A Big Bowl of Polish Candy

http://i.imgur.com/G9uHH5q.jpg

There's a Polish butcher down the block from where we moved in. I went in one day, a gentrifying interloper with a budget, to find cheap chicken thighs, twelve different kinds of kefir and a wall of candy jars. Each of the candies was completely unfamiliar to me.

I am one of those guys who has a sweet tooth and has developed it into a personality trait: the guy who gets gummys and nonpareils at the movie theater, who has a line item for sweets to match my partner's wine budget.

I asked the woman behind the counter to please put together a mix of $20 worth of the candy and to please attempt to pick two of everything for me to try. It ended up being $25. Now I have A Big Bowl of Polish Candy. That's probably not right. Much of it is not Polish, it hails from Moldova or Spain or other places whose name doesn't appear on the label. But for the sake of this exercise, I'm going to consider it A Big Bowl of Polish Candy.

Let's try some.

http://i.imgur.com/3orPOcA.jpg
So far, so good!
This ended up being a reasonably decent dark chocolate covering over a whole dried apricot with an almond in the center. It tastes even better than it sounds. The apricot was moist in a lightish honey coating and the chocolate was crumbly but melt-in-your-mouth.
8/10, would snack again.

http://i.imgur.com/vhpVdAC.jpg
A total and tasty surprise!
Asking for Crabs at the candy store seems a bad idea. The first impression made it seem even worse: the candy comes out the wrapper as a dull pink lozenge the size of the first joint of your thumb. When you bite into it, the pink coating is revealed to be paper thin and underneath is something that tastes like a chick-o-stick mixed with chocolate. Nutty, chocolatey, crunchy, sweet and undeniably good.
8/10, am going to end up going back to this place and getting a bag of Crabs.

http://i.imgur.com/DJMw1D1.jpg
Do Re Mi Bomboane are a thin inch long bar consisting of a layer of fruit jelly over crushed (hazel?) nuts and coated in chocolate. Less delicious than that sounds; the jelly was mostly flavorless and the chocolate was low quality and maybe a bit stale.
https://madein.md/bomboane/do-re-mi-bucuria
6/10, not bad exactly but neither memorable nor particularly worth trying again.

http://i.imgur.com/GznZixZ.jpg
Crazy bee is a gummy lump with a gelatinous interior. They apparently come in different flavors but this one had a sharp grapefruit citrus gummy flavor and a sweet nectar center. The gummy was mellow but the center was a tad cloying; even so I wouldn't mind trying the full flavor collection.
https://roshen.cn/en/product/crazy-bee-fruity/
7/10, could see giving this one another go.

http://i.imgur.com/R0WVRrC.jpg
Milky Splash fooled me. I assumed it was a garden variety caramel but nestled in the center is a lump of somewhat gooey condensed milk stuff that promptly coated my throat. The taste was like rimming a stick of butter. I gagged and spat it out on the street.
1/10, hard pass.

This thread is basically me every time I visit an east London corner shop

yeah I pretty much did this when I went into a Georgian store a couple of weeks ago

Crabs are pretty good.

Anything made by Roshen will be Ukrainian (former President Petro Poroshenko’s company).

Look for Belochka chocolates in a little green packet with a squirrel on it if you go back.

I am so, so jealous of you. I had a girlfriend in high school whose parents were both Polish, and they'd bring back these chocolate covered plums from Poland when they'd visit, or find them at a specialty shop in LA. just impossibly delicious. thirty-odd years later I got to go to Poland and the day before flying from there to england I had enough time in Krakow to find a supermarket -- turns out these plums are an old-folks staple sweet at Christmas, and it was early December, so I hit the jackpot. sooooo good.

Would eat a candy called forksclovetofu

Great thread. That apricot thing sounds fucking amazing.

