I am going to hand down the gospel here since I can tell many of you are confused about what candies are good or bad or should be eaten.
This post seeks to enumerate on what are objectively the three best candies currently in production today. To understand why these are the three best candies, you must understand the concept of Fun To Eat, or FTE for short. FTE can be applied to anything, and not just candy. Although the criteria for what makes something FTE is an exhaustive list, I will supply a few of them here:
- Shape
- Texture
- Size
- Layering
- Flavor
- Aroma
- Behavior under various conditions
- Applications and uses
- Consistency
- Difficulty to bite through or eat
- The feeling it inspires/face it makes you make
- et al.
Generally speaking, shape, texture, flavor, and difficulty to bite through or eat are the most important here. The rest are largely secondary or tertiary; even more criteria are available for the purpose of excepting certain candies from rules they'd otherwise be governed by. In some cases, difficulty to bite through or eat is negligible, such as in hard candy, where that is desired--however, the argument can be made that this is a niche market anyway so who fucking cares.
Now:
The third best candy is the Milky Way bar. The Milky Way, for those of you who do not know, is a chocolate bar filled with caramel and nougat. It goes by the name Mars Bar in other countries than America, but why this is the case, I don't know. The Mars Bar has a different layering scheme and no caramel, so why they are considered the same by Mars is beyond me. The Milky Way places third because of how FTE it is.
We'll start with shape--it is a rectangle. Eating this gives you a clear goal. You know that you start at one end and finish at the other, which gives you a sense of completion. This is a candy that gives you a psychological boost, however minor. In addition, it is properly layered. The caramel does not overpower the nougat; the nougat does not overpower the chocolate bar. This is a chocolate bar first and foremost and it does not forget that fact. (In truth, this is the first "filled" chocolate bar to ever be made; it's longevity alone should be proof that it should be top three.) Next, consistency/difficulty to bite through or eat: the candy bar is devoid of anything hard, like nuts, and mushes together lightly in your mouth. Because of this, it can be enjoyed by people of varying age. And, because the Milky Way can effectively be mashed apart with the tongue, you can eat it without ever using your teeth! What is more fun than that?
Finally (although there is much more I could address here) I'll mention what happens when you break it apart. It doesn't sever perfectly--a trail of caramel and sometimes nougat stretches out. This is intensely appealing to everyone, and Mars knows it. Most of their advertisements focus on the fact that the candy bar being broken open is almost more exciting than the candy bar being eaten and enjoyed. It's almost a sexual tension. "Look at the inside of this. We won't show you anyone eating this. Just look at what you could eat." It's like walking by Victoria's Secret (or in my case, A&F).
The second best candy is fresh red licorice, arguably the most FTE candy in the world. There are many kinds, but the best kind of licorice, the kind that earns it the number two spot, is basically Red Vines, although what you often find in stores is stale because people these days don't fucking understand quality control. The licorice I speak of is not the solid rope kind, but rather the short, ten inch hollow strips with curved ridges spiraling down the outside. Many years ago, in the folly of my youth, I thought Twizzlers were better--regular, boring Twizzlers. I thought this because you could pull them apart, like string cheese (the most FTE dairy product--you can see how I'd be quick to rank Twizzlers highly). Twizzlers, however, suffer in every other area, and in all of those areas regular red licorice excels.
First, flavor and aroma. Red licorice, when fresh, falls apart in your mouth like wet paper. It smells fruity and sweet, and taste the same. The initial flavor is understated, but it quickly suffocates the tongue before almost immediately vanishing. It's a classic hint of what's to come followed by the shock of flavor and then nothing.
Now you want more. Besides this, the licorice stick provides a near endless amount of fun; the outside has a delightful spiraling ridge, which is nice to hold or eat along. You can bite the ends off and use it as a straw for soda that also tastes great, unlike the vast majority of other drinking straws. It can cut into a long rectangular sheet and eaten similar to a Fruit Roll-Up, and the two sides--ridged or smooth--give the consumer the option of what he feels on his tongue.
I submit that fresh red licorice is the perfect understated candy, and were it not for a few minor flaws--such as availability of fresh stock and the fact that if I eat too many I might throw up--it would easily be number one.
