I’m seeing a lot of black licorice mentions, but there’s a special hell for Läkerol’s menthol black licorice.
:adds to shopping cart
That sounds delicious what
I need to find this
Related anecdote: When I worked an offshore rotation with people from all over the world, I made an effort to bring candy that I’d never seen outside of Scandinavia. It was always amusing to see people sampling candy I liked when they weren’t used to the ammonium chloride branch of flavors.
And once I brought this:
Everybody who weren’t Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish (sadly we had no Danes on board) absolutely hated it. Especially the Americans and Brits.
Everyone except Mario, that is; a Croatian geophysicist. He loved them. His voice still lives rent free in my head over ten years later, saying “Sweet candy is for kids”
A few trips later I brought one of my favorites for basically the same result, but this time with Jim (from Illinois, iirc) complaining that it made his mouth physically hurt:
Mario loved that one even More.
The only thing everyone on board liked was the obscene amount of chocolate my navigator brought every trip.But to answer the question: Twizzlers. I bought some when visiting the US a couple of years ago. It tasted like oily sweetener (as in, clearly not actual sugar). That’s when I learned that American and European wine gum are flavored very differently.
Footnote: Durian and durian chocolate is quite alright once you get used to the slight farty smell from each packet you open.
Take a bag of those pebers and dump them in a bottle of vodka. Let them dissolve overnight. Bring to a party and you will be instant friend of any scandinavian.
I did this with my friends when we went to Thailand. We were enjoying the delicious taste on a beach, two Australian guys were wanted to try it. They both spat it out instantly and the other one got so mad we thought he’s actually going to attack us.
After he calmed down a bit he demanded to see us drink it to be sure we hadn’t tricked him to drink poison. So we downed the entire 1 litre bottle to appease him. It was the start of a great day that lasted for few days.
Substitute vodka for some quality moonshine for extra bonus points from us northern scandinavians.
Stop this. This is how poison like Malort is made. We dont need to create its successor.
Yeah, American candy has about the lowest standards. Canada isn’t much better, but there’s a noticeable difference in the quality of chocolate in common chocolate bars. We once did a side-by-side comparison of KitKats (we live right on the border) and the difference was stunning.
If you like KitKat, try and see if you can find this one:
.
It’s similar, but better.One American candy I actually like is Reeses peanut butter cups.
I try to be as anti-Nestle as possible, which meant giving up KitKat, my favorite candy. I found these a few years ago on norwegianfoodstore.com and they’re soooo much better.
Damn, I wish that site existed when I lived abroad.
I love this site! I only order from them once a year because it’s expensive (I usually ask for a gift card for Christmas), but they have so much awesome stuff. The paprika Pringles are to die for.
Reese’s is one of my favorites too, but objectively it’s horrible, down there with hersheys chocolate. They successfully made it addictive, rather than taste like peanut butter or chocolate. Try something like a Trader Joe’s peanut butter cup and it’s a world of difference.
It won’t keep me from my Reese’s but at least I’m aware of it
Reese’s tasted a whole lot better 20+ years ago. Now it’s just gritty sugar with peanut butter flavored ‘essence’ added. Same goes for Cadbury eggs which are completely inedible now.
I always wondered about that but I don’t eat frequently enough to notice when it changed
Eating them infrequently is exactly how I noticed the change especially with the Cadbury eggs. It used to have a creamy center that has been replaced with what tastes like a spoonful of gritty Betty Crocker sugar frosting. Reese’s are less obvious but also just taste like sugar (or HFCS) to me now and they were my absolute favorite as a kid as someone who’s not really into candy.
alot of cookies and cakes are like that, you can feel the granular sugar, because they put so much.
Will do once I’m in the US, although I need to figure out an explanation for the vast collection of JD Vance memes on my phone first.
My first thought was that this is terrible ai lol.
Well, it could be (I just grabbed it off of an image search), but the product is real and found all over Norway.
Ah so ai isn’t bad at words, its just writing Norwegian!
We once did a side-by-side comparison of KitKats (we live right on the border) and the difference was stunning.
Bad comparison on that one. KitKat brand in the USA is an entirely different company that the rest of the world. So they aren’t even the pretending to be the same recipe.
At least the US KitKats aren’t Nestle.
I won’t say I’m boycotting Nestle per se, but I try to avoid their stuff. There’s a bag of strawberry cheesecake KitKats from Japan on my desk, lol. They’re pretty good.
milk chocolate by any of the big chains, are just trash. at WF, they sell gourmet chocolate imported from outside the US, or they make the ones that are bougie and expensive. dark chocolate, not so sweet is the best. white chocolate seems to have a chemical smell and aftertaste to it, super synthetic, that has no chocolate i never liked the taste.
