We’ve heard good things about Pringles and chocolate, but what about Pringles and Lotte’s chocolate?
Pringles has been selling potato chips in its distinctive cans for decades, but it wasn’t until recently that foodies realized that the container can also serve as a chocolate mold. Thus was born the viral Pringles chocolate food hack, and so in turn was born our Japanese-language reporter Yui Imai’s desire to see how it would taste using Japan’s popular Ghana brand chocolate from confectioner Lotte.
Though it’s available at affordable prices in every convenience store and supermarket in the country, Ghana is considered one of the best baseline chocolates you can get in Japan, sweet and milky but not overly sugary and never chalky in texture. Though not a premium-priced product, it’d be fair to say that it’s a more elegant and refined chocolate bar than, say, Hershey’s, but would that also make it less suited for something so unabashedly junk food-y as pouring melted chocolate into a can of potato chips until they fuse with each other?
There was only one way to find out. After returning from the store with a short can of Pringles Uma Shio, the brand’s basic salted flavor in Japan, and four bars of Ghana chocolate (with a combined weight of 200 grams [7.1 ounces]), Yui began breaking up the bars and putting the pieces in a bowl.
She then placed the bowl in a bot of hot water, stirring with a spatula to work out any lumps as the chocolate melted.
Once the Ghana was liquified, Yui showed considerable restraint by not just lifting the bowl to her lips and drinking the whole thing down. Instead, she popped the top of the Pringles can and carefully poured the chocolate in.
It didn’t go all the way to the rim, but there was enough chocolate to fill up about 80 percent of the can, once she’d scraped the sides of the bowl.
Yui then spent the next two or three minutes strongly tapping the can’s bottom against a flat surface, pounding the chocolate down to create a thick and uniform distribution.
Then she put the lid back on the can and stuck it in the refrigerator, once again showing admirable willpower by waiting until the next day to check the results.
As the chocolate hardened, it had also stuck to the inside of the can. Sliding the chocolate Pringles out by turning over the can wasn’t going to happen, so instead, Yui grabbed a pair of scissors to cut open the side and remove the contents.
Yui had a hunch that cutting the choco cylinder was going to be difficult, and sure enough, after a few tentative taps with the blade of a kitchen knife, she could see that it was still hard enough that she was going to end up crushing it if she pressed any harder.
So instead, she let the chocolate site for 15 minutes to get closer to room temperature, and then she was finally able to cut a few slices.
Visually, things had turned out quite beautifully, with a ring of chocolate surrounding each slice and ribbons of Ghana stretching towards the center of each cross-section.
And as for the taste? It was fantastic. As we mentioned above, Japanese chocolate tends to be less cloying than what’s often sold in other countries, and this means that while the rich sweetness of the Ghanna is definitely still a major part of the flavor profile, it leaves plenty of space for the salty notes of the Pringles to play on your taste buds too, and the combination is extremely satisfying.
So in the end, Ghana chocolate turned out to be an excellent choice for the Pringles chocolate hack. Yui’s one and only regret is that, as you can see in the photos right before and after the can went into the fridge, there wasn’t quite enough chocolate to completely cover the stack of chips. Because of that, when she makes her next batch, Yui plans to use five bars of Ghanna instead, but having justification for buying extra chocolate is something we’ll never complain about, and if we end up buying too much, we have ideas about how to use the surplus.
Photos © SoraNews24
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