For Brooklyn-adjacent people interested in visiting and getting your own haul, here's the address
http://www.kensingtonbrooklynblog.com/2007/11/dans-select-meats.html

http://i.imgur.com/xomu0zC.jpg
This is very much like the first one that I posted, except that instead of an almond inside it, the apricot has chopped candied cherries on top. I prefer the flavor of this one and the texture of the first one but I will happily take either of these. JCLC, these are clearly the same species as your chocolate covered prunes... which I think I have several of in this pile waiting for me.
8/10, total keeper

Great thread.

Would love to see photos of the unwrapped candies next to the wrapper.

http://i.imgur.com/oYDo8SI.jpg
A thin finger of chocolate-coated fudge with ground hazelnuts mixed into the filling. As with many of these so far, the flavors are strong, the mouthfeel is unctuous and a little goes a long way. Five minutes later, I'm still picking out infinitesimal grains of hazelnut from between my teeth. A bit of diabetic shock in green and nearly worth it.
7/10, needs a warning label to eat no more than half.

I will start adding pictures of the candies in the next batch.

http://i.imgur.com/hlZAkbz.jpg
A small chocolate covered square. When you bite in, it's tri-colored: black currant jelly up top, a thin layer of french marshmallow and a citrus jelly below that. Decent chocolate, distinct flavors for each of the jellies and a nice overall pairing but i'm not much for sheet gelatin treats without the gummy chewability.
6/10, nice if you like that kind of thing

I hope you've got plums in chocolate somewhere in that bowl

http://i.imgur.com/30PdyNq.jpg
This little foil-wrapped button is the size of a gumdrop. Imagine a big glass jar filled with these! I had assumed this would be something soft and gentle, maybe a simple chocolate bonbon or a caramel. Instead what I got was a thin chocolate coating over a super-dense pink sugar blob of... well, i'm not sure what. Hardened nougat? Dry fondant? Suffice it to say it's hard enough where you can't bite through it with your molars so you have to chip away at it while it dissolves in your mouth. I guess this is meant to keep children busy as a suck toy/choking hazard? Truly a weird and unique candy memory but I dunno about doing this more than twice.
9/10 for the packaging, 2/10 as candy, 7/10 as a one time experience

http://i.imgur.com/RiLiOrL.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/F8xqJZE.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/pB9xx6m.jpg

Lazy Cow is a thickly rectangular, chocolate-covered slab of styrofoamish wafers partitioned by thin sheets of supersweet vanilla milk frosting. Outrageously filling and a bit oversweet.
4/10, all-in-all just a bit too much.

This is my fav thread rn

Lazy cow looks good to me.

forks, I'm worried for you if you've eaten these all today.

lol i am definitely done until evening!

is there a nurse standing by

this stuff is distinctly non-FDA approved

The gelatin one sounds a lot like those kosher-for-passover chocolate jelly things (which I don't much care for) - know what I'm talking about?

Roshen is a big Ukrainian company fwiw, and I notice some of those have cyrillic letters meaning they are probably not polish.

I want the apricot one so bad.

These do seem like Ukranian candies rather than Polish ones. But they are next to each other after all.

The apricot one looks like Polish.

Also, I looked up Bucuria (the "DoReMi" candy) and apparently it's Moldovan.

Yeah, first one is Polish.

you're right about the jelly passover candies MA; it's in the same family.

Now I have A Big Bowl of Polish Candy. That's probably not right. Much of it is not Polish, it hails from Moldova or Spain or other places whose name doesn't appear on the label. But for the sake of this exercise, I'm going to consider it A Big Bowl of Polish Candy.

(incidentally the apricot treats have chopped walnut inside, not almond; my bad)

Great thread. I've seen a few of these in my trips to Atlanta -- the Buford Hwy Farmers Market has a good-sized Eastern European section, including its own deli/cheese/bakery cases. They have most of an aisle of Polish/Ukrainian/Moldovan/Russian/Czech/Belarusian/etc candy and biscuits.

xp - lol goddamnit, I don't read anymore!

