Okay so during halloween, there are these weird eyeball gummies that are not only unsettling to look at, but they also taste like sugary plastic. It’s by far the worst tasting candy I’ve ever experienced, including low quality black licorice and some weird wood bark candy.
Lucas Limon - I never understood how kids could eat. Even before they found lead in it.
Durian candy and sour milk candy share the top spot.
NECO wafers. Like cardboard they taste
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.
Can’t stand corn fructose and palm sugar based snacks. Terrible everything - engironmental impact, texture, health impact, flavor. It’s just the cheapest possible option that ruins everything it touches.
The cheap no name “chocolates” that taste like eating oil solids disguised as chocolate
Peeps. I’ve never like marshmallow anything, really, and definitely not those abominations. Most cinnamon-flavored things. Edit: forgot one: chocolate-covered cherries. I don’t know why. I have a cherry tree and will eat the cherries off it and don’t even mind most artificially-cheery-flavored things. I also eat other fruits covered in chocolate (even durian).
The churro peeps were tasty!
(I actually like peeps, marshmallows, and cinnamon though lol)
I tried Hershey’s (American chocolate) before and it tasted absolutely disgusting. it will never ever come remotely close to Dairy Milk or Galaxy
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.
Reminds me of a story from my wife. As a kid, she was on holiday in Sweden. The ice van came, and she selected a ball of what she thought was chocolate ice. Well, it wasn’t…
ammonia
I like black licorice overall, but your description reminded me of my own worst candy experience. I brought these black licorice cat coins at World Market. The cat shapes were appropriate in the worst way. They tasted the way cat pee smells. It was completely unexpected and overpowering. I looked at the ingredients, and there was fucking ammonia in them. Horrifying. I will never understand how anyone could enjoy a candy that tastes like snacking out of the cat box.
Sounds like something that would pair well with Almond Roca for a litter box themed party.
Droppies! They’re an acquired taste. I worked with a lot of Dutch people at one point and they were always bringing them in. There was one kind I swear that had a powdered coating it was dipped in which only could have been weed killer.
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.
Swede here, that Norwegian shit is weak. This is what we like.
Bought a bunch of those when I had a short visit to Karlstad recently. I’m a Norwegian, and I’ll be the first to admit that the Norwegian kind is way too weak.
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…
🤣
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.
Hands down absolutely nothing worse than peeps. They somehow manage to make twizzlers taste like ultra gourmet candy.
I’m curious, do you like marshmallows?
I like peeps, but also love marshmallows
Plain marshmallows on their own are fine.
Twizzlers.
I tried them in the US and it just felt like I was chewing on a piece of plastic.
On the other hand, unlike most of the people in the comments, I love licorice.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of those. I’m fine with licorice.
Twizzlers feel like some shitty capitalist found a way to turn some industrial waste byproduct edible enough to feed to kids
Yeah, what’s up with twizzlers? They look okay, I’ve read that they should taste really nice and… well, it’s chewable plastic with zero taste
Delicious, delicious carnauba wax…
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.
:adds to shopping cart
That sounds delicious what
I need to find this
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.
the good ones are pretty expensive, and most people dont buy them, they have imported bougies ones sold by WF.
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
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 cant stand the smell of durian candy, its way to pungent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
alot of cookies and cakes are like that, you can feel the granular sugar, because they put so much.
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.
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.
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.
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 (claim to) 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.
Same in Canada. Everything is fake. You’ll see transmission fluid before you’ll see any real sugar in the ingredients.
