A few keen eyed readers and Candy Forums friends spotted the new Reese’s Bar. (I’m not sure what this is actually called. The wrapper says: Milk Chocolate Reese’s filled with Reese’s Peanut Butter. But that sounds infinitely silly and doesn’t even include that it’s a bar and not a cup.)

I’ve only seen it so far in a 4.5 ounce size and only at Walgreen’s. But it was on sale for $1.00 and has disappeared in the weeks since I purchased it.

It was easy to spot what with the Reese’s orange wrapper.

The ingredients list is incredibly long:

Milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, nonfat milk, milk fat, corn syrup solids, soy lecithin, TBHQ), peanuts, sugar, dextrose, cocoa butter, chcoolate, nonfat milk, milk fat & contains 2% or less of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (plam kernel and palm oil), salt, wheat flour, cornstarch, vegetable oil (cocoa butter, palm, palm kernel, shea, sunflower and/or safflower oil), whey, TBHQ, soy lecithin, leavening (sodium bicarbonate & sodium aluminium phosphate), vanillin.

The bar is attractive and thick. Each lightly rounded section holds a portion of crumbly yet smooth Reese’s Peanut Butter filling.

What’s clearly evident about this bar is that it’s all about chocolate and less about the peanut butter than the traditional cups.

I usually prefer the high ratio of peanut butter such as the Reese’s Eggs around Easter, but for those looking for the opposite end of the spectrum, this is an interesting flip.

The difference in ratios aside, this bar is far harder to eat and share though certainly a good value.

What confused me most about this bar was that Hershey’s already has a peanut butter filled bar. I’ve even reviewed it.

It looks pretty much the same - 4.5 ounces and the same number of sections. Really the only difference in looking at them is that this bar says Hershey’s on top of each section instead of Reese’s.

But it is different. The center here is smoother and a bit stickier and perhaps even saltier.

The ingredients list is shorter by about a third:

Milk chocolate (sugar, milk, chocolate, cocoa butter, mikl fat, soy lecithin, PGPR, vanillin), peanuts, sugar, dextrose, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm kernel and palm oil), cocoa butter and contains 2% or less of salt, cornstarch & TBHQ.

I questioned the purpose of this bar the first time I tried it and why it was under the Hershey’s label and not Reese’s. I don’t know if both bars will continue to co-exist but if they have a limited number of slots I’d recommend dumping them both and concentrating on the quality of their core products. It’s not that it’s bad, but it’s just superfluous.

Some Reese’s products are gluten free, but this one lists wheat in the ingredients.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Miniatures
2. Hershey’s Heart’s Desire
3. Reese’s Pieces
4. Reese’s Whipps
5. The Great Pumpkin Roundup
6. Trader Joe’s Mini Peanut Butter Cups
7. Reese’s Bars

I went on a strange little odyssey. It all started with an interview I was prepping for with NBC’s Today show. Hershey’s was changing some of their products, swapping out real milk chocolate for coatings that used other oils instead of the native cocoa butter in chocolate.

I gathered up all the products I could find, including the ReeseSticks (previous review here). I found the single serve package at the drug store, but it was expired and I didn’t think that was fair, so I found this Reese’s Lovers Assortment (photo here) at CVS’s freshly stocked Halloween aisle. I found exactly what I wanted ... but I was a little surprised because the front of the package said that the ReeseSticks were crispy wafers | peanut butter | milk chocolate.

Well, that didn’t match what I had. This is happy news, right? The milk chocolate is back!

But when I opened up my Reese’s Lovers Assortment I was more than disappointed. The little single finger packages of ReeseSticks were quite clear, they said only crispy wafers | peanut butter. What are they pulling?

Well, I’ve already bought them, so I may as well try them and add them to my list of re-reviewed items.

