ABOUT
FEEDSCONTACT
EMAIL DIGESTCANDY RATINGSTYPE
BRAND
COUNTRY
ARCHIVES
|
October 2013Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Halloween Candy Spotting 2013When a candy season comes around, I take special interest in what’s new, what’s returning and trends on the store shelves with holiday candy. Here’s the 2013 Halloween shopping roundup. Last week I was invited to participate in the Nosh Show podcast, we’re talking about candy and a bit about Halloween candy. You can listen to the Nosh Show:
HERSHEY’S MARS NECCO FERRARA CANDY (Includes FARLEY’S & SATHERS and BRACH’S) That aside, Brach’s seems to be their only brand with seasonal candies, though Lemonheads and Trolli Gummis are available in treating packaging. TOOTSIE (review) Available in snack packs for Trick or Treat JUST BORN NESTLE & WONKA RUSSELL STOVER WRIGLEY’S JELLY BELLY OTHER COMPANIES: NOT RETURNING: Have you seen anything new & exciting in stores this year? What are you planning to give out to kids, if they come to your house? Related CandiesMonday, October 7, 2013
Charms Candy Corn PopsI knew there were some new lollipops out these year, so I’ve been on the prowl in the Halloween aisles. I found the Charms Candy Corn Pops at Wegman’s in Mechanicsburg, PA. I didn’t necessarily want a huge bag of them, but they weren’t sold individually like the seasonal Blow Pops. It’s a simple concept, they’re lollipops with three layered colors that tastes like candy corn. What does candy corn taste like? Something like buttered honey. Or honeyed butter. If you’re a fan of candy corn but can’t eat it because it often contains gelatin or egg whites, you’ll be happy to hear that this may be vegan, as long as you’re good with processed sugar. The Charms lollipop line is also peanut free as well as gluten free, tree nut free and egg free. I’ve always liked the size and shape of Charms lollipops. They’re wide and flat but rounded. They’re experts at combining flavors in the pops, I often enjoyed the Sweet & Sour pops as a kid. Though this one is different colors, I could detect no difference in the flavor for any of the three colors: orange, yellow and white. For the most part this was a mild butterscotch lollipop. I welcome that, it wasn’t overly buttery flavored, it has a mild hint of salt and a dense texture without any voids that can create sharp spots. They’re not the most exciting lollipops in the world, but quite good. I was disappointed that the layering was actually stacked, they were more randomly swirled. The one in the photo is about as close as I could get to the vertical stack of candy corn. (Well, if you stand it up on its end.) I hear there’s a Blow Pop version of this, too, but I’ve only been able to find the Caramel Apple Blow Pop (review soon). Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:35 pm Candy • Review • Halloween • Tootsie • Hard Candy & Lollipops • Kosher • 7-Worth It • United States • Thursday, October 3, 2013
Original Beans Piura Porcelana and Esmeraldas MilkOriginal Beans is a small chocolate company that starts with carefully selected, direct-purchased beans and makes them into single-origin bars. They take special care with all aspects of the sourcing, manufacturing and packaging, as their name might imply. The bars are not easy to find in the United States, but luckily a very good chocolate source has developed walking distance from my office, so you’ll be seeing more of these interesting finds in the coming months and years. The selection of bars from Original Beans is very small, but quite specific. I chose to review their Original Beans Piura Porcelana 75% as my first. You can read up on the Peruvian Porcelana beans on the Original Beans website and on other chocolate aficionado sites. The history of chocolate is fascinating and many people have become interested in the generic diversity of the trees and their distribution. The Porcelana beans, as a variety of Criollo, are characterized by their white color and distinctive flavor. They’re quite rare and grown in a few small areas in South America, so single origin bars are not common and often limited editions. The bar features all organic ingredients and is made only exclusively with white Criollo cacao from the Pirua River Valley in the Peruvian Andes. The cacao is 75% and the package says that it’s a 22 hour conch. The ingredients list is simple and short: Direct-trade cacao beans, cacao butter, cane sugar. There’s no soy and it’s vegan and gluten free. The tasting notes for the bar online are: Vibrant, luscious with kumquat, lime, apricot, raspberry flavours and notes of toasted pecan; wonderfully balanced acidity and lingering finish. Though the beans are white, the chocolate is brown. The fermenting and roasting of the beans makes them indistinguishable at first glance from any other bean. The bar is simply and beautifully molded. The segments have a great snap and neutral medium-brown color. The scent is mild, it has some smoky vanilla notes The flavor is an interesting balance of acid like citrus and tannins, for the most part the flavors I got were black tea and roasted nuts. The texture was smooth and has and excellent melt and lack of grit. It still has a bit of a dry finish that’s sharp from the tannins. I loved this bar, this is the third one I’ve eaten, I bought