Why Hershey bars taste like vomit (and I love them)

it's america's favorite chocolate bar it's certainly my chocolate bar but to a great many people from other parts of the world the hershey bar tastes like vomit not figurative vomit but literal actual human sick my wife lauren knows what i'm talking about when i was in college i worked at this camp in pennsylvania and we took the kids to hershey park and my co-counselor who is from new zealand was very excited she tried a hershey kiss and promptly said oh my god this tastes like vomit and then she made us all eat cadbury i talked about the hershey bar recently on my tick tock and look at all of these comments from people not in the u.s and it's not just the hershey bar hershey's has been so dominant in the u.s market for so long that most other big chocolate brands here have to imitate that hershey taste to some extent this is just what american consumers expect chocolate to taste like but why well the history in science that explains this is pretty interesting and it raises some profound questions about how we define the quality of food is there such a thing as objectively good or bad food especially when it comes to something like a dessert the sole function of which is to provide us with pleasure the reason this tastes like puke to some people and this doesn't probably has to do with the milk so we first have to understand how milk got into chocolate in the first place for virtually all of its 4000 year history chocolate has been a beverage ancient mesoamericans harvested cacao beans and did various things to combine them with water into a drink with medicinal and ceremonial purposes this may have included fermenting the cacao to make alcohol europeans got chocolate by way of the aztecs whom the spanish conquered in the 16th century the spaniards used it as a medicine too which makes sense because unsweetened cocoa totally tastes like medicine it is crazy bitter but as the song goes a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and once somebody at the spanish court got the bright idea to try that europeans started drinking chocolate for pleasure and at some point they also started pouring milk into their water-based cocoa drink the same way that people pour it into coffee it smooths and thickens the texture and it rounds off the bitter flavors it wasn't until the 19th century that european confectioners started playing with solid chocolate products consisting of cocoa powder known as cocoa solids cocoa fat known as cocoa butter and sugar and eventually milk for the same reason they put it in the drink this was probably particularly advantageous for early solid chocolates which were produced by relatively crude means we love a milk-free dark chocolate these days but the original dark chocolate was often described as gritty and harsh adding milk helped contrary to what the cadbury marketing illustrations would have you believe you can't pour milk into solid chocolate milk is mostly water which doesn't mix with fat and confections with high water content are hospitable to microbial life they can mold if you don't eat them within a few days the nestle company was born in switzerland when henry nestle figured out a process to create dehydrated milk powdered milk nestle's neighbor daniel peter added the powdered milk to his solid chocolate mix and the rest is history up in england cadbury's first solid milk chocolate also used powdered milk but chocolatiers quickly figured out that you could make an even smoother tastier product if you used condensed milk rather than powdered milk that is milk that has had a lot of its water boiled out but it's still a liquid over in the united states an already wealthy and successful caramel maker named milton hershey was trying to develop his own milk chocolate process much of what i'm about to tell you is drawn from the journalist michael d'antonio's excellent biography of hershey in 1903 hershey retreated to his old family homestead in pennsylvania and started experimenting with milk the first thing they landed on was using skim milk milk that has had the fat removed milk fat would go rancid in the chocolate after a while and that was not going to work for the kind of shelf-stable mass-produced product that hershey envisioned he cooked batch after batch of milk in a giant copper vacuum pan when you cook a liquid in a vacuum that lowers its boiling point so you can drive off the water at much lower temperatures he still couldn't get a product that he was happy with and in desperation one day hershey summoned one of his factory workers named john schmalbach schmalbach tried mixing the skim milk with sugar and then he cooked it on the vacuum pan at a very very low temperature for a long time and then when it was done cooking he turned off the heat and then just let it sit there and cool in the vacuum for a long time then they opened up the pan and hershey said look at that beautiful batch of milk how come you didn't burn it you didn't go to college out of context that remark sounds way more rude than it probably actually was because just before this hershey had indeed invited a fancy college chemist to his lab to try to make a batch of milk and the chemist did in fact burn that batch of milk but anyway hershey and his guys made a batch of chocolate with small box milk and he thought it was perfect the chocolate had a snap to it like al dente pasta it was smooth it was shelf stable and it was better suited to mass production condensed milk you can flow through systems of pipes you can't do that with powdered milk it may indeed have tasted a little like sick we'll talk about why in a second but hershey had found a money-saving product and process and you can save even more money on your groceries today with fetch rewards the sponsor of this video whom i'll now briefly thank fetch is an incredibly easy way to convert your grocery shopping into savings on like almost any product you could think of here's how it works you just hit my link in the 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guarded trade secret but chocolate experts these days are generally in agreement that the sour taste in hershey's is butyric acid butter acid they create it by lipolyzing or breaking down the fat content in the milk and butyric acid may very well have been what made that 1903 batch of milk taste sour too one way to make butyric acid is through anaerobic fermentation remember they were doing it in a vacuum pan anaerobic butyric acid is also created in our digestive systems and in the event that the contents of our digestive systems leave we are then exposed to that signature twang that smell that taste of butyric acid this is probably why people who didn't grow up eating this stuff think this tastes like sick for me who did grow up eating this stuff it's very