Photographs by CHRISTOPHER PAYNE OCT. 24, 2018
For millions of Latin Americans, the Colombina factory in La Paila is the place where sweet moments are made. squeeze jam candy
For millions of Latin Americans, the Colombina factory in La Paila is the place where sweet moments are made.
Photographs by CHRISTOPHER PAYNE OCT. 23, 2018 By INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS
Like any good immigrant, I know on which bodega shelves to find the food portals to my childhood. I know where to turn, where to crouch, where to bow before the ready-made boxes to make Colombian buñuelos, pandebonos, pandeyucas and arepas. But the one food item I cannot find in San Francisco is the candy of my childhood.
I grew, as we say in Colombia, a punta de Bon Bon Bum. The strawberry lollipop was such a central part of my diet, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was made of equal parts Valle del Cauca sugar and red dye No.40. Bon Bon Bums (pronounced like the French bonbon and the English “boom”) are lollipops with a gum center made in tropical flavors commonly found in the country (maracuyá, watermelon, lulo, pineapple, mango). They are the star product of Colombina, the nation’s beloved candy company. Bon Bon Bums are exported to 90 countries, including all of South America, the Caribbean and even Papua New Guinea and China. In much of Latin America, the phrase has become shorthand to describe a body type (big butt and skinny legs), and all lollipops, no matter the brand, are known as bon bon bums. They are as central to growing up Hispano as receiving your first merengue lessons on New Year’s Eve from a drunk tío or tía who insists your life depends on your ability to sway your hips with swing. Shakira has been known to carry a few Bon Bon Bums at all times in her purse.
For nearly 50 years, Bon Bon Bums have been produced in the Colombina factory in La Paila, north of Cali. At the start, 20 workers were responsible for the production of four million lollipops per month. Today, in that same factory, 200 workers produce more than 40 times as many.
Bon Bon Bum is not Colombina’s only candy. The first candy was a flat sucker made out of cane sugar and natural juices. My father liked them, but his absolute favorite was the caramel drop infused with Colombian coffee. He sucked on them while driving and waiting in line, the two inescapable activities of living in Bogotá. For my older sister, Francis, the palm-sized plastic tray of chocolate-hazelnut and vanilla spreads was a necessity. She spent half an hour with the tiny spatula, meticulously eating and selectively mixing the halved creams. My grandmother, who lived in a small town near the Venezuelan border, bought large quantities of pâte de fruit wedges with the intention of reselling them to her neighbors, but I often caught her eating them on her own, squeezing them in her hands, making the colorful gelatin bulge, the tips of her fingers covered in a dusting of sugar. For my little cousins, the powdery marshmallows that looked like soft, pastel corkscrews were the most fun. They waved them in front of us like fishing poles until we caved and took a bite.
Colombina was born in the Cauca Valley, where the land is hot and humid. The air smells of sugar cane and pineapple, which grow abundantly in the region. The vision for Colombina came to the founder, Hernando Caicedo, in the 1920s as he tended his small sugar-cane mill. Caicedo’s mill, powered by the circumnavigations of yoked oxen, produced hardened blocks of unrefined cane sugar, which Colombians have long thought of as medicine, using the blocks to make aguapanela, a concoction of honey and lemon believed to cure everything from a hangover to a mother’s low breast-milk supply. It was at this mill that the idea of candy with a tropical flair took hold. In just a few years, Caicedo rounded up the funds, readied a warehouse and traveled with a flat lollipop machine from the United States to the town of La Paila.
Today Colombina is a multinational company, but it is also a family one, run by the founder’s grandson, César Caicedo. The factory in La Paila has become perhaps the largest hard-candy plant in all of South America. Two thousand three hundred people work there, and it is not uncommon to find families where three generations have worked on the factory floor. Colombina provides day care for its workers, offers student scholarships and even holds a national soccer tournament where, this year, 34,000 young players had the chance to be scouted by the professional clubs. When the company bids the old year goodbye, it does so in a nearby coliseum, with the help of a salsa brass band, a generous spread of nourishments and refreshments and much dancing and revelry.