I will defend my rubber flavoured twizzlers til the day I die. Do they taste like you shouldn’t be eating them? Absolutely. Will I still eat an entire bag of twizzlers at the movie theater every single time? You betcha.
sweet candy is for kids
I vibe w Mario. I haven’t had either you mentioned, but they seem my speed. I go for the saltiest licorice you crazy Scandinavians can come up with.
(am an American who warns people off my candy stash, but they still try it and think I’m pranking them)
Edit 4 days later: I bought a bag of Original and a bag of Hot & Sour as a result of this thread. Delicious but TBH, I was hoping for stronger. I ran into a specialty licorice store in small, Midwestern city Lincoln, Nebraska a few years bag and they had imported licorice from all over the world. They had a couple that were stronger.
I am happy to see they survived Covid. It couldn’t have been easy for such a niche thing like licorice in a city that small. https://licoriceinternational.com/
Sometimes it’s a hit. I was going somewhere with an Uber in Houston once, and the driver needed to stop for gas. I took the opportunity to head inside the gas station for some supplies, and while I was queueing and minding my own business while the guy in front of me had his stuff scanned by the cashier, and he suddenly said “Oh, and his stuff too”, offering out of the blue to pay for my stuff. (Seriously, does that happen sometimes? I’ve never heard of it before nor after. He must’ve been in a good mood). I wasn’t holding much stuff, so sure why not, once my initial WTF-factor had worn off.
I gave the guy a tin of Tyrkisk Pepper as a token thank you (I happened to have some I bought at my home airport that I planned on leaving at the head office). When he asked what it was I just said “Scandinavian candy, be careful”. He actually liked them.
i cant stand the smell of durian candy, its way to pungent.
Same in Canada. Everything is fake. You’ll see transmission fluid before you’ll see any real sugar in the ingredients.
American or South African chocolate products.
NOT an anti-American/-Saffer thing. They add butyric acid, which tastes like vomit to the rest of the world. (Accurate, as vomit contains it).
Presumably because the market there have been trained to expect that flavour for some reason. To the rest of us, a US or ZA origin is usually a sign to avoid.
That reason is because Hersey chocolate was the first chocolate the common American could afford and the processing method that Hersey used to produce it would create butyric acid from the milk. Now they add it back in because customers complained when they refined the process.
While in American, in right there with you. Aldi fortunately imports a good selection of chocolate so not all of us have to suffer.
Aldi has such awesome chocolate! Thanks for pointing out the reason.
I tried to like the Aldi chocolate bars but they leave this strange fatty coating in my mouth after eating them. I don’t experience that with other brands.
We usually get things like the chocolate covered cashews or sea salt caramels. They occasionally have some peanut butter or maybe cashew butter cups and those I remember being really good.
Those Choceur bars are pretty good. My favorite treat are Droste pastilles but the aldi bars will do.
That explains a lot, thanks.
I got a monthly food box for my wife a number of years ago. Each month they sent snacks from a different country.
I can’t remember which country it was from, but one month we got some round, hard candies. It was one of the most unfortunate things I have ever intentionally put into my mouth.
I don’t even remember the flavor (licorice, maybe?), because my brain attempted to bleach it out.
Everything else was usually tasty, though.
My wife looked it up. It’s a hard licorice candy with a salty filling from the Netherlands called Napolean Zwart-Wit (which loosely translates to “tarred scrotum”).
That may have been one of the Scandinavian countries. Sorry.
If you have any leftover, plz send.
Edit: Not our fault this time, but thanks for the tip!
Swede here.
Some American candy, mostly bad chocolate
I tried American chocolate once. It tasted like vomit aftertaste.
Never again.
american chocolate is just milk sugar mostly, i would like at the total cacao concentration, anything less than 70% is nasty asf, most american ones are under 40%. i heard the hersey ones they use some kind of chemical in it to make it taste the way it is. White chocolate american is the most chemically tasting and smelling of them all.
any American chocolate tastes like vomit
Hersheys “chocolate”. I spit it out, and a bit embarrassed, asked “could it gone bad during the flight?”
Well, obviously this stuff does taste like vomit, and Americans seem to be OK with that. Explains a lot about American behavior. If chocolate here would taste like that, we probably would have more mass shootings, too.
Hersheys used to be our only choice. However now that we have better choices, many of us are waking up to chocolate as a good thing (other than the sugar rush). It can be hard to get over the price and quantity difference though.
Luckily, we are spoiled for choice here. German, Swiss, Belgian, English chocolate all around. And no Hersheys anywhere.
the good ones are pretty expensive, and most people dont buy them, they have imported bougies ones sold by WF.