Flipping over the bag, they do list all the ingredients for the products separately and though the front and both sides of the package mention milk chocolate, the ingredients tell the full story:

Sugar, peanuts, wheat flour, vegetable oil (cocoa butter, palm, shea, sunflower and/or safflower oil), chocolate, dextrose, whey, nonfat milk, cocoa butter, contains 2% or less of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm kernel and/or palm oil), salt, palm kernel oil, milk fat, soy lecithin, corn starch, leavening, TBHQ, vanillin.

The old ingredients (courtesy of Mike’s Candy Wrappers) from 2003:

Milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, milk, nonfat milk, milk fat, lactose, soy lecithin & pgpr), peanuts, wheat flour, sugar, dextrose, cocoa butter, contains 2% or less of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (contains palm kernel and palm oil), salt, palm kernel oil, leavening, soya lecithin and TBHQ and citric acid.

The little sticks in the assortment are a little smaller than the regular twin pack. These are .6 ounces each, but are still pretty substantial feeling.

The possibly-chocolate coating (well, the ingredients say that there may be cocoa butter in there and no other oils) looks pretty good, a little greasy but a nice medium color. It smells like peanuts and Easter grass. Sweet and artificial and, well, comforting.

Unless chilled the coating was pretty soft and sticky. The crunch of the foamy and flavorless wafers allowed the peanut butter to come through. Without much chocolate flavor, these reminded me of Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch, without all the sharp mouth-wounding bits. It’s pretty salty though, saltier than I would like. (135 mgs in a current twin pack versus 110 mgs in the original one.)

Overall, I prefer the memory of the real chocolate one - less salty and I recall it having some chocolate flavor input. I don’t like ingredients lists that tell me what might be in there in there. I don’t want to eat palm oil, I want cocoa butter. But it’s still a pretty good candy product and not as noticeable a change as the Kissables.

Final note: Though the package deceptively promised me milk chocolate in my ReeseSticks, it also said that the Fast Break was not real chocolate on the outside ... but on the inside and the reverse of the package it was.

Related Candies

1. Revisit: Take 5, Sunkist Fruit Gems & Snickers Almond
2. Hershey’s Miniatures
3. Kissables (Reformulated)
4. Reese’s Whipps
5. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line
6. Reese’s Sticks

I found two more flavors of Nips to add to my growing collection.

The series seems to be color coded, peanut butter is accented with orange. I think orange is the universal color for peanut butter (though I could see yellow working too).

The Peanut Butter Parfait Nips didn’t sound that appealing to me. I wasn’t sure what the peanut butter center would be like. The picture on the box makes it appear as though it’s some sort of caramel sauce flavored with peanut butter.

These seemed more regular than the Dulce de Leche ones that I had before, not as much leakage.

After cracking one open (yes, with a nutcracker) I found out why these weren’t leaky. The center isn’t gooey, it’s a dry and crumbly partially defatted peanut butter.

The shell was like the Caramel Nips. Sweet, creamy and toasty tasting.

After a while I got kind of tired waiting for the peanut butter flavor, so I crunched it a bit. The peanut butter innards are very sweet, a little greasy (thank goodness for the defatting) and really peanutty.

The combination is nice, but completely overpowers the caramel at this point. Then the peanut butter dissolves away and I’m left with shards of caramel Nip (well, that’s my fault for crunching). Not really much of a winner for me.

Rating: 5 out of 10

The Butter Rum Nips sport a medium purple banner across the box and on the little wrappers.

Though I enjoy rum as a spirit, I don’t drink it straight and rarely in mixed drinks at all. I think it’s best in sauces and baked goods, so putting it in a candy seems like a pretty good idea to me.

They don’t smell like much in the box. Kind of like box.

If you’ve ever wanted Butter Rum LifeSavers to be more creamy, and I mean actually have milk in them instead of being milk flavored, this is the stuff.

The caramelized flavors, the smooth texture and the oh, so fake rum flavor all combines to make a really satisfying treat. I was dubious, but these won me over on the second piece.

Related Candies

1. Nips: Caramel & Dulce de Leche
2. Coffee Nips
3. Brain Candy! (gummi brains)
4. Goodbye Reed’s

I realized when I started Candy Blog that there was no way I’d ever sample every single candy out there, let alone review them. What’s making it even harder now is that candies that I’ve already reviewed have changed and it hardly seems fair that the reviews here still stand against the present day products.

