Some might be scandalised by the idea of a hot cross bun containing anything other than fruit. But in the annual taste test of supermarket hot cross buns, consumer advocacy group Choice has awarded one of its highest-ever scores to a less than traditional product.
This year Choice tested 15 buns from Coles, Woolworths, IGA, Aldi and Bakers Delight, including traditional fruit, chocolate and gluten-free varieties.
Woolworths Bakery Chocolate Hot Cross Buns Made With Cadbury Milk Chocolate Chips, which cost 73c a bun, received an overall score of 95%, taking out first place in the chocolate bun category. That is one of the highest scores in Choice’s 10-year history of hot cross bun taste tests.
“It looked like chocolate. It tasted like chocolate. It smelled like chocolate,” said the culinary taste tester Brigid Treloar, who also judges chocolate at the Sydney Royal Fine Food Show. Treloar said it was “unusual” to get the “trifecta” of sensory qualities, where the strong chocolate taste carried through both the toasted and untoasted versions of the bun.
Treloar was one of three judges who blind-tested the buns, scoring them on flavour, aroma, texture and appearance.
“Usually the outside appearance will be a good indication of what the inside is like,” Treloar said. A lower height or “dome” to the bun indicates a denser and drier interior.
The buns were eaten fresh from the packet, and then toasted to see if this affected the flavour and to assess whether the toasted buns had a “real crunch”.
Woolworths’ victory came despite not having the highest chocolate content compared to other buns. It contained only 19% chocolate while the category runner-up, Coles Bakery Choc Chip Hot Cross Buns, had 25% chocolate and received a lower score of 75%. Treloar believed this could be because Woolworths’ chocolate buns contained cocoa powder, which may have boosted the chocolate flavour.
For the traditionalists, Coles Finest Luxurious Fruit Hot Cross Buns nabbed the top gong in the traditional fruit category for the second year in a row, with a score of 85%. According to Treloar, the high score was due to their generous fruit offering that had more than just sultanas, and the strong spice smell – which Treloar and the other judges found lacking in many of the other fruit buns. “If you don’t have that spice coming through,” Treloar said, “there’s not much differentiating a bread roll with fruit and a bread roll without fruit”.
The runner-up in the traditional fruit category was considerably cheaper than the winner. Woolworths Bakery Traditional Fruit Hot Cross Buns placed second with a score of 73% and a cost of 73c a bun – almost half the price of the Coles buns, which cost $1.38 each.
Buns with overly moist fruit also scored lower. In these products, liquid “leached out” of the bun or the fruit left “little wet pockets” inside the bun, Treloar said.
With the gluten-free buns, Woolworths scored the highest in both the traditional and chocolate subcategories. The Woolworths Free From Gluten Fruit Hot Cross Buns scored 77%, while the Woolworths Free From Gluten Choc Hot Cross Buns scored 70%. Both were $1.38 a bun.
In the blind test, usually Treloar can tell when she is trying a gluten-free bun due to their “hockey puck” shape. But she said this year was the first time they looked like “normal hot cross buns”, and believed the winners of the gluten-free categories “would have held their own” against their gluten-full counterparts.
Treloar noticed a “slightly unnatural and chemically” aroma across all the gluten-free buns, but said toasting the Woolworths products mitigated that scent and replaced it with a more desirable “hot cross bun aroma”.
“But it was still a lovely bun to eat, even untoasted,” Treloar said.