different because i've eaten hershey's chocolate way more often than i've thrown up thankfully therefore to me butyric acid tastes like chocolate not sick and when i go to the british import section of my local grocery store and pick up some goodies damn no arrow bars today i am usually struck by how this chocolate tastes flat to me dull it lacks the acidity that i've been conditioned to expect and british chocolate in particular tends to taste kind of fatty to me indeed cadbury uses vegetable oils in addition to cocoa butter that may contribute to the smoother creamier texture cadbury has relative to hershey's but that could be a lot of things the churning the tempering lots of things certainly cadbury lovers really value the comparatively creamy texture i should acknowledge that this particular bar is the american version of the cadbury dairy milk which is ironically distributed and partially manufactured by hershey's and the recipe has been adjusted a bit for the u.s market it has no vegetable oil in it because that's not legally allowed in a u.s product that's labeled as chocolate it still tastes very different from a hershey bar hershey haters often describe the texture of this as waxy by comparison to this but you know what i kind of like that cocoa butter goes very waxy when you get it cold as anyone who's had chocolate chip ice cream can tell you and i keep my chocolate bars in the fridge i love that snap of waxy cocoa butter in 2015 the bbc did a fun little focus group to analyze the difference between hershey's and cadbury and that strikes me as a fair comparison they're both inexpensive mass-produced mass-market chocolates it would be absurd to put a hershey bar up against a fine handcrafted european chocolate the adult focus groups preferred cadbury they described the hershey's as harder more bitter not as rich interestingly though when the beeb asked british kids which chocolate they liked the kids were more likely to choose the hershey bar now some of you are probably thinking right now of course the kids like the hershey bar better the hershey bars got way more sugar not really though the bbc investigation found that widespread belief is chiefly the result of different labeling regulations in the uk versus the u.s cabria and hershey have about the same proportion of sugar it's just that milk comes higher on the cadbury ingredients list because the brits rank the milk based on its liquid weight not its evaporated weight it may indeed be the case that the hershey bar has proportionally less cocoa in it if you look at the u.s and eu regulations on the minimum cocoa content of chocolate it looks like the eu standard is higher yes the uk isn't a member of the eu anymore but they're still generally operating under those old rules the eu standard for the minimum cocoa content of milk chocolate is higher but the european standard is for dry cocoa solids whereas the us standard is for chocolate liquor which is a wet product so these are probably apples and oranges numbers i don't really know how to interpret this i do know that a hershey spokesman told the bbc that hershey's contains 30 cocoa solids if true that'd be higher than the 23 that cadbury claims for their own product though he's probably talking about the uk version of the hershey bar which is a slightly different recipe but it's certainly the case that a hershey bar has way less cocoa in it than a fine european dark chocolate bar i mean just look at it cocoa is very expensive and it's got a very intense flavor both of those things are bad for mass market chocolate so if this doesn't have much cocoa in it does that mean that the hershey bar is an objectively inferior product certainly a lot of people on my tick tock tried to make that argument coco is the defining ingredient of chocolate so chocolate with less cocoa is objectively lesser chocolate because it's less chocolate interesting argument certainly you would reach a point where the proportion of the cocoa was so low that the product would be utterly unrecognizable as chocolate and some might argue that this has gone well below that point but what if we extended that logic in the opposite direction this logic implies that the finest chocolate bar in the world is the one that has the highest proportion of cocoa and you know what i happen to have some of that right here it's called unsweetened baking chocolate you ever just eaten some of this yeah eat that and you will be immediately reminded why people started putting other stuff in their chocolate you could argue that alcohol is the defining ingredient of a spirit right and if we apply our chocolate logic to booze that means that pure ethanol is a superior beverage to fine scotch whiskey which has all kinds of other things in it besides ethanol and wine has even less alcohol in it than whiskey does that mean that whiskey is objectively superior to wine okay now you might say forget the cocoa percentages hershey bars are objectively bad because they taste like human vomit we are evolved to find certain tastes and smells repulsive because they are indicative of substances that are dangerous to us we are evolved to be repulsed by butyric acid and therefore a food that contains butyric acid is a violation of natural law well i happen to be a fan of violating what a lot of people regard as natural laws and a lot of the world's great foods are great because they ride the line between enticement and revulsion europeans generally love fermented milk products think of all the stinky cheeses they dig and guess what parmesan has butyric acid in it too certainly you could argue that food can be objectively bad from a nourishment perspective but even that would depend on the subjective dietary needs of the individual and that whole line of inquiry is moot when it comes to a dessert when it comes to candy that has no nutritional purpose it's purely for pleasure and i derive a lot of pleasure from eating this not the least because i grew up with it candy more than anything else is wrapped up in childhood memory right i grew up in central pennsylvania not far from where milton hershey lived there's an amusement park there now called hershey park every summer my parents would take me there to ride the roller coasters and on the way out they would buy me a giant novelty hershey kiss and i would slowly nibble away on that all summer long those warm feelings are half of what i'm tasting when i'm tasting this and i bet that you could think of a food that you could eat that would take you right back to a very happy place in your life in my moral code anything that brings you pleasure is great so long as it doesn't come at the particular expense of anybody else or the particular expense of your long-term pleasure experiencing capacity so take your pleasure where you find it i'll do the same