A look inside the Colombina plant shows how this old-fashioned corporate philosophy extends to the factory floor. In part to keep more workers employed, many of the hard candies at Colombina are still mixed and prepared by hand. The large vats, where workers stir cane sugar until it boils and takes on a glowing amber color, date back to before Bon Bon Bums had been created, as do the iron caldrons where the fruit extracts and amber sugar combine into highly pigmented neon globs. Workers in white aprons and brick-red rubber gloves hand-turn the candy — called caramelo at this stage — with long rods in order to cool them. The neon goo will be used to make Bon Bon Bums and Fruticas, candy drops sometimes shaped like hearts and lemons.
Machines — a mix of old and new — take over once the caramelo has set. One of the new machines might churn out small armies of bright red gummy bears, injecting them with candied syrups and bathing them in hot chocolate that will dry into a soft shell in seconds. This is the process for the Grissly ChocoSplash, a favorite among the workers on the factory floor. But even the old machines keeps precise, hypnotic movements, spitting out strings of molded candy at regular intervals. The candy fresh from one set of machines will then travel down moving belts, awaiting hand inspection. In gloves and protective glasses cinched over their hooded jumpsuits, workers add the final touches, discarding flawed specimens or steering the candies into the best position on the belt, almost ready to be packaged.
It had been 10 years since I last had a Bon Bon Bum. When I turned 24, I deemed I was too old for them. Recently, the hankering returned, and I deemed I was old enough to have them again. I scanned the bodega shelves in San Francisco one more time before placing an order online. We all have our rituals for consuming candy, but I had forgotten what ceremonies I performed when consuming a Bon Bon Bum. Holding the stem in my hand, though, the rote motions emerged in spite of myself: I observed my hands unwind the cinched wrapper by twirling the lollipop head, I noted how I pulled the wrapper’s flared ends down so that it looked briefly like a cape before slipping it off the stem altogether. Soon my mouth became full of familiars — the sweet and tart making my tongue surge, the accidental clack of the hard candy against the back of my teeth. I remembered that I used to try to make the orb perfectly round, sucking selectively, taking the Bon Bon Bum out to check my progress. I continued the old task, until the very first champagne-pink edges of the gum broke through the surface. Then, the sensation jolted childhood memories from me I did not know I still possessed.
We whiled away the time by sucking Bon Bon Bums, my sister Francis and I. The ruby globe shrank and shrank until all that was left was the heart of gum. This was the metronome of our childhood. Once the Bon Bon Bum was gone, we ironed out the wrapper, and I held onto one end and Francis held onto the other. We would make a wish, then pull. Whoever got the longer wrapper got the wish. I wished for peace on earth, the survival of all whales, my first kiss. My first kiss came at night in the middle of the street. It was bookended by my taking a Bon Bon Bum out of my mouth and putting it back in. At slow hours, I held my Bon Bon Bum to the sun, watching the translucent red planet glow from within. There were air bubbles trapped inside, in the dazzling undersurface of the lollipop, which itself was striated like the radial veins of a banana leaf.
I remembered how on New Year’s Eve I lay on the floor of my grandmother’s house. Nona pushed against the balled-up masa in her kitchen, and I on the floor used the slow and steady force of my tongue to eat away at the candy. Come midnight, a bouquet of sparklers would flash gold in my hand, the sky would be jeweled with fireworks and Tío Víctor, nostalgic and happy, would come out to celebrate with us. He would stand with his rifle at the edge of the jungle and fire just once up at the sky toward the palm trees, just as my grandfather used to do. And then, in the startled silence after the shot, I would unwrap another Bon Bon Bum.
Christopher Payne is a photographer who specializes in architecture and American industry. He previously photographed one of America’s last pencil factories for the magazine.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras is a Colombian writer based in San Francisco. Her debut novel, “Fruit of the Drunken Tree,” was published this summer.
Candy is controversial. Scouring the globe in search of the sweet stuff reveals just how different our palates are — and how much we have in common.
By MARY HK CHOI OCT.23, 2018 Photo Illustration by Massimo Gammacurta
Whenever I land in a new country, before I’ve even left the arrivals hall, my mind turns to shopping. Not the boutiques or cosmetics counters, no duty-free sunglasses and designer perfumes for me. No, the pressing calculus as I make my way to baggage claim is driven by drugstores, kiosks, supermarkets and vending machines. In a new port of call, I like to know what sort of candy I’m dealing with.
