Review: Lindt Lindor Caramel and Sea Salt milk chocolates

Lindt’s Lindor chocolate truffles are ubiquitous in Canada. They’re available at grocery stores and pharmacies, placed shoulder to shoulder with Snickers and Mars bars, yet they’re aimed at consumers who want to treat themselves to something a bit more elegant than a standard Kit Kat.

For those unfamiliar with Lindor chocolate truffles, they’re round chocolate balls with a creamy filling inside. Each comes individually wrapped in shiny foil plastic that differs in colour based on the shell and filling in the sphere. Common varieties (milk chocolate, dark chocolate, etc.) are available everywhere, but there are also rare and seasonal varieties that take a bit more effort to find. I live in a city that has a Lindt shop that stocks a ton of different types, and you can also buy the rarer ones online. If you’re only familiar with the supermarket standards, you should definitely check out the other available flavours.

Choices, choices, choices

Lindt does make some of their more exotic truffles available in mass-market retail channels, usually in little paper-and-plastic bags, and they introduce new flavours whenever the mood strikes them. Hence my discovery of a bag of Lindor Salted Caramel truffles at my favourite local specialty grocery store, Sunterra Market.

Lindt describes these as having “delicate milk chocolate shells and iconic smooth melting chocolate, caramel and sea salt centres, Lindt LINDOR Milk Caramel Sea Salt Chocolate Truffles are a sophisticated, salty-sweet indulgence for chocolate connoisseurs.” Fair enough.

I was mostly curious to see what exactly the filling was like. The centre of each sphere is usually a rich, creamy ganache, so I wanted to know how they’d pull that off with the sea salt. Would there still be a crunch to it? One of my all-time favourite chocolates are the Himalayan Pink Salt Caramels from Purdys Chocolatier, and those rely on the textural interplay of the crunch of the salt on the outside of the chocolate and the firm caramel centre.

But what do they taste like?

The bag contains a total of 12 individually wrapped truffles, each of which is around one inch in diameter and has a nice feeling of weight.

As I learned as soon as I unwrapped one and popped it in my mouth, the caramel flavour has been incorporated into the chocolate shell that coats the caramel ganache filling. The shell melts away quickly, becoming a rich, creamy mass of chocolate with caramel flavour, but without any of the sticky or chewy texture typically associated with caramel. When you bite into it, you can feel little crunchy bits of salt crush against your teeth.

It’s very sweet and very rich, and I wasn’t expecting it to be as smooth as it is. It’s not subtle, but it’s also got some nuance to it, like being hit in the head with a pool cue while your attacker recites a sonnet.

The Details

Price: $8.99 for a 150-gram bag at Sunterra Market in Edmonton.
Value for Money: Not great. You’re not getting much chocolate for your nine bucks.
Availability: Limited. Look for it where you find other Lindt Lindor chocolate balls. (Usually supermarket and pharmacy chocolate/candy aisles.)
Fun Fact: I find it interesting that Lindt, which plays up its Swiss chocolate mastery, now makes these in Italy. Mamma mia?
Calories: 80 kcal per 1 ball. If you can stop yourself at one, that’s not bad. For something that sells itself as salted, it’s impressive that each chocolate has only 25 mg of sodium.
Verdict: I think I like them, though they’re not nearly as satisfying as the Purdys sea salt caramels mentioned above. One or two orbs is enough for one sitting, as any more than that would be sugary overkill.