Love this thread. This is reminding me of when I was fifteen and on a school exchange in Russia, and they took us on a tour of the Red October candy factory, which seemed to mostly make little bite-size oblong wafer-and-chocolate candies. It was like a kid's fantasy of being let loose in a chocolate factory; you could just reach out and grab chocolates off the conveyor belts. But they cleverly took us past the cheapest, sickliest chocolates first, so that by the time we got to the truly wonderful dark chocolate truffle wafers at the very end, we were all too full of bad milk chocolate to eat more than one or two.

Cant help but notice a lot of this supposed polish candy is clearly of ukranian manufacture

can't believe nobody has mentioned Juggalo candy itt yet

If you bought it in America it’s American candy

if you bought it in Uruguay is it Uruguay candy or Myuguay candy

Now I have A Big Bowl of Polish Candy. That's probably not right. Much of it is not Polish, it hails from Moldova or Spain or other places whose name doesn't appear on the label. But for the sake of this exercise, I'm going to consider it A Big Bowl of Polish Candy.

if the first picture is the entirety of the candy you bought am genuinely amazed that 25 dollars got you that amount. seems insanely expensive.

I am so, so jealous of you. I had a girlfriend in high school whose parents were both Polish, and they'd bring back these chocolate covered plums from Poland when they'd visit, or find them at a specialty shop in LA. just impossibly delicious. thirty-odd years later I got to go to Poland and the day before flying from there to england I had enough time in Krakow to find a supermarket -- turns out these plums are an old-folks staple sweet at Christmas, and it was early December, so I hit the jackpot. sooooo good.

Yes, those are classic Polish grandmother treats:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/j_JzS84k9SB3LXKA-7BEcVyY4zc2ACvYSJ6bq0z5vvM_MNBCCsxAPEEU-vpEyWag7ULpVnd3vtEdzkVrdbZ5TAyb4f18IfGBjQlCu0O4roQnUU0OTnhkTVYwdCpfI4ylhMmE_bX5weZGPSwSauEerVWqHz7ew15Jjfw-FyT_0SpEnDBz8i5sMpIXkLMZXnZpp7WoLXknu3XrE3cU1SY3rU7r82f3zg

damn, my polish grandmother would just give us unwrapped free cookies from the boat casino, claiming she'd baked them.

excellent thread, forks. looking forward to the next surprises. I can't criticize what my kids watch on youtube anymore -- I get it.

seems insanely expensive.

the polish aisle in my local supermarket is a favourite because it's significantly cheaper than english chocolate (and often nicer). polish particularly fond on wafers and coconut things based on the stock there.

tons of polski skleps locally too, but i'm never sure of the vegetarian status of things so...

(UK obviously closer to poland than the US)

I am somewhat addicted to Kucharek Universal Vegetable Seasoning but have never tried Polish sweeties, there are certainly plenty of opportunities to try them here!

these are all WAY sweeter than I'm used to!

the man alive special:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0007/9744/2107/products/npblossomgel_400x.png?v=1620405350

anyways you're right in noting that i don't like peanuts or almonds in my candy as a general rule

If there's one thing your average Eastern European chocolate lacks, it certainly isn't sugar.

I grew up in Scotland, where the concept of something being too sweet doesn't exist. I mean this stuff should probably be illegal on dental health grounds at least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_(confectionery)

btw pom:

Tablet is almost identical to Québécois sucre à la crème.

I think there's a widesoread belief over here that American chocolate is weird and terrible.

― Wouldn't disgrace a Michael Jackson (Tom D.), Wednesday, July 28, 2021 4:52 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well…

― pomenitul, Wednesday, July 28, 2021 4:53 PM (four minutes ago)

definitely true at the level of a Hershey's bar, but you can, of course, get nice US-made chocolate

I think Hershey's is US chocolate to people outside the US.

I've never tasted it.

you can, of course, get nice US-made chocolate

Oh yeah, you can nice US-made anything (or very nearly). I was thinking in terms of the typical, ubiquitous stuff.

