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So my wonderful girlfriend brought me home a delightful confectionery concoction the other day. It was a “Bacon Caramel Square with Salt” from Jo’s Candies of Torrance, CA. I am not normally one for excesses of chocolate and caramel but the magic ingredient put it over the top. “To the lab!” I yelled, as I sprinted to my Bacon Lair.

Initial assessment: It’s a 3×3 inch square, about 1/3 of an inch thick and it feels pretty substantial. It appears to be a caramel patty dipped in milk chocolate with a dark chocolate drizzle and large salt crystals on top.

Flavor analysis: Texture is good. Not too gooey, not too sticky, not too tough. The chocolate and the caramel aren’t obnoxiously sweet and blend well together. When you get one of the big salt crystals it really sings. However, didn’t this thing say it had bacon in it? Well, that’s where it falls down. On the first bite, after my palette recovered from the initial sweetness of chocolate and caramel, I barely detected the faintest hint of bacon as the last of the caramel dissolved on my tongue. Upon intense visual scrutiny and a few more bites, I could detect no evidence of the existence of actual bacon. No little diced bits or anything in the caramel, which is what I initially assumed due to the nature of which the bacon flavor manifested itself, nor in the chocolate as far as I can tell. I don’t detect any bacon in the nose, either. Confusing and disappointing.

Conclusion: A fine example of a salted caramel chocolate bar; a complete and utter letdown as the above with bacon. A healthy smattering of hickory or maple bacon, diced up and evenly distributed throughout would have done wonders. A little crunch, the actual taste of bacon, something to additionally bridge the sweetness of the ingredients with the salt crystals on top. This seems like an easy enough thing to construct in one’s own kitchen. I may just have to present my own take on this at the next local bacon-based event. I think it’d be a real bacon crowd-pleaser. For now, I’d personally point people towards the Mo’s Chocolate Bacon Bars. Still a little less bacon than my palette craves but a much more accurate representation of what is advertised.

On a side note, I don’t actually see the bacon bars on Jo’s website. That plus the fact that the label was an Avery printout leads me to believe that it may have been a market trial and they may not be commercially available yet.