So, every once in a while I’ll revisit major products that have changed since my original review at least enough to warrant a new taste.

Hershey’s introduced the Take 5 in 2004 and it quickly became one of my favorite new candies. It combined all the great textures of crunchy pretzels and chewy caramel and creamy chocolate. But that was then, and this is now.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking (I photographed it last summer again) the Hershey’s Take 5 left the list of chocolate candy bars and joined the growing list of Hershey’s Real Mockolate. 

The package now says: made with chocolate & pretzels & caramel & peanuts & peanut butter. That “made with chocolate” part means that the coating may contain chocolate, but it has other additives such as vegetable oils that mean that it’s not pure chocolate. The actual chocolate as an ingredient comes far down on the list as the number 6 item, after vegetable oils and high fructose corn sweetener and before nonfat milk (you can imagine there’s not that much milk in there).

The bars actually still look quite fetching. Little rather rectangular lumps with a pleasant sweet & peanutty scent.

Mine were exceptionally fresh, the pretzel was good and crunchy, a nice salty complement to the sweet coating. The coating didn’t have much flavor but did add a creamy texture.

This one was passably good, but I’ve had others in the past few months (I picked them out of a mix of snack size in a bowl at the office a couple of times) and I didn’t realize why they were kind of empty tasting for what I remembered. I just thought they were stale ... turns out that they’re just not designed to be good any longer.

Hershey’s still has an opportunity to reverse this and make it real chocolate again.

Product: Hershey’s Take 5
Previous Review: 7/13/2005
Change: milk chocolate coating is replaced with a fake chocolate coating (which contains chocolate but also other vegetable oils).
Result: For now they’re off my list but still get a passing rating of 5 out of 10.

Sunkist Fruit Gems are made by Jelly Belly these days. An alert reader let me know that the little “single serve” trays are back on store shelves, but instead of holding six fruit jellies, they now only have four.

Worst part of this news? The grapefruit one was missing. (What is it about grapefruit disappearing lately? Is it because of the news that grapefruit juice interacts with some prescription drugs?) This is not to say that the Sunkist Fruit Gems don’t come in grapefruit any longer, just not in this particular package.

The flavors included now are: Orange, Lemon, Lime and Raspberry. The old package was 2.4 ounces, the new one is only 1.35 ounces.

Seeing how Sunkist is known as a citrus company, the fact that they made an assortment the neglects one of the citrus fruits and includes a berry is beyond me. The package is also similar to the old one and actually includes images of grapefruit (though the text clearly says which flavors are in the package).

The change in manufacturing location and ownership, as far as I’ve been able to tell, has made no difference at all for the actual candy. It’s still a nice, soft and flavorful fruit jelly without too much of a granulated sugar coating.

The only real difference here is that you get only 2/3 as much as you used to. I was hoping when Jelly Belly took over that they’d sell the jellies in individual flavors like they do with their famous jelly beans. No such luck yet. (For now whenever I see the Jelly Belly booth at a trade show I pick a half a dozen grapefruit jellies out of their sample bin and move along.)

Product: Sunkist Fruit Gems
Previous Review: November 15, 2006
Change: New owners (Jelly Belly) and smaller package
Result: I didn’t care much for raspberry or lime, so with such a small package and only two pieces I do like it’s not worth it. 4 out of 10

Mars used to make a bar that was called, appropriately enough, the Mars Bar. That bar was discontinued and reintroduced under the much more famous Snickers umbrella of products as the Snickers Almond.

Then something happened, Mars mucked around with it and created the “More Satisfying Snickers Almond” which was really just the Snickers Almond with peanuts thrown in to make up for a lack of, well, almonds. It wasn’t a bad bar, but it wasn’t really distinctive.

Well, the old new Snickers Almond is back. It’s a white lightly sweet & salty nougat with a caramel stripe and whole almonds covered in milk chocolate.