The best candy, both in my opinion and de facto, is Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. It has a recipe which has not changed dramatically in over 80 years. It steadily rose to the role of most popular candy in the town it was made, then the state it was sold, then the side of America that could get it, and now the world. RPBC benefits from being the candy that is most FTE in theory and often in practice.
RPBC are two things. Those things are peanut butter and chocolate. The peanut butter is in a flat disk shape inside the chocolate. They make RPBC by placing a small amount of chocolate in a mold, then some peanut butter, and then more chocolate. The simplicity of this candy amazes me, and yet countless imitators manage to fuck it up. WAIT, HOLD ON, BACK UP. Do you see that word there, that starts with the letter I?
Imitators. Can you think of a candy with more imitators (or any at all, really) than RPBC? I can think of off brand licorice; I can think of things similar to a Milky Way but not the same. There are a plethora of disgusting candy bars filled with so much shit you can't even taste what you're eating; the fuckers are dime a dozen. RPBC alone have the most imitators, and yet, no one does what they do the same or better. Every single imitator fucks up the tried and true recipe of chocolate-peanut butter-chocolate. I don't fucking know how. No one can layer it right, or texture it right, or smooth the bottom and tops right. RPBC got all these right immediately, and yet, after years and years of watching them succeed, no one else can do it. I am simply amazed; this is truly testament to their otherworldly greatness.
The trick to RPBC is trifold.
Primarily it's the layering and consistency. There is a perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter, and it's in the right places. No other candy in the world is as perfectly layered. The chocolate is smooth, wet; the peanut butter is rougher, slightly dry. There is a tinge of saltiness in the peanut butter that clashes with the sweetness of the chocolate. The entire idea of the RPBC is an exercise and implementation of opposites attracting. Imitators often make the chocolate too hard, or the peanut butter too soft or mushy or grainy.
Second is the look and feel. Earlier I expounded upon the sense of completion that eating something rectangular gives you, and I wasn't lying. But there is a better feeling--eating something circular. When you eat a cookie, a cheeseburger, when you bake a pie or a cake, you are making circular food. Circular food by definition has no start or end point; you get no sense of completion because you cannot complete what you didn't start. You end up wanting more. It's the same trick record producers use--fade out at the end of a song and people want to keep listening to it, as though it isn't done playing. Now think of hot dogs, french fries, pies and cakes cut into slices: these things almost everyone loves. They give you an easily defined start and end point that you can be satisfied with. Slicing a cake or pie makes it manageable. It makes you limit yourself.
The circular nature of a RPBC means that you can never be done eating them and will always need another. You can only put them in your mouth and hope that after you swallow you can forget they exist for a time. Even though the ridges--perfect depth, perfectly spaced--give you a feeling of control, you have none. None at all. And though the ridges and circle mean it is FTE on a basic level, what really puts it here is the feeling it inspires in you--that for a moment, things are nice, and the world is good, and you'll live on in a happy universe forever. RPBC are tiny bites of Heaven. This is undebatable.
Finally, perhaps most importantly: there is no wrong way to eat a Reese's, and I mean that literally. For two years (00-02) I would eat four of these a day, each one in a new way. Bottom up, top down, spiraling in, side to side, pry it apart, melt it, freeze it, blend chop break mush chocolate first peanut butter first sideways etc etc etc. Eventually I realized my quest was futile. The ad campaign during the 90s said there was no wrong way to eat a Reese's, and it was right (though it often showcased silly or impractical ways to eat them, such as drilling out the peanut butter [which I did with a knife at one point]). And although the new, just as modest slogan is "Perfect.", the old one remains true. Hershey's challenged the world to think of a wrong way to eat RPBC, and the world cried out with one voice, "There isn't one." (If you are wondering, I eat all of my RPBC the same way: one bite makes a crescent, then another bites across the line of symmetry, then I eat the rest.)
RPBC is the most FTE candy in the world. It is the best selling. It cannot be imitated, though countless greedy fools attempt to do so. It cannot be eaten incorrectly, and it always leaves you wanting more. It is the most delicious, best layered candy ever. Willy Wonka himself has nothing on this. Not only is it the best, but it's spin-off candies are some of the most popular in the world as well. Spin-off candies are not common. They are exceedingly rare.
OK in conclusion thanks for reading.
