While I meant to post something on Wednesday, I’ve had a lingering cold that messed up my ability to taste and smell for the better part of a week and a half. It’s admittedly hard to review food when your taste buds are shot. Sorry about that.
To tide you over, let me point you in the direction of last week’s amazing New York Times Magazine. If you haven’t seen it already, there’s a great set of features about everything candy, including Japan’s fascination with Kit-Kat bars and the very regional lure of salty liquorice. But the piece that immediately caught my attention was their Home Sweet Home feature, which has an illustrated guide to 32 different signature candies from around the world, with a bit of a back story about each candy and why they’re special or important in their country of origin.
For Canada’s entry, they chose Coffee Crisp (Amazon affiliate link!), which struck me as reasonable. To supplement their blurb with a bit more info for visiting Americans (hello!), Coffee Crisp does indeed have a hint of coffee to it, and it’s widely available in every corner of Canada. The NYT describes it as being like Kit-Kat, but that’s only half true. Coffee Crisp is not nearly as chocolatey as Kit-Kat, and the focus is on the crunchy iced wafer filling, not the thin layer of coating. Anyone who has gone trick-or-treating in Canada has received at least a handful in their bags, these days sometimes cheekily rebranded as Coffin Crisp.
Personally? I’m not a huge fan, but if there’s a box of fun-sized Coffee Crisps on an office desk, I’ll absolutely nab one. But I prefer chocolate bars with more chocolate and less wafer.
Another highlight from the article is High Chew from Japan (green apple and strawberry are my favourites). High Chew is now surprisingly easy to find in Canada (they’re even at Costco), which was unexpected. A decade ago, I used to have to make the trip to Asian specialty markets to stock up. (And that’s still a good place to find less common flavours, if you’re into that kind of thing.)
So, since there’s a whole world of internet out there reading this, what’s your take on the NYT’s list? Is your own country well represented? Did they get anything wrong? Is Red Vines the best they could do for the United States? Leave a comment, friends!