Will These Milk Chocolate Cookies Make You Crackers?

On Friday, July 5, 2019, it will be National Graham Cracker Day but I'll be at a convention that weekend so I wanted to make sure you all had time to plan who you'll celebrate this fun full holiday. We're going to look at two types of milk chocolate grahams from South Bay Chocolate Co. today to see what they are like but also to ask some tough questions about their packaging. There are full sized Milk Chocolate Grahams and Milk Chocolate Mini Grahams with Black Sea Salt. I got both packages for free from the company via the Vine program on Amazon.com in exchange for a fair and honest review there; today's blog article is an unexpected bonus for them.

We'll start with the full sized Milk Chocolate Grahams that come in a 16 ounce box. These are individually wrapped and each one weighs an ounce so that's 16 individually wrapped pieces. Why wrap each one? I don't get it? All you are doing is adding more non-recyclable (at least where I live) trash to the landfills or worse the waterways and land. Sine the box is made with basic thin paper and is easily recyclable that adds to the mystery of the plastic sleeves for these cookies. The milk chocolate is made from sugar, cocoa butter, milk, unsweetened chocolate (?), soy lecithin, and vanilla extract so it is real milk chocolate covering them though more toward the candy side rather than chocolate side of treats. These have a very sweet scent to them with only an undercurrent of chocolate. Inside you an that on the top the coating is thick but thinner on the bottom. The top has a drizzle pattern but as you can also see in the above photo it could get mushed even though it was in the plastic. The graham cracker is crunchy and has a burst of sweetness to it but the chocolate coating dominates as it should though it is very sweet as well. This is for lovers of sweet milk chocolate who also like graham crackers.

Sea salt is fairly common with chocolate goodies these days though usually on darker chocolate. This is the first time I've seen "black sea salt" listed so I wondered: How is that different? In general, "black sea salt" may also be called black lava salt and created by gathering evaporating salt above lava in Hawaii which is then blended with purified volcanic charcoal -- the ingredient label here says it the "black sea salt" is sea salt plus activated charcoal from coconut shells so I'm confused. We'll need to try it and see what is it like.

Milk Chocolate Mini Grahams with Black Sea Salt. These are about 1/3 the size of the individually wrapped grahams we looked at above but these are not wrapped in any way other than being in a easily recyclable bag. As you can see, the black specks are few and a bit difficult to decipher against the scratched surface and brown chocolate coating. Yes, the milk chocolate ingredients are the same as the previous graham, leaning more toward candy with sugar first in the list. The individual specks have an interesting flavor -- salty, yes, but also I do get a carbon flavor, too, which I know from years of using a carbon filter for our water. The mini grahams have the same sweet flavor and crunchiness, the milk chocolate dominates it but this time with an edge of salt that I think brings out the chocolatey taste more. Oddly the carbon flavor is hard to pull out with you have a bite of the cracker which is good in my opinion.

While these grahams were loved by my family, I was disappointed with the higher sweetness. Add into that the misleading "black sea salt" label and I can't give this sacramental status, not even close. Yummy, yes, worthy of The Chocolate Cult... well, what do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.