I have never been a world traveler but I always find it interesting when browsing international stores, trying out different countries candy. Candy seems to be universal and most countries have their own unique tastes. For example Scandinavians seem to like hard, gummy candy and salty candy. Mexicans like spicy candy. Candy from Asian countries can be very exotic. I really liked the coconut and rice candy from the Philippines.
So I’d like to ask, what unique candy have you found outside the USA?
Also what do you non-Americans think of American candy?
Here are some videos of kids trying foreign candy:
Visited England several times in my life, starting from a very young age. The candy over there was way better than the US. Two favorites:
Cadbury Flake. Imagine a long sheet of chocolate, about a millimeter thick, piled up to make a stick that’s 1/2" thick and about 8" long (click the link to see a pic). You bite into it, and the chocolate immediately crumbles into tiny pieces in your mouth, creating a ton of surface area and melting very quickly. It’s an explosion of chocolate flavor with every bite. Not only that, it’s Cadbury chocolate, which beats the daylights out of Hershey’s chocolate.
Cadbury Crunchie. Chocolate coating on a core of “honeycomb toffee.” There was (and still is) nothing like that honeycomb center in American candybars.
OK, one more. Rowntree Smarties. No, not the shitty little roll of hard pressed-powder candies we all hated in our Halloween bags. Rowntree Smarties are the English equivalent of M&Ms - chocolate bits with a thin hard-candy shell. Except, as always, they were made with better chocolate. The Wikipedia page doesn’t say it, but I’d swear there’s a tiny bit of fruit flavoring in there, too.
It lacks variety, as it’s always very sugary: in Spain we tend to mix sugary, fruity and zesty, lemon juice and its poor man’s cousin citric acid are very popular in our candy industry. But then, many of us are surprised by what kind of foods carry sugar when made in the US; at least with candy we do expect sugar.
And what you guys call chocolate is chocolate like what you guys call black coffee is coffee.
Candy is supposed to be sweet, but american candy seems like somebody went completely nuts with the sugar.
I’m not much of a sweet tooth, but I like English lollies (they sell them here, there are shops that just sell English lollies). My favourites are treacle dabs, sour apple and jamaican limes.
A coworker who came from Russia brought me some Russian chocolate. At first it didn’t taste so bad, but then the aftertaste! It was if Satan had eaten some rotted burritos with sauerkraut and limburger topping and had shat the result directly into my mouth, followed by a 30 second fart.
The candy I always like to buy in England are the violet and rose chocolate cremes. Different varieties in different parts of the country, but my favorites would be ones that are dark chocolate and have the little candied rosebud or violet on top.
There are some Cadbury chocolate bars available in the US, but I’m pretty sure they taste different than the ones you buy directly in the UK (or I guess Australia). I think they’re actually made domestically.
You can find thinks like Crunchies and Flakes in the US, but generally only at specialty shops that go to the trouble of importing them.
Yes, I think they make the choccies here, but they are the same as in the UK (although the milk used can make the chocolates taste different, NZ has good chocolate because they have good cows). Come to oz and see whether you can tell the difference…
I’d be surprised if the Cadbury bars in US mass-market retailers were the same as the ones sold in the UK. I think these companies make candy aimed at the local tastes, which is why, for instance, there are hundreds of varieties of Kit Kat bars available in Japan.
Non-western countries don’t have much of a sweet/candy culture because a) it’s an expensive luxury b) lack of available dental hygiene makes eating lots of sugar a very bad idea.
I always look for local sweets to bring home in every destination I visit. There are limited pickings in places like Nepal (where I rightly got a stern lecture for offering a biscuit to a 5-year old girl in a tribal Himalayan village where the nearest dentist is hours away and more than they can afford) or Indonesia. India was a little better and they have some wonderful confectionary at big events and family gatherings - perhaps that’s amongst the most unique.
Other factors: hot countries don’t tend to have good chocolate because the manufacturers need to make it last a decent amount of time without it being ruined by the heat. Australians tend to have similar sweets to the British but the chocolate is of a poorer quality because the bars need to last in the heat (taste is subjective of course). I can’t work out the love of Hershey’s - it tastes like it contains vomit to my palate and other American sweets look they are designed to deliberately give people diabetes.
Northern Europe is the best for chocolate. Belgian chocolate is incredible, the French tend to pour their energies into pastries and cakes, the Scandinavians have wonderful milky chocolate and the most fantastic sour sweets - and that bleeds into Holland. Properly sour. Sooo good. The Finnish are severely underrated when it comes to confectionary, but the Brits seem to do all of this stuff quite well - I’m not bias I’ve been asking my European work colleagues (I expected them to say that the UK wasn;t as good as other European contries but they’ve all been quite positive). Although Cadbury’s have gone downhill a bit since they were bought by Kraft/Mondelez. So actually I think the best confectionary all comes from Northern Europe. Although the most unique is a more interesting and even more subjective question
For weird and/or bad, the salmiak licorice(“Zout”) they sell in Scandinavia and the Netherlands has to be right up there. It kind of grows on you after a while, but the first time you try it, it’s basically salty black licorice with a hit of ammonia.
US candy can be pretty bad. Not all of it but I can’t understand why anyone wants milk chocolate. I hear from non-americans about this often. Natural flavors seem to be totally discarded in favor of weak artificial substitutes. The excess sugar previously mentioned is just a way to cover up the low quality ingredients.
Maybe Lower Slobovia has worse candy but my limited experience in international candies has us at the bottom of the list so far.
ETA: There is some good candy made here. I’ve just had wide exposure to our candy. The worst stuff from Switzerland and Belgium might be pretty awful also.
Not candy, per se — the hot chocolate (beverage) I have consumed in Barcelona far outpaces in deliciousness the hot chocolate (beverage) of Vienna, Paris, or Brussels, all located in far more chocolatey countries. Why is that?
I’ve had some mystifying Chinese confections. A co-worker used to go there for part of every year and he’d bring something back to the office to share. The strangest one was a large box filled with smaller boxes that were perhaps the size of a quarter. In each box was a small allegedly fruit-flavored square of gelatin wrapped in a thin rice paper/pastry coating. It was pretty much tasteless - not sweet at all, and I only figured out what flavor it was supposed to be by looking at the picture on the box. Most of them were either pear or peach. Except not really.
There was also corn candy - a gummy-like thing shaped like a short fat ear of corn that tasted like … buttered corn. It seems these are usually given out at weddings and for Chinese New Year.
Loved Belgian chocolates when I lived there, especially Leonidas. You can find more small candy makers in the US now. There are a few local toffee makers who have nailed it.
Well thats the thing in the USA you can find any kind of candy you want from the cheap crap to the fancy stuff. And its all to ones taste. I personally, LOVE Hershey bars.
