Charleston Chew - Vanilla flavour

I'm ending my American review week (apart from my mega M&M post to come next week!) with a not quite chocolate, not quite a sweet bar - the Charleston Chew. Before I tried the Charleston Chew I assumed it was marshmallow covered in milk chocolate but it's actually a 'chewy flavoured nougat with a delicious chocolatey coating'. I think I was mistaken as this comes in a few flavours, vanilla (which I had), strawberry, chocolate and an actual marshmallow. 

The vanilla is actually quite powerful, the bar says to try frozen so I opened it a few hours before I wanted to eat it so I could freeze half and the vanilla and chocolate were very strong, in fact I'm writing this review the day after I ate it with the packet for reference and the wrapper still has a very strong vanilla scent! 

Anyway I wanted to try half normally and half frozen so I tried to snap the bar in half, the nougat would not budge so please excuse the photo! The day I ate it was very warm, especially in my kitchen and I didn't want the chocolate on the unfrozen half to melt so I popped it in the fridge. 

The bar is absolutey enormous - that's just one bar snapped in half. 

I tried the frozen half first and where I'd had issues getting the nougat in half earlier at room temperature I had the opposite problem now. It was very, very crisp and extremely brittle now. I even had to check I hadn't broken a tooth taking a bite of this side and whole chunks were just snapping off. The texture wasn't very pleasant so I tried the refrigerated side next. 

I thought I'd made a big mistake refrigerating it when I took it out, as it felt and looked the same as the frozen half but to eat it was completely different. The chocolate was crisp but melted straight away in my mouth and the nougat was wonderfully chewy and thick. I couldn't really taste anything in the frozen half but here the nougat flavour was sweet and quite a tasty vanilla. The texture is thicker than the nougat in our chocolate bars but not as thick as our actual Nougat bars and as the chew warmed to room temperature thinned out and got a bit creamier. 

The chocolate itself isn't bad, it's not great quality chocolate but it's better than Hershey's and fine on top of the nougat. 

Overall I enjoyed this, I wouldn't recommend freezing it as it took away the best part of the bar, the chewy texture. Freezing dulled the flavours they were best at room temperature but refrigeration gave the best texture by far. If your teeth are in bad shape though, give this bar a miss - a total jaw workout! 

Rating 7/10