I like the bar (though I prefer the dark chocolate version) and I’m glad they brought it back.

Product: Mars Snickers Almond
Previous Reviews: 12/28/2005 & 8/14/2006
Change: reverting to old recipe (eliminating peanut ingredients from previous version)
Result: A great bar with a long history and I’m glad that it’s back to a more classic formulation so it bumps up a notch. 6 out of 10

Related Candies

1. Grapefruit Mentos (Japan)
2. Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road Bar
3. Head to Head: Twisted vs Take 5
4. Snickers Almond Dark
5. Take 5 Peanut Butter

Hershey’s makes several varieties of their Miniatures line. I picked up Hershey’s Special Dark Miniatures as I’d never seen them before and they seemed to promise dark chocolate versions of the old favorites Krackel and Mr. Goodbar (though not by name).

The bag was a bit larger than the other Hershey’s Miniatures that I bought at the same time and has only three varieties instead of four.

But the most notable part is the appearance of the little seal that Hershey’s puts on some of their dark chocolate confections, it says that this is a “natural source of flavinol antioxidants.” At only about 45% cacao content, yes, I guess it qualifies as a source, though not a terribly dense one. Hershey’s has some wonderfully convincing documentation about this on their website, though they’re probably purposefully vague about how much of these beneficial compounds are in any given serving.

The assortment here is rather balanced between the three varieties: 13 Special Dark, 11 Special Dark with Crisp Rice and 12 Special Dark with Peanuts.

I just reviewed the Special Dark on Friday, but for those who don’t feel like clicking over, here are the relevant parts of that again:

It smells sweet, a little woodsy.

The texture is rather chalky and doesn’t melt into a creamy puddle in my mouth. Instead it just tastes sweet and more like hot cocoa made with water than real rich chocolate ... there’s a thin-ness to it all, probably because Hershey’s now uses milk fat.

There’s a dry finish with a slight metallic bite to it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

The Special Dark with Peanuts comes in a mustard yellow wrapper, which I figured is to remind us of the Mr. Goodbar. Why they don’t just call it Mr. Goodbar Dark or Mr. Darkbar or something, I have no clue.

Though the ingredients on the wrapper are not broken out for each of the individually wrapped varieties, the list is clear, these are all real chocolate. There are no additional oils present except for those native to the chocolate or dairy ones (permissable in present definitions).

The little bars are cute and look really just like you’d expect a dark Mr. Goodbar - dark sheen and little nuts poking through.

It smells like dark roasted peanuts and cocoa.

The bite has a good snap and an immediate mix of bitter notes from both the peanuts (which look like they’re roasted very dark) and the chocolate. The texture isn’t super creamy, but is consistent with an okay melt.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I brought a lot of my own baggage to the Special Dark with Crisp Rice as I was hoping Hershey’s could be redeemed. Perhaps with the one hand they’d taken away a beloved favorite but with the other they’d snuck a glorious replacement into this mix.

It looks much like the Peanut version, but smells much sweeter with only the lightest whiff of malt.

The crunch isn’t as pronounced as the old Milk Chocolate or present Mockolate version, but has a nice texture. The malty flavor of the rice is completely lost in the thin cocoa flavor and sweetness. The texture doesn’t seem as creamy or melt as easily for some reason, but I can’t call it waxy.

It’s less bitter than the others though, so provides a nice counterpoint.

Is the Krackel and Hershey’s redeemed? No. But it’s a passable effort.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I didn’t even try asking Hershey’s what the ingredients for the individual pieces are, because I’m not entitled to know should I decide to pick only one of the variety to eat.

If I needed to buy a chocolate miniature assortment from Hershey’s again, I’d have to pick this one up instead of the old favorites. But even with the higher ratings than that one, I don’t see myself picking this up again.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Special Dark with Almonds
2. M&Ms Premiums: Dark Chocolate
3. Hershey’s Nuggets Double Chocolate
4. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
5. Kissables Dark

Hershey’s Miniatures were introduced in 1929. At that time the assortment was pretty much the same: Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, Krackel and Mr. Goodbar. (Though Hershey’s made a bar called Semi Sweet, the present iteration, a dark version didn’t find its way into the mix until the Special Dark came along.)