As for sucre à la crème, yeah, it's blindingly intense and I'm all for it – just not more than maybe twice a year? I'll definitely try Tablet when I get the chance.

Anyway my Eastern European candy/chocolate challop which I'm allowed to state point blank is that 95% of them suck and are only worthwhile as exotic artifacts. The desserts are where it's at.

absolutely, just want visitors to know it's okay to eat the fancy chocolate lol

isn't Hershey's not technically chocolate or something?

As for sucre à la crème, yeah, it's blindingly intense and I'm all for it – just not more than maybe twice a year? I'll definitely try Tablet when I get the chance.

You'd have to go to Scotland to try it, no-one else is insane enough to make it and feed it to their children.

Proper link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_(confectionery)

I'll be on the lookout for it once I get there – it's a question of when not if.

I've never had Tablet or sucre à la crème but the image in that wiki article looks a lot like burfi, which is the only Indian sweet I really like

tablet sounds like the babyface candy stuff upthread

ILX struggles with Wikipedia links that feature closing parentheses, so you have to copy/paste it.

2xp

Fuck me, that link doesn't work either. Anyway, you can feel your teeth rot as you eat it etc. Indian sweets are even worse though!

Evan ate a bunch of these leftovers and lived to tell the tale

Indeed! Not so bad. Lots of various waxy textures iirc

I got a bag of wrapped candies from the Swedish company Sockerbit. They’re good! Much better allocation of sugar than the last pile so I can eat a bit more in one sitting without feeling poisoned.

http://i.imgur.com/fw6UCGh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZrjiAxM.jpg
Gingerbread Caramel - Outrageously strong gingerbread flavor, tastes just like one of the gummyish corners of a tray of fresh gingerbread. Absolutely outrageous, totally delicious. Would eat a pile of these without noticing, probably lucky that I can’t immediately find these for sale on their own on the website. 10/10.

http://i.imgur.com/W5X373Y.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Ql6WNA0.jpg
Fransson’s Polkakola - Peppermint taffy with a slightly creamy flavor and consistency. Nothing exciting but the freshness and natural taste made it a treat. 8/10

http://i.imgur.com/1CVO5Sk.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UBxIWjd.jpg
Grahn’s BRAVO - Thinner-than-Starburst-sized individually wrapped bits of flavored toffee. The Gräddknäck flavor is vaguely ginger and coffee, the Lakrits is a pungent but not unpleasant licorice and Choklad is exactly what you would expect. The size and relative kick of flavor makes me think that a jacket pocket full of these would be great to have for blood sugar emergencies or to pacify kids… or just me. 7/10

http://i.imgur.com/KZBhpKC.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lbKKsf7.jpg
Kick Original - Billed as “My Soft Licorice Toffee” on the wrapper, it delivers exactly that. Creamy after chewed and without the tannic leather flavor I associate with lower quality black licorice. It’s not going to win any converts but if you like that flavor, this is a great option. 7/10

http://i.imgur.com/dLVeiBn.jpg
Kolafabriken Lemon Toffee - Harder than many of these other taffies but possessed of a subtle, enjoyable citrus flavor. There’s lots of different flavors, but this is all I had at the moment. 7/10

http://i.imgur.com/txevX5E.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/w7Xq2nx.jpg
Hem-Kola - Starburst-sized wrapped squares of toffee. Hasselnötter original is caramel, Chokolad is chocolate. Both are fine and would easily surpass most of the “original” big bowl but in this company it’s middling at best. 6/10


http://i.imgur.com/YBHcBgW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/w5Qc27W.jpg
Marianne - Thin white peppermint shell over a chocolate shell for the red ones and over caramel for the blue ones. The blue ones are fine but it’s the red ones I love. The temptation is to crunch these, which makes them into lightly chocolate flavored peppermint candies but trial and error has taught me to breath them as lozenges to suck on. The peppermint is mild and sweet and eventually gives way to a now mostly liquid core of chocolate that gets much more flavorable now that it’s body temperature. I just bought a quarter pound. Blue ones are 6/10, Red ones are 10/10

http://i.imgur.com/bvj1Wjv.jpg
Pim Pim Klubba - Mellow strawberry flavor lollipop. Super-dense candy, not a chewing lollipop but a legit sucker. Not bad, but not the way I prefer to consume candy. 6/10

does removing this from Poland kill the interest? Who woulda thought.