the first two over the summer but found they weren’t doing well in the heat so I ate them and waited for it to cool off to do a proper review. The flavor is not too intense but still very satisfying after three or four squares. The cocoa butter balanced out the clean but sweet sugar to make it very munchable for a high cacao bar. The next bar I picked for review is Original Beans Esmeraldas Milk, which is a 42% cacao bar with a touch of fleur de sel. Like the dark bar, it’s made with organic ingredients. From the photo above you can see that it’s a dark looking bar for milk chocolate, but compared to many commercial milk chocolate bars, I’m inclined to call it a dark milk. The beans for the Esmeraldas Milk is from the Esmeraldas Rain Forest of Ecuador. The conch is 16 hours, according to the package. Original Beans is in The Netherlands, and the packaging is largely in Dutch (though the website also in English) while the chocolate is made in Switzerland. The ingredients list is a little longer than the dark bar, but still short: direct trade cacao, sugar, cocoa butter, milk and sea salt. The tasting notes suggest: Exceptionally velvety with salted caramel, hints of summer red fruits and spice. The Original Beans website has a feature where you input the batch code from your bar into their website that says:
Unfortunately that feature just takes you to the same page you could browse to based on the name of the chocolate bar. For true transparency and education, I kind of wanted specifics about the harvest that made my bar. What was that year like? Were there special issues that would distinguish that vintage from the previous year or the coming year? Or even just things like how many pounds of beans were harvested, how many bars were made in that batch. The bar has a roasted, caramelized scent that has a bit of a cheese note to it, something a little more savory. The melt is great, it’s soft and fudgy without feeling too sugary or sticky. The flavor has molasses notes, maybe even a little fennel but a lot of milk. The hint of salt does keep it from tasting too much like sugar, but it doesn’t jump out. There’s a sharpness to the bar, again, that powdered milk cheese-ness that doesn’t quite satisfy me. I’m not a big fan of the powdered milk flavors in some milk chocolates; it’s a personal preference, not an indication of quality. I also tried the Bolivian Beni Wild Harvest bar, as I was a big fan of Lillie Belle’s Wild Thing, also from wild beans, but found the 66% far too sweet for me. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 3:22 pm All Natural • Candy • Review • Chocolate • Ethically Sourced • Organic • Single Origin • 8-Tasty • 9-Yummy • Switzerland • Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Bonomo Taffy Nibbles: Vanilla and BananaBonomo Turkish Taffy is one of those great comeback stories in the candy world. The company is now bringing back one of its more obscure products, Bonomo Taffy Nibbles which were made briefly from 1966 to 1972, when the equipment used to make it was damaged in a flood and never repaired. The revived version comes in two varieties, Vanilla and Banana. They are small bites of soft taffy covered in milk chocolate. Though they are an old product, the timing of their reintroduction coincides with the current trend of morselization, that is, making candy bite sized. I heard they were coming back and had some samples earlier this summer, but found the packages I’m reviewing while on vacation last week in Pennsylvania. They’re a nicely sized portion of 1.5 ounces. The Vanilla Taffy Nibbles are nicely formed and coated. They’re a bit like Milk Duds, except they’re made with real chocolate and instead of caramel, it’s a nougat-style taffy. The chew is soft and a bit airier than the crack & chew bars. The flavor is mild, not quite the soft vanilla notes that I get from the taffy bars, but still a pleasant chew. There’s a faint whiff of amaretto or some other flavor in it. The chocolate is sweet and creamy without being too waxy or sticky. Overall, I found them fun to eat, though I’d probably prefer to mix them in with something else. The Bonomo Banana Taffy Nibbles are pretty much everything I want in a banana candy. The chew is soft, the banana is light and though artificial it’s still satisfying and not too caustic. The chocolate is decent and the pieces are a great size with good proportions. Bonomo’s Taffy Nibbles are what I always felt Charleston Chews should be. They reminded me of the Swedish candy called Polly, which is a little nugget of rum nougat covered in chocolate. Now that they’re back, I hope they become easier to find, because they do fit a wonderful niche in the candy world. They’re a great movie candy and I’d like to see more flavored centers and maybe some dark chocolate if they become popular. The candies contain milk, eggs and soy as well as confectioners glaze (shellac) and are made on equipment that also processes peanuts, tree nuts and wheat. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:15 pm Candy • Morselization • Review • Bonomo • Chews • Chocolate • Kosher • 7-Worth It • United States • |
Meticulously photographed and documented reviews of candy from around the world. And the occasional other sweet adventures. Open your mouth, expand your mind.
|