As with breakfast foods, I believe candy is often tastier the less expensive it is. I like my confections approachable. Low-rent. Basic. Shot through with a skosh of hoi polloi-ishness. Wrappers with cartoon mascots are promising. So is branding that testifies to soccer hooliganism as a respectable pastime. I’d sooner crush a Quality Street (except the strawberry crème ones; barf) or a crumbly puck of Mexican De La Rosa than a morsel of marzipan molded by human hands to resemble a carrot on a dinky doily. If a wan man in a toque has ever loomed over the thing with tweezers, no matter how storied its provenance, I would enjoy its bootleg cousin more.
Park me in front of any country’s pick ’n’ mix, penny-candy bins, Aji Ichiban, the part of the five-and-dime where jelly hamburgers live, and I will go to town. And I’ve learned some tricks in my travels. In any Scandinavian country, you’ve got to watch out for salted licorice; there are at least a dozen different kinds, and all of them taste to me like old spoons. But don’t let that dissuade you from sampling the fruity stuff. Shake your selection in the bag as if you’re crumb-coating chicken, so that you get an even citric-acid distribution.
Russian bulk-candy bins are feasts for the eyes, with trillions of variations on the individually wrapped chocolate bonbon. The art direction on each tiny canvas is a marvel, featuring oil-painted landscapes, shiny-eyed squirrels, polar bears and swans — even the occasional camel. The thumb-size rectangular one, featuring a startled-looking infant in a babushka, is my favorite. (It’s called Alenka.) British Smarties beat American Smarties, because candy-coated chocolate buttons are superior to chalky pressed pills; of the former, the orange taste delicious. Any flavor of Ritter Sport is crucial whenever you can find one (milk-chocolate cornflake in particular). The green Haribo gummy frog is peach not apple (common misconception); clear gummy bears are the best bears. But the best Haribo by my standards is the sour cola Balla Stixx (sometimes dubbed Zig Zourr) with a mallowy interior that I’ve only reliably found in Italian gas stations. Still, Asia’s flavorings are unrivaled. Hi-Chews lay waste to any other fruit taffy experience. Milkita melon is a singular delight — creamy honeydew drops — while Kasugai gummies in mango, muscat grape, lychee and yuzu (in that order) are a necessary part of any convenience-store run in Tokyo.
When it comes to the United States, my opinions are more calcified. Red Vines over Twizzlers. Easy. The best M&M: peanut butter. Hands down. Milk chocolate over dark; white is not right, and the only correct way to eat a Kit Kat is to nibble off the enrobed edges and pry the wafer layers apart. Fight me. Candy is controversial. As with a beloved sports team, your affinities and fealties have been ingrained since your prelinguistic days. Such innate belief systems defy reasoning. Your mom loved herself a Goetze’s Cow Tales or maybe a milky White Rabbit, so you do, too. How else could you explain how Circus Peanuts are still a going concern? Or those gnarly monstrous mint-leaf gel slices, the dial-up internet of candy?
No one’s madeleine will be exactly the same. But no matter your brand, it will always deliver similar things: the rose-tinted pleasure of nostalgia, a brief respite from adulthood and, well, whatever else it is that sugar does for morale. Despite all our differences, candy speaks to a fundamentally shared humanity; we like a lot of the same stuff. Most of us have some version of Fun Dip. Or Pop Rocks. Fruit leather. Caramel. A Tunnock’s Tea Cake is a Mallomar is a Whippet is a Krembo — a cookie with marshmallow dipped in chocolate — except of course it’s never that simple. One’s kosher, one’s Canadian, one appeared in “When Harry Met Sally” and one’s in a kilt.
If you think my selections are particular to Western Europe, America and East Asia, you’re right. It’s the shortcoming of the international candy marketplace that even Jeff Bezos can’t deliver you the deep cuts. You’ll have to travel for the choicest morsels. And while candy may not be the chief reason I visit a country, it’s a solid tourist attraction. Bodegas, newsstands, dagashiyas and tuck shops rarely require selfie sticks. That in and of itself should inspire fondness and warmth.
As a Korean kid who grew up in a former British colony, I might not ever be able to go home. But I’ll kill a stack of Haw Flakes and chase them with Wine Gums, and the rush will remain the same.
