to eating Kit Kat Caramels. It turns out she was right; and this is an important distinction. The Kit Kat Caramel represents a significant improvement over the basic Kit Kat model — in fact, may represent a local peak in candy bar evolution. To say that the Cookie Dough Kit Kat, then, is a minor improvement on the Caramel, is to say that it is a minor improvement on near-perfection.
There is, of course, the creaminess to speak of. The “cookie dough” in question here isn’t so much dough, as a dubious paste. To some, this may be off-putting. However, if you’re any sort of Kit Kat aficionado, you’re probably used to these sorts of shenanigans. The idea isn’t to focus on the individual textures, but on the gestalt; and the creaminess is, for the most part, lost in the familiar crunch of wafer and chocolate. You can tell it’s there, but it doesn’t interfere. It’s nice, but not *too* nice, like a creepy uncle.
As you can probably tell, I would recommend this chocolate bar. It’s nothing revolutionary. But if you want something revolutionary, why are you eating a Kit Kat? Kit Kats are about minor but solid variations on a consistent, underlying theme. In this respect, the Cookie Dough Kit Kat succeeds marvelously. I give it 8.5 Kits out of a possible Kat.
Kit Kat Tourism: Cookies & Cream
There is nothing more exciting than going to Coles and seeing a new flavour of Kit Kat. But it also kinda sucks, because you realise your old favourites like Kit Kat Cookie Dough are never coming back. It’s sorta the fucked up appeal of Kit Kats - they’re always getting rid of flavours you like to make room for new ones that you might not. But you just have to try them all. It’s a neomaniacs dream. Especially in Japan. They have like 50 million different flavours, and weird ones too, like Fan and Black Sugar. Okay maybe not Fan, but that’s certainly what it looked like from the package. Black Sugar looked and kinda tasted like turd. Anyway, yeah, Cookies & Cream - the latest Australian Kit Kat Flavour. It’s in the chunky bar format, rather than the classic four stick style. I like the chunky better. The official description from Nestle’s Kit Kat site:
Smooth Filling with Crunchy Cookie Pieces over a Crisp Chocolate Wafer Finger Covered in Smooth Milk Chocolate.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. You can even taste the unnecessary capitalization, which is probably why I found it overwhelmingly creamy, and not in a good way. It’s supposed to be milk chocolate, but the abundance of creamy filling (which I think is supposed to have something to do with Oreos) makes it taste like white chocolate. And I hate white chocolate. It’s not even chocolate, anyway. Overall, Cookies & Cream is okay, but it’s more like a failure version of my all time favourite, Cookie Dough, which had delicious caramel to temper the creaminess, and just the right amount of salt. But that said, it’s still heaps better than Mint or Black Sugar. Worth trying, but probably not destined to be your favourite.
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