Which chocolate bars can I eat if I am gluten free?

I love chocolate bars. Well I used to anyway. Sadly chocolate is pretty much off the menu for me but I still want to know which ones I can eat if I decide to break my “low sugar”rules.

I have previously posted about my favourite chocolate bar, the Bounty bar and more recently, the Snickers bars. After my findings, I can eat Snickers bars but I won’t eat Bounty bars as I can’t be sure they are gluten free.

But what about other chocolate bars? I went out and bought a whole pile of my favourite chocolate bars and put them in the cupboard and then forgot about them for a while. When I decided to make a start on this post, I went to the cupboard and found a whole pile of empty wrappers. Guess who? My husband Haitch had eaten them all! But at least he kept the wrappers for me, so I could check out the ingredients. I guess in a way he did me a favour as I would have been tempted to eat one or two if I had found any gluten free bars in amongst this lot.

Milky Way bar.
This chocolate whip bar states on the label that it contains “25% less fat than the average of the major chocolate bar brands in the combined Australia and New Zealand market”. Very interesting, however, we are not here to discuss fat content, we are here to discuss gluten.
Nope, I can’t eat Milky Way bars. Milky Ways are not gluten free as they contain barley malt extract!
The Milky Way bar on the Milky Way website has different coloured packaging to the one  in my photo (made in Australia / New Zealand) but the ingredients on the web site state malted barley so neither are gluten free.

Chokito bar
Some of you may not know what a Chokito bar is. I am not sure if they are unique to Australia and New Zealand but they were popular many, many years ago when I was growing up. But they seemed to disappear off the shelves for a very long time.
Then for some reason Nestle relaunched them a few years ago. So I thought I would include them in my chocolate gluten list, mainly for nostalgia and hope that I can have a little try of this chocolate bar.
But sadly no, not only do they contain wheat flour, they also contain malted wheat flour! So Chokito bars are not gluten free.
If you are interested in what Chikito bars taste like, here is a link to a review by Chocablog.

Moro bar
Mmmm, Moro bar, “a fistful of caramel, nougat and Cadbury milk chocolate”. Perhaps this one is gluten free. Snickers bars are and they are a bit similar.
Here goes, checking the label…. gosh some of these labels are hard to read. Silver writing on a brown wrapper making it very difficult to see, but there it is, contains malt extract from barley.
So Moro bars are not gluten free either. What a shame.

Mars bar
Is the very popular Mars bar gluten free? No, Mars bars contain barley malt extract. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after going through the ingredients of all of the above chocolate bars. It unfortunately seems to be a common chocolate bar ingredient.  It probably makes them taste really good as I used to love the taste of anything malted.

Whittakers Peanut Slab
This delicious little New Zealand made chocolate slab is made of Whittaker’s chocolate and peanuts. Definitely gluten free and definitely one of my favourites. They have a very clever chocolate website. And they have also started to export this delicious little traditional New Zealand chocolate bar. If you see one, buy one (or three as they sometimes come in packs of three). You won’t be disappointed.

Twix bar
This label is even more difficult to read than any of the others. Gold writing on a gold wrapper! But never mind, I probably didn’t even need to read the wrapper. I don’t know why I bothered to buy Twix bars as they contain a crunchy biscuit and yes, the wrapper states wheat. So Twix bars are definitely not gluten free.

Many of the above chocolate bars do contain wheat derived glucose syrup but this is deemed to be gluten free. See my post on Snickers which goes into glucose syrup in more detail.

For a much more comprehensive list of gluten free chocolate bars, go to this list of gluten free candy on the About.com website.

The funny thing is that since I have cut down on sugar, when I do have a chocolate bar (or a bite of one) I find them incredibly sweet and I decide I don’t miss them so much after all. That’s good, isn’t it.

Please, if you are buying chocolate bars, always check the ingredients on the label as these chocolate bars were bought in New Zealand and the ingredients can differ between countries, even in the same chocolate bar. Also, ingredients can change over time, so please be careful.

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