Original question by @[email protected]
The disgusting Harry Potter every flavour beans. They had jelly belly jelly beans that tasted like dirt, grass, booger, vomit, ear wax, and others I can’t remember.
Maryjanes? (Very old yucky candy, not cannabis related)
Licorice. Anise flavored candy. It’s disgusting.
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.
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
I tried some matcha mochi once. It didn’t really taste good, but the worst thing about it was that it was just boring.
If I had to choose between leather belt flavoured licorice and vomit flavoured Hershey’s. Licorice wins everytime.
Ever had Dutch licorice? All the salt of a thousand oceans in one little bite.
I’ve tried the licorice thats made with ammonium chloride.
I love love love, licorice. Theres a store by me that often carries international candies and goods. I saw salty licorice there, and it sounded good, so I bought a little bag of the stuff made in one of the nordic countries, it was a bit ago, I don’t remember which one.
Driving home with a piece in my mouth and I taste it. Why do I taste cat piss? Wtf? My face sours, and ammonia comes to mind. My nose flairs, I spit it out. I get home and search up ammonium chloride, which I found on the package lable. I’m horrified what I find. It is processed with ammonia. WTF
Salty licorice might be good, but y’all can keep the ammonium chloride stuff, I’m good. Taste like cat piss smells
Salted liquorice.
I had a Norwegian friend who waxed lyrical about this stuff. So when I saw it for the first time in a shop, I grabbed a packet to nibble on while waiting for my train.
Plain black liquorice is delicious and salt makes everything taste better, and the Norwegian seemed like a nice, relatively normal person who enjoyed other things I liked. This was a low risk choice of mid morning snack, I thought to myself.
I was wrong. So very wrong.
This stuff tastes like it was peeled off the bottom of a shoe after walking through the city all day. It’s not salt either, it’s freaking ammonium chloride.
To paraphrase the Wikipedia:
The mineral is commonly formed on burning coal dumps from condensation of coal-derived gases. It is also found around some types of volcanic vents. It is a product of the reaction of hydrochloric acid and ammonia.
And Scandi’s put this on liquorice and like it. Even the kids. Madness. It took my all not to heave into a bin after trying it and like six cups of black tea to get the taste out of my mouth.
I gave the Norwegian the rest of the packet and he laughed at me while I watched him eat it because I looked so horrified.
As a Scandinavian I am ok with this being a general opinion outside of Scandinavia (minus a couple of countries), because that just means there’s more for us.
This stuff is like cocaine to me. Liquorice with salmiak is my favorite candy. It’s so interesting seeing people who didn’t grow up with it dispise it so much. Nowadays I don’t but it anymore because I can’t stop myself from speed running all the candy once it’s in the house.
Swede here, that Norwegian shit is weak. This is what we like.
It hurts, but it’s delicious. Svenskjävlar! is the world’s saltiest licorice.
Lmao, you all are built different or something. How many can you eat before it starts melting your tongue?
I mean, yeah, I’ve been salty liquorice all my life. But this is not something you binge on, it will eat up the roof of your mouth after just a few.
My go to is a combination of a sweet liquorice and a salmiak and chocolate covered almond. Pop one of each and munch away. Usually drink milk to save my stomach lining…
🤣
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.
Chinese olives are from a different plant entierly to western olives btw. I’ve never had them candied but they’re really good pickled as a side dish with spicy food.
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.
In my schoolboy days American teachers would bring candy from USA and the kids would absolutely devour it. Things like fruit gushers and sour warheads were absolute crack to primary school kids compared to the domestically available choices.
I went to America once and tried an American coke. It left this weird film in my mouth. I don’t understand how they drink it.
Put cheap “rum” in it.
I’m seeing a lot of black licorice mentions, but there’s a special hell for Läkerol’s menthol black licorice.
This just brings to mind the dreaded menthol filter tipped liquorice roll up. These were never intentionally done, but running out of either ordinary tips or blue rizla would often end up with being the only option.
I quite cigs years ago but for some reason I’m really craving one of these right now, ha ha.
That sounds delicious what
I need to find this
:adds to shopping cart
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.
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.
Twinnings did an Allsorts flavoured Earl Grey at one point that was the best thing I ever drank.
I’m one of those that rather like Allsorts though, the bobbly jelly ones particularly. I wouldn’t really call Allsorts liquorice though, liquorice flavoured maybe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Same in Canada. Everything is fake. You’ll see transmission fluid before you’ll see any real sugar in the ingredients.
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.
If you feel like DMing your name and address to an internet stranger who may or may not send you anthrax spores, I can mail you a resupply stash on Monday.
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)
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.
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.
Oh my God is that why I taste vomit if I eat a Hershey’s bar then drink a glass of water
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.
It may have. Certainly one of the many problems with hersheys s how old it can be. It seems to be treated as something that can sit on the shelf forever
Growing up and living in the US and then accidentally learning to taste the butyric acid after tasting chocolate without it made me sad :(
Black licorice.
I firmly believe candy should be sweet; not bitter.
Bitter? You must have had some weird fake crap. I’ve never had any liquorice that bitter, and I’m Swedish and love liquorice.
If we had pearls here in Scandinavia we’d all be clutching them right now.
Surely you looted some pearls back in the 700’s from innocent townsfolk.
And even if it’s not sweet, it can at least be tangy, sour, or tart.
Black licorice just taste like fucking death
It is evidence of how bad life used to be. If that shit was the treat, what was normal food like?!
Ah, yes, the world before refined sugar, lol
There’s fake black licorice, and there’s the real stuff. Two very different experiences!
Both trash.
I’m upvoting you not because I agree (I don’t, I love black licorice), but because you touch on a good point that if someone doesn’t like black licorice, they’re probably not going to like any black licorice regardless of quality. Maybe there’s some exceptions out there that like bougie black licorice and not the basic twizzlers stuff, but anecdotally I’ve tried introducing the fancier brands to a few friends who don’t like black licorice, and not one has given a single fuck.
Came here to say this and saw this comment.
This is the correct answer.
