Wawel Blok Orzechowy
I’ve been to my supplier of Polish chocolate. (Does small dance for joy).
And they have a whole lot of new goodies there. (Does even bigger dance).
Of course, I don’t speak Polish and would not know what most of the goodies are if they reached out and strangled me. But I recognise chocolatey goodness at about 700 paces, and that’s good enough.
The rather large and imposing Blok Orzechowy kind of took my fancy. It means “Block Nuts” or, in plain English, a nut block. The photo’s don’t adequately show the sheer imposing size. This 250g brute is about 4 cm deep, 7 cm high, and 17 cm long. I began to wonder what I’d bought, so of course I had to rush home and, with trembling fingers, open the box. After photographing it – as you do.
Inside we find a plastic tub containing what looks an awful lot like a kind of biscuity loaf like my mum used to make. Tipping it out and cutting some off confirms this.
The presentation is… well… interesting. The Blok does not really come of the plastic tub very well, and it’s kind of crumbly. The nuts are fairly clearly visible but there don’t seem to be the vast numbers of them that the photo on the box, and the name would lead you to believe.
The loaf is also not very chocolatey. I shoulda checked the ingredients – it’s there – at a mere 8%. Sigh. Still, it should go nicely with a cup of tea.
Or not. This is very very sweet, has a strange slightly gritty texture, it’s difficult to cut a piece off the Blok, and the taste is not really of anything much. It reminds me a bit of a Halva I tried a year or so back, but it’s not one of those either. My friend the ingredients list explains… Sugar is the number 1 ingredient, followed by peanuts at 21%. Reading between the lines, sugar is about 50% of the contents. No wonder.
The only time I’d recommend this is for bush walkers (or ramblers if in the UK). Then you get your entire daily scroggin in a single package. One Blok should feed a whole troop of Boy Scouts.
I’ve tried a Wawel filled chocolate bar about two weeks ago. It caught my eye because it looked nice and tempting on the outside.
But it didn’t pass the most important test. The filling (which they don’t even say what it is) was dry and the chocolate unimpressive.
I remember my Polish friend from college Jacek (Pronounced Ya-Sek) bringing in one of these and yeah, its really really gritty with all the sugar, kind of the same texture as Kendal Mint Cakes Minty interior…
Nice reveiw!
“Blok czekoladowy” probably refers to the old, dark times when you could only (or mostly) but a pseudo-chocolate product which was sold by weight, cut from a large block (like cheese). Had VERY low cocoa content and LOTS of other things (ie. margarine as the main fat source) which would not allow it to qualify as “chocolate” nowadays.
Some people still crave it, as the “taste of childhood” kind of thing. Still, it’s better to try other Wawel products, if you can come by them.
I’m afraid I put too many links into the previous comment 🙂
Here’s Wawel’s English site: http://wawel.com.pl/en/produkty – list of all products, with small descriptions. Check “Kasztanki”, plums in chocolate, bars and wafers section.
Srebrna is right…altough, I remember Chocolate Block (Blok Czekoladowy) as a home-made product that indeed had no real chocolate but did have cocoa (whatever quality was at the time avail in Poland), sugar, margarine/butter, dry milk, nuts, cookie crumbs, etc. I personally love it! 🙂 It has nothing to do with chocolate but the taste and texture is unforgettable! 🙂 I have never seen Wawel’s product in Michigan, where I now live and suspect that it is not even close to the home made product. In any case, I would also recommend you checking out Wedel’s dark chocolate, I like it better than Wawel’s.
I agree completely!!