What is Salted Caramel Milky Way?
I’m of two minds when it comes to salted caramel. On the one hand, “We added salt!” seems like the absolute bare minimum a company can do to differentiate its product. On the other, salt is a magic rock that makes everything taste better, and salted caramel demonstrates this particularly well.
Mars’ latest addition to its famed Milky Way line of products is the Salted Caramel Milky Way. According to the nutrition facts, a typical Milky Way 2 to Go bar has 75 milligrams of sodium, and this one has 170. Will adding 95 milligrams of rock be enough to rise above the competition?
How is it?
Unlike the more gourmet salted caramels that you might find, there are no salt flakes on the outside of these bars – they look like plain Milky Ways. As I bite into the bar, the saltiness is striking but not overwhelming. I’ve always found Milky Ways to be a bit too sweet, so it takes a fair bit of saltiness to balance it out.
I take another bite and am surprised at the crunch. If this was a plain Milky Way, visions of insect endoskeletons and other foreign objects being ground into nougat would flash through my mind. In a salted caramel confection, it’s very pleasant. Context is everything. There may be not salt flakes on the outside, but they’re somewhere.
Is there anything else you need to know?
Given the vivid salty crunch, I expected to see some sizable flakes mixed in to the caramel, but close inspection doesn’t reveal any. This makes me think the caramel itself may not be the salted component in this bar.
But how to isolate the famously ooey-gooey bar into its constituent parts? The results of my freezer + meat mallet solution can be seen below.
Picking through the shards of candy, I taste some bits that are mostly caramel and mostly nougat and am convinced that this is actually a “Salted Nougat Milky Way.” Salted Nougat sounds like the kind of weird old-fashioned candy that your grandfather ate at the 1904 World’s Fair, so it’s understandable that Mars went with the more popular Salted Caramel moniker.
Conclusion:
The Salted Caramel Milky Way bar is an excellent addition to the Milky Way line. It’s noticeably salty with crunchy bits, which may be off-putting for some, but if you’re a fan of salted caramel, you’ll love it.
Purchased Price: $1.48
Size: 3.16 oz.
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 8 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 bar) 210 calories, 8 grams of fat, 5 grams of saturated fat, less than 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 170 milligrams of sodium, 32 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 27 grams of sugar (including 25 grams added sugar), and 2 gram of protein.