Mary H.K. Choi is a writer whose work for Wired, GQ, New York and The Atlantic focuses on culture. She is the best-selling author of “Emergency Contact,” a young-adult novel about texting, and host of the podcast “Hey, Cool Job!”
I learned how to take candy tasting as seriously as wine tasting. What I discovered surprised me.
By SAMIN NOSRAT OCT. 23, 2018 Illustration by ORI TOOR
As she passed out paper bowls, Beth Kimmerle smiled broadly at the dozen or so employees of Long Grove Confectionery Company seated around the conference table. Each bowl contained a slightly misshapen caramel of unknown origin. “I can train anybody to taste,” she declared. “It’s just about focus.” Kimmerle peeled off her rubber gloves and gestured at the candy in the bowl. “Let’s start with this product. What do you notice about its appearance?”
“It’s glossy,” someone called out from the back of the room.
“O.K.,” Kimmerle said in a tone that made clear it wasn’t exactly O.K. She turned to a graphic designer. “You’ve got the Pantone matching system,” she said. “Is this a special kind of color?”
The designer’s eyes widened. “Caramel color?” she said, unsure.
It was, in fact, caramel-colored, but Kimmerle, a 48-year-old native Chicagoan who has written four books on candy and helps companies develop new recipes, was after something more specific. Someone else suggested “bronze,” which seemed like a great adjective to me, but this didn’t satisfy Kimmerle either. She pressed on: “We want to come up with a standard language for describing everything about this candy.” It felt as if the group were in the midst of a middle-school pop quiz and no one was prepared.
Kimmerle pulled her long hair away from her face to prevent the distraction of any scented products, lifted the bowl to her nose and demonstrated taking several “bunny sniffs” to avoid overwhelming the nasal cavity. “Your turn,” she told the group. “What do you smell?” Closing my eyes and sniffing, I picked up the distinct aromas of caramelized sugar and butterscotch, but kept quiet, curious to hear what the others were noticing.
“Sweet?” someone said timidly.
“Sweet is a taste, not an aroma,” Kimmerle replied briskly. “Find other words for what you’re smelling. And if you can’t place an aroma, let your memory guide you there.”
Other suggestions included buttery, burnt, caramel — language that Kimmerle approved. Now she was ready to move on to flavor. She told everyone to write down any words that came to mind, whether they were one of the five basic tastes or any of the trillions of aromas the nose can detect. “Remember,” she added, “taste is what our taste buds sense. Everything else is a texture or an aroma, a volatile, airborne scent.” The semantics of taste are a little finicky. The folks at Long Grove were tasting the candy, but now their task was to describe its flavor, which exists at the intersection of taste, aroma and even feeling (like the burning heat of a chile or the icy chill of menthol). Confusion radiated from their faces.
The tasters began taking tiny bites and closing their eyes, chewing intently and rolling the caramel around on their tongues. “Take your time with it. And if you feel like you’re getting satiated, or what we call burnout, feel free to spit,” Kimmerle offered gently, pointing at the plastic cups she’d set out for everyone. “It’s weird and a little creepy at first, but it can be helpful to reset. Just swish with water and try again.”
Someone let out an audible sound of delight. “Did someone say ‘Mmmmm’?” Kimmerle asked disapprovingly. “Remember, this isn’t about likes and dislikes. It’s about what is.” After a few more long, quiet minutes, she started calling on each person to list his or her adjectives, writing down the responses on a whiteboard: sweet, salty, creamy, buttery, vanilla, maple, burnt. “Powdered milk,” someone said.
“So is it like that lactic sour that somebody once described to me as ‘baby vomit’?” Kimmerle asked with a mischievous glimmer in her eyes. “Because that is actually incredibly appealing in certain foods.”
Everyone in the room laughed uncomfortably. Yet it did make a certain amount of sense. Sweetness often needs to be balanced with a little tang, and so “baby vomit” wouldn’t be an entirely unattractive quality in a caramel.
Kimmerle was coaching the group through its first attempt at Sensory Evaluation (or “sensory,” as it’s called in the industry), a form of analysis used to measure the human response to any particular food or drink. “Sensory is all about using your five senses to make an assessment about a food product,” Kimmerle explained to me. “While it’s considered a scientific discipline, it’s really about using our human perception to describe and evaluate something.”