I've a swedish colleague that occasionally brings back marabou bars. The black saltlakrits are particularly great. I've read and enjoyed these updates.

no, this is gold. xp.
always wanted to try maleco pastellfiskar.

I find the soft, salty licorice things smell faintly of urine, like the sheep kidneys in Ulyesses

This thread is great... thank you for sharing these candies.

i am avoiding the salt licorice stuff tbh; i've tried them once and it was like eating shoe leather in curdled piss. not something I'm looking to repeat.

lol

but do u like regular black licorice?

standard licorice, when either mild or particularly raw anise, is fine by me. That licorice thing upthread was pretty tasty!

as long as i have your attention: where can i get grab bags of foreign candies online? Or better yet, buy them for me and then send them to my home. I will eat them for your amusement.

https://www.candywarehouse.com/international-candy

??

not sure if they sell samplers tho

Not so much. Once Omicron blows over, maybe I can start going to places in the city.

Polkakola is my favorite name, but I would love to try the Mariannes.

my mom got me 6 months of universal yums for xmas and the first month is polish. i haven't opened it yet, though.

http://i.imgur.com/MSaBkyc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/pzTuRKK.jpg

This elegant looking, ballet branded block of candy is sold as kinda premium chocolate and it mostly lives up to the price hike: silky chocolate, ground hazlenuts, no chemical aftertaste or overly harsh sugar flavor. Sort of a milder, richer Ferraro Rocher. 7/10 would eat again but could probably get better for the money.

http://i.imgur.com/0dAwh1C.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/fs8BcK9.jpg
Another sort of hazelnut whipped, airy chocolate center, somewhat sweeter but without chemical aftertaste. 7/10, good and better than a lot of prior offerings in this thread but a little undistinguished.

http://i.imgur.com/aesbaPb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/qvjNHUn.jpg
Chocolate-enrobed lemon creams. As you might imagine from past reports, the lemon is outrageously sweet and somehow creamy. It avoids the dreaded evocative scent of floor wax, but really only barely. Its tastier than I'm giving it credit for but the INTENSITY of the goddamn thing is such that half of one might be a better snack. Eating a whole one (and they're the size of your first pinky knuckle) coats your throat in saccharine citrus. 6/10, a little goes a long way.

are you ready for the next one? I wasn't.

http://i.imgur.com/wtpyXW3.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/F6GFEYF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ocEAjxm.jpg

At $12 a pound, wrapper and all, the Boletto Premium was the most expensive item in the candy counter and, if not for this thread, I surely would've skipped it. But curiosity set in, so I got one. Imagine my surprise upon opening this treat to discover that the external advertising was all too accurate. This thing looks just like a mushroom and slips out of the cellophane with a pre-moistened glisten of lubrication. Alas, it turns out to be made out of the aforementioned and generally disgusting "bird's milk souffle" marshmallow, a dense and coagulated lump of oversweet hog fat. The "head" is covered in thick milk chocolate and the "stem" is inexplicably crawling with a generous smattering of poppy seeds and then split up the middle. This is presumably to allow for sharing but the effect is near-pornographic. 1/10, everything here is a bad idea and i feel bad for eating the little bit that I did.

Oh no.

Creamy mushroom souffle, hat covered with chocolate glaze, leg sprinkled with poppy seeds.

Unfolding the wrapper you will see just a 100% copy of this fungus)

Very original design.

A wonderful idea.

Incredibly delicate taste.

I don’t think it’s meant to be sweating like that.

it was not very inviting

IRL LOLs, thanking u

harbl, you need to post pix