My roommate Emily left behind a huge box of Crunch bars, but after their long exposure to the ridiculous heat of this apartment in summer, they had begun to go… tan. You know, when a chocolate bar’s outer surface starts to get chalky, covered in a light-colored powder that doesn’t taste especially good.
I had observed before that melting chocolate tended to reverse this process, and so I set about melting down about a pound of crunch bars, hoping to liquefy them and spoon it back out.
Don’t do this. It doesn’t work.
I remain convinced that it is possible to recover the texture of individual crunch bars that have experience this sort of separation. Raising the temperature slightly is all that is required to recover the original texture, resulting in a crunch bar with the slightly distorted geometry of a fire-damaged TV set.
Going to the full extreme of remelting the chocolate is to invite disaster. For one thing, maintaining a consistent temperature to reach a spoonable consistency without burning the bottom is next to impossible. I wound up with a pot full of Crunch-bar crumbs that refused to melt.
Crunch bars also contain amazingly little chocolate. In each bar, the Crunchy bits are specially placed in the interior of the mold, so that one gets the impression of a smooth chocolate surface. In fact, there are so many Crunchies and so little chocolate that the structural integrity of a congealed crunch-cookie is severely compromised. If you attempt to recover the remaining crumbs by adding a dash of milk and microwaving, you will find that your Crunchies have absorbed the milk and becomes Spongies, ruining the texture of your ganache.
I think I’ll still be able to take in the few successful crunch-cookies for dessert at lunch, but I have serious concerns about them arriving without getting pulverized.