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Junk Food Review: Chocolatey Payday.

 I saw an ad on my Instagram page for a chocolate-covered Payday bar.  Jokingly, I took a screenshot, and posted it on my stories asking the question "Isn't this just a Baby Ruth?"  A friend responded by saying that no, a Baby Ruth is peanuts surrounding caramel and chocolate-flavored nougat; the chocolate-covered Payday is peanuts in caramel-flavored nougat, dipped in chocolate.

Now, candy bars are made from a few common ingredients:  Chocolate, peanuts, nougat, and caramel.  Chocolate and nougat is something like a 3 Musketeers.  Chocolate, nougat, and caramel is something like a Milky Way.  All 4 makes a Snickers bar.  Chocolate and Peanuts is a Mr. Goodbar.  Chocolate and caramel is either a Caramello or a type of Milky Way.  Peanuts and caramel (no chocolate) is a Payday.  And, chocolate, peanuts, and caramel led to the confusion that took me down the road to writing this article in the first place.


I did what any sane person would do:  I bought both bars, and did a head-to-head taste test:

From the label, a Baby Ruth contains the following ingredients:
Sugar, Roasted Peanuts, Corn Syrup, Partially Hydrogenated Palm Kernel, Coconut, and Soybean Oils, Milk, Cocoa, High Fructose Syrup, Dextrose, Skim Milk, Whey, Glycerin, Salt, Emulsifiers (Monoglycerides and Soy Lecithin), Peanut Oil, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Carrageenan, Tbhq and Citric Acid (to Preserve Freshness), Caramel Color.

A chocolate Payday contains:
Sugar, Peanuts, Vegetable Oil, Corn Syrup, Chocolate, Skim Milk, Whey, Salt, Lecithin, Carrageenan, Mono and Diglycerides, and Vannilin.

The Chocolatey Payday has a shorter ingredient list, but it doesn't parse out the oils like Baby Ruth does.  On the Hershey website, the ingredients for the Chocolatey Payday lists "vegetable oil," then breaks it down into a very similar list to Baby Ruth.

 
Pictured above, left is the Baby Ruth and right is the Chocolatey Payday.  The size difference is for a silly reason:  I could only find a King Size Chocolatey Payday, and didn't want to bother finding a King Size Baby Ruth.  Right off the bat, though, we see the similarities:  A caramelly core, surrounded by peanuts and chocolate in each bar., with no visible layers of nougat like you'd see in a Snickers or Milky Way.  But, the peanuts are contained directly on top of the caramelly core on the Baby Ruth, whereas they sit around the outside of the Chocolatey Payday.  Despite the caramel core being approximately the same size, the Payday appears larger because it has peanuts on the outside edges.  The caramel on the Chocolatey Payday appears shinier, but it was also partially melted because it was in my shirt pocket.  The Baby Ruth stayed relatively cool in the car on the drive home.  I don't necessarily think that the sheen is an indicator of chocolate quality...I mean, I picked these up from a gas station, for cryin' out loud.  They're not from a boutique chocolatier or anything.

The Baby Ruth wrapper boasted "Improved with dry roasted peanuts," which is also emphasized in the ingredients list.  From this, we can only ascertain that the Payday uses regular ol' greasy-ass peanuts like Uncle Ed eats at deer camp.  That is, of course, until we turn to hershey.com and navigate to the Payday section where it's spelled out that Payday also uses dry-roasted, salted peanuts.  They just don't talk about it on the wrapper.  I'll be honest though, to my palate, they taste the same.  I won't go so far as to say they're the same damn candy bar, but they're basically the same list of ingredients presented in a nearly identical manner.
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