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,621,692

Rating: 4.8775678 out of 5

Keywords: hersheys chocolate, taste test, milk chocolate, united states, united kingdom, chocolate bars, candy bars, cadbury, cadbury chocolate, hershey bar, cadbury dairy milk, dairy milk bar, butyric acid, fermentation, sick, puke

Id: J44svaQc5WY

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ray_Shumar]

Love this one. I'm pretty positive I've never had any European-standard chocolate bars so I have no frame of reference, but I genuinely really like Hershey's chocolate too. I'm sure it wouldn't compare to better stuff but I go into it fully knowing that it's a cheap mass market product (and every one of us has some cheap mass market guilty pleasure). This is an aside but when I'm really hungry and just want something quick to buy, I have found personally that a chocolate bar is the most filling while also being the least expensive product to buy at say a vending machine or convenience store.

Learning the science behind the tastes and the differences between products is really great too and I love the conclusions Adam draws from it.

[u/R3dRuby]

The last bit about childhood nostalgia got me. On rare occasion the only chocolate I got to eat growing up was from a company called Chocolate Decadence, who made delicious semi-sweet chocolate and also went out of business in 2017 or so. I'd pay anything to get that feeling again and I'm glad everyone who's nostalgic over Hershey's still can. So I can't judge either. The big Symphony bars with toffee and almond bits are a pretty awesome mass-produced chocolate candy.

[u/YOLO4JESUS420SWAG]

As an American I like toblerone and nutella before hershey's.

[u/DannyBoy135]

Ok so I've never had Hersheys. But English chocolate is an amazing thing. Cadburyssssss

[u/vladimirnovak]

Funny thing I'm not American and I had Hershey's twice in my life and it tasted good. Like , in the sense that it was just another mass produced chocolate I never tasted any vomit taste.

[u/G00bre]

I've never had hershey but now I have to find out.

[u/[deleted]]

I’ve had hersheys and I don’t like it not because of vomit but cause its not fatty enough