Hello boys and girls!
Today I’m exploring another famous confectionery sent across the seas from America!
You may remember I reviewed the American “cakes” Twinkies a while ago.
The taste was far from pleasant and the ingredients, well lets just say most things recognisable as food were not contained.
I’m at it again though, at risk to my own digestive tract.
Will I survive the onslaught of……the Butterfinger?!
Well, these are called Butterfinger so I’m pretty sure we can rule out any possibility of these being healthy.
To be honest, the name doesn’t sound all that appealing, thinking of a finger of butter ready to eat really doesn’t have me salivating in the slightest though I guess neither would thinking of a “Galaxy” out of context, never really thought Uranus looked that tasty myself.
From the name I would have guessed it was some kind of fudge-y buttery bar covered in chocolate but it says they’re peanuts inside and that it’s crunchy?
Well it actually says crunchety.
I think I prefer that to crunchy……….crunchety.
It’s official, I’m using it from now on!
Just like the the Twinkies, the serving amount on this package is for 2.
I’m really not sure why 2 and not one, they are individually packaged aren’t they?
One package should be a serving, right?
Why not just put two in one pack if you want everyone to eat two a serving?
Also, you might notice that the sodium is measured in milligrams rather than grams or percentages of grams as in the UK.
At first glance you may very well have a heart attack thinking there is 85g of salt in 2 bars. The salt is still high, just not THAT high!
These are the “fun sized” bars so I can’t really say how large or small a usual bar is compared to one of our UK brands but these fun sized ones are quite big for what they are, almost the size of a standard Rocky bar here.
Right, now to the dreaded part, the ingredients.
Strangely enough the first ingredient is corn syrup, rather than sugar.
Sugar is the second ingredient.
I’m guessing corn syrup is a lot cheaper than sugar so it serves to bulk the sugar content, which is clearly bloody huge.
I expect to see sugar as the first ingredient with things like boiled sweets since they pretty much are sugar but this seems pretty excessive.
Phew, after all that sugar I’m glad to see there is a high amount of peanuts in these, but what? Ground peanuts?
Why would you take perfectly good peanuts and grind them for a chocolate bar?
I was imagining crunchy pieces of nuts but I guess it saves on that particular choking hazards!
Hydrogenated palm kernel oil, sounds good to me, cocoa, molasses……..and less than one percent of whey, confectioner’s corn flakes, nonfat milk, salt, lactic acid,esters and soy lecithin.
Erm, is it just me or are they saying there’s only 1% of most of the ingredients? “Thank the heavens there’s less than 1% whey, I’ve heard that’s terrible for you” cried no-one as they ate these.
They also have such tasty additions as soybean oil, cornstarch, artificial flavours, TBHQ and E330, E102, E129.
So…here’s a question….how much less than 1% do they take up out of the ingredients?
So basically these are syrup, sugar, peanuts, oil, cocoa and molasses with lots of scient-iffy chemicals.
Did you notice anything missing in those ingredients by the way?
Like…………butter?
I’m sure it was way too much to ask but nope, no butter in a Butterfinger, even peanut butter would have been something…..
In fact I have no idea why it has that name since they’re not even supposed to have the texture of butter or peanut butter, unless there’s a crunchety hard butter I don’t know of somewhere.
So what do they taste like?
Inside they’re this strange, dusty dry powder.
They’re really overly sweet which is no surprise with the sheer amounts of the sweet stuff pumped into these.
There was a taste of some peanuts in it, as you might hope, almost like peanut butter but really not.
I hope the peanut taste wasn’t the artificial flavourings, that would be beyond sad.
Basically this is powdered peanut brittle covered in not very nice chocolate which is pretty bonkers because who in their right mind would grind up peanut brittle?
It’s lovely how it is and it has texture, why get rid of all of that?
All in all it’s another big disappointment from what seems like a really iconic brand name in America.
I don’t want to say all big brand American confectionery is a load of old pants but from what I’ve seen so far I’m kind of getting that impression.
To the stomach pump!