Hershey’s bills the mix as A little something for everyone (r).

I remember as a kid getting these in both my trick-or-treat haul and my Christmas stocking. They’re a great mix of candy because even though everyone has their favorites (and my rankings for them have changed over the years), even if you don’t like all of them it’s pretty easy to find someone to trade with.

Each piece is a nice size, two bites for those who prefer to savor or one big bite for those looking for a quick fix.

I wasn’t sure when I picked up the bag if they have a consistent mix, so I documented mine. It actually feels like a good proportion: 11 Hershey’s Milk Chocolate and 6 each of the Krackel, Mr. Goodbar and Special Dark.

This particular bag was 9.2 ounces, they’re available in a wide variety of sizes though and often in bulk bins at large grocery stores.

It’s hard to approach a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar without some sort of personal history. Those of us who have grown up on them know the flavor pretty well, though I don’t think most of us think much about it. Those who taste Hershey’s for the first time as adults though have expressed strong dislike for the taste and/or texture. All I can say is that it’s distinctive and they wouldn’t keep making it if someone didn’t like it well enough to keep buying it.

It has a sweet smell, a bit milky and dare I say, cheesy (feta) and milky. There are also notes of black pepper and caramel.

One of the nice things about the Miniatures is that the bar is thicker, so a bite (half the bar), is a nice mouthful that give more opportunity to revel in the flavors and textures. The milk chocolate is rather fudgy, not quite firm even a room temperature. It dents instead of chipping or flaking and is more likely to bend than snap. It’s a little grainy like a fudge, but the particle size is small. The flavors are strong, it’s sweet without burning the throat and has some mellow cocoa notes mixed with that inimitable tangy yogurt flavor of Hershey’s along with some toffee and maybe a touch of hazelnut.

I hate to sound like an old fart, but I think it was better before. I think something happened that it became grainier.

It sounds like I hate the stuff, but I don’t. I feel the same way about it as I do for things like Fritos, American cheese, grape soda and Fudgesicles. They’re really not that good, but I love them anyway.

All I can do is hope they don’t make it worse and give them a 6 out of 10.

The Special Dark bar was introduced in 1971. I always liked the packaging, but not the bar itself. It looked rich and sophisticated, which appealed to the part of me that yearned for status that could be bought for 20 cents at the corner shop. But to actually eat one as a child was akin to eating raw fish, I just didn’t have it in me. Yet.

Similar to the milk bar, this one also has a slightly soft snap.

It smells sweet, a little woodsy.

The texture is rather chalky and doesn’t melt into a creamy puddle in my mouth. Instead it just tastes sweet and more like hot cocoa made with water than real rich chocolate ... there’s a thin-ness to it all, probably because Hershey’s now uses milk fat.

There’s a dry finish with a slight metallic bite to it.

So while I’ve come to love and prefer dark chocolate, this is like eating cheap chocolate chips to me. A diversion while I wait for the better choice ... like those freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or a wonderful single origin Ocumare bar.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Mr. Goodbar was introduced in 1925. Later, during the depression, the bar was sold as “a tasty lunch” back when meal replacement bars were simply candy bars. (And it’s still not a bad idea if you get a really nutty bar.)

Even though the bars are smaller these days and don’t cost a nickel, it’s tempting to think that this bar is unchanged since Milton Hershey started producing it.

Sadly it’s not a war or a depression that’s change Mr. Goodbar. I can’t say what The Hershey Company is thinking these days but they’ve changed it. Mr. Goodbar is no longer a chocolate bar.

Instead he’s a silly oiled up shadow of what he used to be. The description of the bar was more recently peanuts in milk chocolate but is now just made with chocolate and peanuts.

The bar looks the same as ever. A milky, chocolatey sheen with little peanuts peeking through. It smells like deep roasted peanuts and sugar. (More like peanut brittle than a chocolate product.)