I’d traveled to suburban Chicago to observe Kimmerle’s workshop because I wanted to know if learning to taste candy like a professional — which is to say, as attentively and objectively as possible — could teach me how to better describe what I cook and eat. Putting language to flavor isn’t easy, because we’re rarely taught that it matters. As children, we learn the names of all sorts of shapes, colors and sounds. But when it comes to the way things smell or taste, the only language we ever hear is qualitative — good and bad, yummy and yucky, delicious and disgusting. And in adulthood, we learn that taking the time to describe the things we eat and drink is the pretentious domain of foodies and wine snobs going on and on about flavor profiles and horse-sweat bouquets.
Once you start trying, you notice how difficult it is to assign language to taste and smell. The sense of taste is simultaneously public, because we come together to eat; and private, because we must put food inside our bodies in order to taste it. This paradox creates tension. Your experience of flavor is unique and unspoken; the mere act of describing it entails exposing something incredibly intimate. What if you share a bar of chocolate with a loved one and describe how it tastes, only to discover your companion disagrees? It’s a remarkably vulnerable feeling, knowing that your most private sensual experience could differ so considerably from those to whom you’re closest. Perhaps it’s why we shy away from talking about flavor at all.
Even though I’d come to Kimmerle to learn, I found myself battling snobbery of my own. I struggled to assign her much credibility. I learned to taste from chefs who trained in the finest restaurants in France and Italy. Kimmerle received her Sensory Expert certification after taking an online course from the Institute of Food Technologists. Could she really know more about how to taste than I did? In fact, there are entire industries devoted to taste, from the forecasters who predict what we’ll want to be eating three or four years from now to the food scientists and innovators who develop new flavors and products to the sensory scientists and experts like Kimmerle who are trained to conduct research to figure out what we, the candy-eating public, really want to eat.
Sensory evaluation is an evolution of the “flavor profile,” a standardized method developed by 20th-century food scientists to help manufacturers achieve consistency as they ramped up production in the postwar years. Myrna Fossum, a 77-year-old former home economist, is often credited as the mother of a simplified version that she marketed as “the Best Approach.” After years in the test kitchen at Nabisco and Mars, Fossum realized there was a basic suite of easy-to-use tools that she could train others to use. A result was the relatively straightforward method of evaluation I’d observed: less reliance on jargon, more on the senses.
“Flavor itself is a language,” Fossum told me over the phone from her home in Plymouth, Mass. “And like any language, it takes years to learn.” Throughout her time at Mars (the manufacturer of M&Ms, Twix and Skittles), Fossum traveled to production plants around the world giving sensory trainings like the one I sat in on. “Whether they were in Waco, Texas, or Hackettstown, New Jersey, they were speaking a common language,” Fossum recalled. “Mr. Mars could pick up the phone and call any plant and ask, ‘How is the chocolate?’ and get an answer in plain English. He’d tell me, ‘You know, dear, this is my mantra: The most important thing is taste.’ Even at age 84 he sat in every single training with a spoon, ready to taste. And if you think about it, it worked, because when you eat an M&M, it tastes the same wherever you go.”
It makes sense that, within an industrial setting, the primary value of sensory evaluation is consistency. But why should nonprofessional tasters care about slowing down to describe the experience of eating candy? “At the end of the first day of training, I say to people: ‘Go home tonight and taste your dinner. Come back and tell me about it tomorrow. Come tell me about your first cup of coffee,’ ” Fossum answered. “They come back and say, ‘I never knew it tasted like that.’ Until they do sensory, they don’t pay attention to what things really taste like. They just drink and eat. So they learn, and they learn to appreciate.”
While companies use sensory evaluation to engineer better candies and meet bottom lines, anyone can learn from careful, thoughtful tasting; putting language to the experience can lead you closer to knowing what you like and don’t like. It’s why, as snobby as it can seem, wine tasting is an incredibly useful tool: The more wine you taste attentively, the more words you learn to associate with the kinds of wine you like, so the more easily you can choose bottles that will please you regardless of price. In this age of $12 chocolate bars and artisanal, well, everything, there’s great value in knowing your own palate and letting that, rather than labels or prices or marketing, guide you in the store or through a menu or wine list. The point of candy is joy — pure, unadulterated joy. And that joy shouldn’t be compromised just because you feel as if the “right” chocolate is the one that comes wrapped in hand-painted paper that looks as if it was trimmed by apprentices in Matisse’s workshop.
