Túró Rudi

Túró Rudi is the name of a curd snack popular in Hungary since 1968. The bar is composed of a thin chocolate-flavored outer coating and an inner filling of túró (curd). The "Rudi" in the product name comes from the Hungarian "rúd", which translates to rod or bar (and is also a nickname for the name "Rudolf"). Túró Rudi can be made in different flavours and sizes.

The basic (plain, "natúr") bar is far cheaper and more popular and comes in two sizes: the classic 30-gram (1.1 oz) bar and the larger ("óriás", giant) 51 g (1.8 oz) bar. There are differently-flavoured varieties of the bar, like apricot, strawberry and raspberry as jams in the túró, but coconut and vanilla are aromas. The plain bar can be found with dark chocolate outer coating.

The "pöttyös" (spotty or spotted) theme is part of the marketing scheme of the bar, and the distinctive red polka-dots are readily associated with Túró Rudi by regular consumers. Friesland Hungária, Inc. (which claims to be the manufacturer of the "original" Túró Rudi) released its product in Slovakia, Romania, Spain and Italy under the name DOTS in 2003. The version sold in Western Europe is said to be sweeter and comes with a milk-chocolate coating to suit the taste of locals.

Its first public appearance was in a Hungarian family film, Kismaszat és a Gézengúzok (roughly translated to Little Smear and the Scapegraces) in the 1980s.

The bar is best kept refrigerated around 4 °C (39 °F). The regular 30-gram bar and the óriás bar usually retail for about 95 Hungarian forints (about 30 euro cents) and 140 Hungarian forints (about 45 euro-cents), respectively.

The earliest form of Túró Rudi appeared in Russia under the name Cырок (Syrok meaning curd snack), a rectangular bar of curd, butter and fat mixed together, covered with dark chocolate coating. Its coating is thinner and the filling is sweeter. It is widely acknowledged that Túró Rudi was based on it, as design and production began after a study trip to the Soviet Union (presumably by Antal Deák). Sándor Klein, a teacher at the Budapest University of Technology, gave the product its name, which raised a bit of controversy as people thought the name was vulgar and had pornographic associations. But the name stayed, and throughout the 1970s, turned out to be very successful. Production moved from Budapest to Mátészalka and eventually grew to several additional factories throughout the 1980s.

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Wikipedia