The flavor is overwhelmingly peanut. The peanuts are roasted dark too, so there’s a slight burnt taste to it that I think is meant to mask the nonexistent chocolate.

Yes, this mockolate is shallow and unimpressive. The texture isn’t all that different from the Milk Chocolate bar, but it has a different melt. It’s cool on the tongue. It’s actually salty (looking over the ingredients in the old recipe and the new, salt now appears).

For a mockolate bar, it’s quite passable. For a time tested icon it’s a travesty. I don’t care how depressed I am or the country might be, this is not a tasty lunch.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

Krackel, I’m told, is the last candy bar that Milton Hershey developed that still exists today.

It went through a few changes over the years, when introduced in 1938 it had nuts and crisped rice but by the late 40s it was a simple crisped rice and milk chocolate bar. (The packaging was also similar to the Mr. Goodbar, sporting a yellow stripe and brown instead of its present red.)

Today the bar is all but gone. The full size has been discontinued (2006), only the miniature remains. To add insult to injury, the bar isn’t crisped rice in milk chocolate, no, now it’s made with chocolate and crisped rice.

One of the things the Krackel bar has had going for it over the years, especially in the miniature size is the crisped rice. They’re big crisped rice pieces. Nestle Crunch has moved to some sort of BB-sized rice product that just doesn’t deliver the depth of crunch or the malty & salty taste.

The crisp is definitely there, the malty flavor peeks through. But the

chocolate

mockolate, oh this isn’t even worthy of being wrapped up and called R.M. Palmer.

I’ve given away four of these little bars and asked people what they think to people who profess that the Krackel is their favorite in the miniatures assortment. I didn’t preface it with anything, yet they all recognized that this was terrible. Empty, vapid, lacking all chocolate flavor, no creamy component and no puddle of chocolate ooze melting so that all that’s left is the rice crisps.

I was curious how mock this mockolate was but I am simply unable to get the information out of Hershey’s. (Read more about that experience here.) It’s just disgusting that Hershey’s, the Great American Chocolate Bar company, is making this ... they should have just let this bar die a natural death than let it be zombified into this mess.

Rating: 1 out of 10

There is nothing to do but simply stop buying this deplorable product. 12 out of the 29 bars (41%) here are not even chocolate and yet I’m paying chocolate prices!

If you like the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, I’d suggest getting just the snack sized bars, they’re a little bigger, but at least you don’t end up with any Krackels or Mr. Goodbars and you get more value for your money. (Unless you were looking for some individually wrapped & solidified cooking oils.)

Related Candies

1. Kissables (Reformulated)
2. American Value Chocolate Bars
3. The Shame of Some “Healthy” Candy
4. Whoppers Twosomes

Last year Hershey’s introduced some new Whoppers, twists on the classic chocolate covered malted milk ball (well, in the case of Whoppers, they’re mockolate). For some reason my area in Southern California is a vast maltless wasteland, so I had to pick up these Reese’s Peanut Butter version of Whoppers in Dublin, CA as I returned from the Bay Area last weekend.

I love the use of the little milk cartons for Whoppers (and Milk Duds, though sadly those have turned mockolate as well), it’s a great way to package a product to stand up, be dispensed and then closed.

The new Whoppers Reese’s Peanut Butter Flavored Candy are basically a peanut butter confectionery coating made of defatted peanuts & partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. (Think of the inside of Reese’s Pieces.)

The inside of the Whoppers is just as I’d hoped, a light honeycomb crisp with a malty flavor.

Whoppers are a bit smaller than the usual malted milk balls found in bulk bins, which are usually about the diameter of a quarter. These little Whoppers (hard to call them that when I’ve just said that they’re small, now isn’t it) are about the size of a hazelnut.

The outside is a little waxy, but definitely peanutty. It’s not terribly sweet and does eventually do something akin to melting. But the best part is the crumbly, sweet and malty center.

