Sugar Free Life Saver

I am pleased to present the sugar free Life Saver, another in my occasional series of guest candies. For reasons unclear to me, this candy was not popular when it was in the Candy Bowl. It should have been.

Once you get beyond the stigma of "sugar free," you will find this is one flavorful non-nutritive foodstuff. But what flavor? It tastes like fruit, but not like any particular fruit. Childhood experience with purple magic markers led me to believe this would be a grape flavored candy, but it tastes like neither grape or artificial grape. Raspberry? Perhaps Life Savers outbid Jolly Rancher for the last barrel of artificial wild berry flavor. The only aspect in which the candy disappoints is the aftertaste, which has slight notes of dish soap.

The factor that moves this candy from just north of blah to just south of boffo is the crunch. The fine people at Life Savers have managed to duplicate the crystalline crunch of a fine hard candy, and the absence of sugar (no, Dear Leader, your nemesis HCFS was not invited to this party) means that it doesn't gum up when you chew it.

If you needed any more reason to try this candy, consider this: Life Savers is owned by Wrigley. Maybe that funny flavor was the taste of Chicago.

Soda Mix Candy

I'll be the first to admit, this is one strange candy. So strange, in fact, that I believe it could only have come from a work-release program for criminally insane food chemists.

The package, which now wish I had kept, illustrated three different flavors (no doubt, the "mix"), each representing a moderately famous Japanese soda flavor. Had I kept the package, I might have been able to guess which one this particular sample was meant to taste like. But I didn't, so all I can do is give you my impressions of how it tastes.

It tastes like lemon. Or soap. Or some kind of lotion. Lemon moisturizing soap. Tasty lemon moisturizing soap. Or what I imagine Mr. Clean-flavored soda would taste like. (Honestly, I think this might be Calpis Water flavor.)

The crunch is good, not great, with a bit more residue on the tooth than I'd like. None of this leads me to speculate on what those drano-blue flecks are.

Try one and see what you think. Take it from the royal taster: you will not die, it's not poison!

Plum

This plum-flavored boiled sweet comes to us from Haitai, the people who brought us the Melon candies. In fact, it has a lot more in common with the Melon candy than with the nama ume ame plum candies I recently profiled.

The initial flavor is subdued, almost bland. Can it really be that the plum flavor manifests as a fragrance but not at all on the tongue? A piece of rock candy with the mere hint of plum blossom perfume? Consider how watery a real plum is. This sensory sleight-of-hand presents a nice example of how confectionary works of art can imitate life.

This is one candy you'll want to bite into. No more pulling punches; the natural plum flavor explodes in your mouth. The crunch is familar -- this candy is the equal of any ordinary boiled sweet, fracturing well and leaving just a bit of residue on the tooth.

Well worth a try.

Melon is Back

Melon is back!

Can those tasty Korean Red Ginseng jellies be the next to re-appear? I hope so, because my post on that candy yielded (via Google) the first hit from Korea. Yep, Candybowl is on the Seoul train.

Moment of Clarity

Every once in a while, we can get a moment of clarity that forces us to rethink what we're doing, and why we're doing it. Mine came while eating a Milky Way caramel candy.

I was wondering how a manufacturer could decide to put such a valuable brand name on something so waxy and distinctly lacking in cocoa flavor. As I typed the words "slight notes of play-doh," I wondered to myself, is this where I wanted to be when I started this project? Am I really never going to say a nice word about a domestic candy? And what will happen when, as seems inevitable, I run out of different candies to write about? I grabbed a lychee gummy just to take the sickly caramel taste out of my mouth.

I've thought hard about what this blog means, not just to me, but to us. All of us, including people like a certain high level functionary who still doesn't know it exists, but knows that the candy is good. It is good. And it's gotten better because of this blog, and because of all of you.

And so I rededicate myself to this project. There's no way to know what it's going to become, only that it will be.

I would like to thank you for bearing with me during what has been a hard week, my septimanus horribilis. I'd also like to thank Milky Way's insipid caramel candy, for "grantin me this moment of clarity, this moment of honesty. The world'll feel my truths through my hard knock life time, my gift and the curse. I gave you volume after volume of my work, so you can feel my truths."

CB