I’m allergic the something they put in mass produced milk chocolate over here I think. Idk what it is, I’ve no allergies I know of. But if I have a Hershey Kiss, my throat burns a little after, feels painful.
This doesnt happen when I have good dark chocolate, it’s only the garbage mass produced chocolate. US chocolate wasn’t always this shitty, but it sure as fuck is now. I doubt there is much actual cocoa in it these days
Licorice, that funny retro looking shit with the black and bright colors. They are as revolting to me as sushi
Allsorts, we call em. They taste of chalk and disappointment.
There are variations of these and the ones with aniseed are the worst.
At my place of work, one project we worked on involved a lot of contractors from a place based in China. (The project was an absolute cluster-fuck all the way from soup to nuts, but that’s a story for another day.) When the project concluded, they sent our office a thank-you gift box of various Chinese snacks.
One of the snacks was a… dried… meat… “candy”… I guess? The taste wasn’t “sweet” so much. It tasted like it had been dipped in perfume. And the texture of the meat was hard to describe. Not chewy like jerky, and it didn’t have that highly-processed Slim Jim sort of texture to it. Maybe it was sortof freeze-dried or something? I also couldn’t identify what animal the meat might have come from. (And I couldn’t read the text on the packaging.)
I’m not sure whether it was just an acquired taste or rather a practical joke by the folks at the Chinese company. Lol.
Was it a little cube? A Taiwanese exchange student once gave me a few “fish-tidbits”. Holy shit those things were the fishiest things I’ve ever tasted. Just concentrated chum bucket, instant bad breath. I’m sure that cats would love them, but I’m still not convinced that she wasn’t pulling my leg giving me a cat treat or what was essentially a bouillon cube and calling it “candy”.
I don’t remember it being fishy or cube-shaped. If I had to guess the meat, I’d guess beef or pork. And the shape was roughly spherical, but kindof… lumpy? It looked like it had been maybe torn off of a larger chunk of meat and then formed a bit.
Was it like eating cold hot dog meat? These sound like fish/beef balls used in soup like pho though they’re a Vietnamese thing.
The mention of “cold” makes me think you’re thinking they were prepared food of some sort or at least “wet”. These were shelf-stable, individually-wrapped “candies” (I think the note on the gift box even referred to them as “candies”) that came in a larger, plastic bag with art and text printed on it. Like you might think of bags of, say, these. Except they were a dried meat product, not losenges or caramels or whatever. And they weren’t “sweet” the way you think of candy. They tasted like you might imagine something dipped in perfume (and then dried) might taste. One more detail: I remember them being drier than any jerkey I’d ever eaten. They simply didn’t have enough moisture in them to have any heat conductivity to speak of. (Asking if they were cold is like asking if room-temperature Rice Crispies dry and straight from the box are “cold”.)
I guess I meant “cold” in the sense of “uncooked” hot dogs that have a very distinct texture, but it doesn’t sound like these are the same as what I’m thinking of either way.
The cheap no name “chocolates” that taste like eating oil solids disguised as chocolate
Well, licorice is definitely up there.
There’s some pralines that with some alcohol based filling that’s also really gross.
But I still remember I was a kid and my parents bought these cheese crackers. They were awful, the it was a bit crumbly but they had this really bad taste of something I can only describe as for fungus & cream cheese. I literally had to take a break and concentrate on not barfing even though we just wanted to play tabletop games. I know it’s not sweet but that stuff lives rent-free in my head to this day.
I tried Hershey’s (American chocolate) before and it tasted absolutely disgusting. it will never ever come remotely close to Dairy Milk or Galaxy
Turkish delights tend to be terrible. Insanely chewy and sticky, floral and just unpleasant. I also tried some sweet “goat cheese and spice lollipop” candy from mexico i didn’t care for much.
Black licorice fucks though. I’ll stand with the swedes on this one.
Avoid pretty much anything that has rose water as an ingredient then. That’s what gives Turkish delight the floral flavour and you will recognize it instantly.
That being said the Big Turk chocolate bar is such a bad shitty Turkish Delight it’s almost edible
Rose water is meh, but the worst part of turkish delights is the gelatin style chew. I also have a mild walnut allergy which makes them taste “scratchy” to me, so i doubt that helped when I tried it.
It’s like it was designed to piss you off specifically
I tried some matcha mochi once. It didn’t really taste good, but the worst thing about it was that it was just boring.
That’s an easy one - Durian bonbons from China. Durian is also known as the “stink fruit”. You need many hours to get that taste out of your mouth
I like fresh durian but the candy tastes like rotten onions to me. There’s also a kind of durian twinkie. Tried it once, almost threw up.