It’s a nice addition to the line, but I think I’ll stick with the Trader Joe’s version (see this post from June 4 Bellies) which is not only bigger but has real milk chocolate on top of that. But if I were to stumble across these as an option at the movies, I’d certainly go for it, the combo with popcorn would be pretty fabulous.

Related Candies

1. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
2. Whoppers Sno-Balls
3. Brach’s Fiesta Eggs
4. Naked Chocolate Maltballs
5. Bulk Balls
6. Cocoa Pete’s Maltimus Maximus

I mention summer candy every now and then and this past weekend with sweltering June heat I figured it was time to start concentrating more on it.

Annabelle Candy makes a few good summer candy bars, ones that are exceptionally tolerant of the heat. The Abba Zaba is probably one of the best known, perhaps because of the name and whackable bar.

The Look! bar isn’t summer friendly, but the Big Hunk is. For a long time I though that the Look! bar as just a chocolate covered Big Hunk.

The Look! is a narrow and flat bar of rich chocolate covered nougat with peanuts and if that sounds like a Snickers without the caramel, it’s a bit more simple than that. Basically, as the package announces, it’s Chewy Good!.

It’s about 6 inches long but only a quarter of an inch high.

I’ve never had one of these. Though the appealing wrapper tells me to Look! and I do, I never buy.

And what a fool I’ve been! It’s everything I love about Bit-o-Honey plus real chocolate and even a hint of molasses.

The golden nougat center isn’t easy to bite, so I’ve found peeling back the wrapper and nibbling off a little bite is best (not as big a picture, please, spare yourself that drama of “will it pull out my teeth!”).

The dark, creamy and smokey chocolate melts quickly into a buttery chocolate mess just as the peanut molasses chew starts to warm and soften. As the chocolate taste drifts away the lightly salty, woodsy and nutty chew comes forward. It’s smooth and pliable, reminding me a bit of Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews (except for, you know, that real chocolate part).

The only thing I wish was that it was easier to eat. I need to find the snack size version.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Big Hunk is exactly that. It’s 2 full ounces of chewy nougat studded with peanuts. This bar is about 7 inches long and about a third of an inch thick.

Unlike the Look! bar, Big Hunk contains no molasses.

Like the Look!, the Big Hunk were first made by another San Francisco-based-confectioner called Golden Nugget Candy Company. Annabelle Candy took them over in 1972 and helped to expand these regional bars to larger national prominence via placement at drug stores and discount retailers. I’ve found, though, that they’re easiest to find on the West Coast.

I like to whack the bar to break it into pieces, though this isn’t always easy.

It’s studded with peanut & peanut pieces, the nougat itself is a bit lighter in color than the Look!, a bit on the yellow side, I’m guessing from the peanuts. It’s easy to bend, or if you bend it very quickly it also breaks. The wrapper also suggests microwaving for 5 to 10 seconds to make it super soft, but I don’t believe that candy should ever require preparation ... that’s veering into recipe territory. However, leaving on the dashboard of the car in the summertime can have the same result. It can actually become rather stringy this way, depending on how long you leave it in there and how hot it is.

It softens up quickly in the mouth, even at room temperature. It’s smooth and has a light honey flavor but mostly it tastes like dark roasted peanuts. It has far more flavor than the Abba Zaba and is a winner in my book. Besides chewing, you can suck on it to disslove it. It reminds me of Cap’n Crunch cereal milk - sweet, a little hint of malt perhaps and of course a creamy background.

I’m not as fond of it as the Look!, but it’s still very appealing and as mentioned earlier, this is an ideal summer treat. No melting but still a satisfying creamy experience along with the little boost of protein from the peanuts (3 grams). It’s also promoted as a low fat bar, and the fat that’s in there comes from the peanuts ... but that also means that it’s full of carbs ... which, you know, makes it pretty darn appealing in my book.

Rating: 6 out of 10.

Related Candies

1. Tootsie Rolls & Fruit Rolls
2. Mary Jane Peanut Butter Kisses
3. Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews
4. Annabelle’s U-No
5. Rocky Road