• thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I’m seeing a lot of black licorice mentions, but there’s a special hell for Läkerol’s menthol black licorice.

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksM
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksM
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          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

          • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            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.

    • Deestan@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • Lorindól@sopuli.xyz
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        1 month ago

        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.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksM
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        1 month ago

        Substitute vodka for some quality moonshine for extra bonus points from us northern scandinavians.

    • garbagebagel@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • Pipster@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      I’m a brit and have loved tyrkisk peber and other “salty” liquorice etc. sweets for a long time. I had a big bag of the hot and sour flavour and was rather sad when I ran out.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksM
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        1 month ago

        If you feel like DMing your name and address to an internet stranger who may or may not send you anthrax spores, I can (claim to) mail you a resupply stash on Monday.

    • Vanth@reddthat.com
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      28 days ago

      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/

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksM
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        1 month ago

        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.

    • Uff@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Same in Canada. Everything is fake. You’ll see transmission fluid before you’ll see any real sugar in the ingredients.

  • Brewchin@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • Pipster@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      A colleague came back from the US with a big back of mini Hershey’s flavours. Most were ok but I legitimately thought the standard plain flavour had spoilt.

  • Signtist@bookwyr.me
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    1 month ago

    When I was a kid someone gave me a “buttered popcorn” flavored dum-dum sucker. It tasted so terrible that it gave me a taste aversion to real buttered popcorn for nearly 2 decades.

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    First of all, licorice is good actually, though black jelly beans are trash.

    One time I bought olive flavored gummies from the Asian market because I love olives and I was curious. Absolutely horrible, didn’t even finish one.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Very likely! What I had was formed and individually wrapped in little wrappers like you might expect Werther’s caramels to come in, bu the texture does sound similar to that. Neat!

  • gigachad@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    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

    • Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      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”).

  • M137@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    American candy. Not American brand candy which different outside the US, but actuall American candy. It’s all so bad quality and vile that it would never sell outside the US and not even be legal to do so in many places.