In fact, matters of taste are highly personal, and often colored by past experience. Both genetics and childhood exposure shape our earliest culinary preferences. And for adults, nostalgia — a literal longing for home — can also affect the flavors toward which we orient ourselves. This is why there’s no one candy bar or bottle of wine that is universally beloved. And yet, because we’re human, we can’t help devoting ourselves to the pursuit. Sensory offers a reprieve from such futility; instead of encouraging the quest for a singular “best,” it allows you to define, in plain terms, what sits before you, and determine how it makes you feel.
I’m a cook and a writer. Practically all I do professionally, in either capacity, is describe the experience of preparing and eating food. Yet I’d left Kimmerle’s workshop befuddled. I tend to rely on metaphor — fireworks in my mouth! — and flowery, emotional language when describing how things taste. But sort of like my therapist does, Kimmerle, who was mentored by Fossum, had me set aside what I thought and narrow in on what I felt. The sensory practice became almost meditative, offering me an entirely new way to experience taste. I wanted to keep practicing.
The next day, Kimmerle suggested we try more varied sweets. We headed out on a tour of international markets near her home north of Chicago. At an Indian sweet shop, the shopkeeper told us we had to try aflatoon, a soft brown bar wrapped in greasy wax paper, because it’s “the most popular sweet in Mumbai.” At the Swedish-American museum, we were persuaded to buy Bilar, a popular car-shaped fruity marshmallow gummy. But what I really wanted to taste with Kimmerle was the Mexican candy Pelon Pelo Rico. All throughout the ’90s, I curiously watched my Latino classmates in California suck the pastelike candy from a plastic tube. No one ever offered me any, and I’d never worked up the courage to ask for a taste. Twenty-five years later, I still had no idea what it might possibly taste like.
By the time we sat down at Kimmerle’s dining table, with clean knives and plates, paper and pen, water and spit cups, we had collected dozens of candies — everything from sesame brittle to Turkish delight to my Pelon Pelo Rico. We sorted through everything and decided on a tasting order. Just as in a wine or cheese tasting, we wanted to save the strongest-flavored candies until the end to keep our palates from being overwhelmed. We agreed that the aflatoon, probably on the milder side, was a good place to begin.
First, we noted the appearance: a speckled slice the color of brown sugar. Next, we sniffed. “Now, remember, we can’t smell ‘sweet,’ ” Kimmerle said, “but do you smell any fruit notes? Like brown fruit? Or baked notes?” All I could sense was browned butter or ghee, some caramelized notes and cardamom.
“Think raisins, or dates, or plums,” she hinted after another sniff.
I didn’t, for the life of me, smell any fruit, and I didn’t know why she kept bringing it up. Was she posturing? I started to feel the way I do at wine tastings, where I often wonder if everyone else is just making up descriptors to sound as if they know what they’re talking about. Even once we had tasted the aflatoon, I felt at a loss for words.
“Well,” she gently began, “the first thing that you sense when you put it in your mouth is that it’s overwhelmingly sweet. Then, there’s a dough. It could be wheat flour, or almonds. And I still really get the brown fruit. It could be date, date syrup. I’m not sure.”
Kimmerle’s 11-year-old son, Cliff, arrived home from summer camp, and Kimmerle invited him to join. We tasted the aflatoon again. “It tastes sweet,” he said. “Definitely sweet. And there’s a spice.” Apparently Kimmerle could even train children to taste. I took another bite, this time noticing a gritty texture and the slightest tang as the aflatoon melted away. “It does kind of taste like raisins,” Cliff added. I started to feel impatient. We’d already spent at least 15 minutes on just this one candy! I feared at this rate I’d be tasting candy for the next eight hours. Eventually we settled on a taste description in the order of “sweet,” “caramelized,” “cardamom,” “dough” and “light tang,” which was as close as I could come to admitting to tasting any raisins.
We moved on to Limon 7, a packet of white powdered candy we found at the Mexican grocery that didn’t look or smell like much. “Well, it’s not really a powder,” Kimmerle corrected. “It’s more granulated.” As Cliff ran off, she and I closed our eyes and tasted it, looking up in unison with surprise. It tasted like pure citric acid and salt. “Citric-y. Not citrusy, but citric-y,” I ventured.
