American chocolate: why it tastes different

The United States and the European Union both define milk chocolate and they define it differently, with a lower minimum cocoa content in the US. A product legally sold as milk chocolate in one may not qualify in the other.

So the same two words on two labels do not describe the same product, and comparing bars across the Atlantic by their percentage alone is comparing two different measurements.

The dominant American milk chocolate has a distinct sour or cheesy note that non-American palates frequently read as a fault. It is widely attributed to butyric acid arising in the milk processing; the precise cause is not published in detail and the leading accounts are partly reconstruction.

What is not in doubt is that it is the taste of chocolate for a very large number of people. Calling it a defect mistakes an acquired regional standard for an error — the same mistake as calling Mexican drinking chocolate unrefined.

American chocolate development ran toward assembly: nougat, caramel, peanut butter, marshmallow, crisped rice, and the engineering needed to keep those stable in a wrapper on a warm shelf.

That is a real technical tradition, and making a filled bar that survives August is a harder manufacturing problem than making a plain one. Writing that treats the plain tablet as the serious form has undervalued it.