“It’s not sweet at all!” she exclaimed. I looked at the ingredients, surprised to find sugar and a host of artificial colors listed. Neither of us could have identified the presence of either until I rolled another pinch of the powder around on my tongue, searching for a grain of sugar. “I found a little sugar!” I said excitedly. Even though I wouldn’t have thought to call Limon 7 candy, I found it inexplicably enjoyable. Each taste was so unbelievably salty that it made me wince with something between discomfort and pain. Yet my mouth kept watering. I couldn’t stop eating it. Or smiling.
Eventually it was time for Pelon Pelo Rico. Pushing up on the base of the tube made the paste move through the holes at the top like noodles. The paste was glossy and brownish-red. We agreed that it smelled like some sort of fruit leather and tasted sweet, salty, with tamarind and chile and a little grit to the texture.
“Of all the things we’ve tasted,” Kimmerle said, “let’s say the tamarind has umami, which it might, this is the closest to a five-star confection. Meaning, I wouldn’t be surprised if this hit on all the basic tastes.” I tasted it again. She was right — every single taste bud in my mouth was firing simultaneously. The sensation was utterly delightful. “There’s a reason those kids were sucking on this,” she said with a grin.
As we made our way through the massive pile of candy, I started to feel more confident about my ability to notice nuances. Every once in a while, I’d even catch something before Kimmerle did. We started to move through each evaluation more quickly, easily arriving at consensus. At one point I even wondered, Is this what it feels like to be good at meditation?
Days later, I found myself thinking of that aflatoon again. I looked up recipes for it. Nearly every one called for semolina flour and raisins.
Back home in California, I found myself craving tamarind candy, so I went to my own Mexican grocery in search of several varieties, including my new favorite, Pulparindo. On the front of its package was what looked to be a cartoon-character version of the candy: a bar of tamarind paste with a jolly face and a tongue sticking out of its seemingly salivating mouth. “Mouthwatering” is often thought to be synonymous with “delicious,” but the term refers to a physiological response to eating acidic foods. Acid corrodes the enamel on our teeth, so we only need to think about eating something acidic and our mouths will begin to produce saliva to neutralize the acid. Clearly, the Pulparindo guy knows that sour things make our mouths water.
En route home with my haul, I bumped into a couple of friends. I excitedly doled out Pulparindo, certain they would love the salty, spicy, sour, sweet treat as much as I did. They were both suspicious. One carefully opened the wrapper, sniffed the bar and took a minuscule bite before recoiling. He might have even grimaced. The other took a bigger bite and then told me, diplomatically, “I like it, but I wouldn’t call it candy.” There was apparently a vast gulf between our experiences of the same sweet.
It turns out I love sugar best when it’s thrown into stark relief by acidity, which perhaps makes sense. I wasn’t allowed much candy as a kid, but I did eat a lot of lavashak, the relentlessly sour fruit leather my grandmother made from plums in Iran each summer and smuggled to us in California. Pulparindo bears a striking resemblance to it. So does my absolute favorite candy, which is any sort of Haribo sour gummy — it’s what I invariably sneak into every movie theater and ballgame. I love biting through the crunchy coating of sugar and citric acid on the way to the gummy center. I love the almost punishing wave of sourness that lingers for a second too long on my tongue. I love the silly shapes, colors and names, like Sour S’ghetti and Fizzy Cola. I love that, unlike every other part of my food-related work, there’s nothing local, seasonal or organic about these candies. It doesn’t have to mean anything. There’s nothing but fun.
And yet I remember being a young cook in a fancy restaurant, where admitting that my sweet of choice was chock-full of corn syrup and artificial colors and flavors felt potentially disastrous. The chefs I worked for instructed me to slow down and think about everything I ate, even when it was just a deli sandwich or a slice of pizza or a scoop of ice cream. (A version of sensory, though no one would have called it that.) Dutiful young student that I was, I took the time to thoughtfully taste even my secret gummy candy, and for the first time I noticed that the sourness was only on the surface. I realized it was the same granulated white powder I used to can tomatoes: citric acid. Almost immediately, I thought of the candied orange peel I’d learned to make and how the last step was to toss the cooked peels in sugar. What if, I wondered, I added citric acid to the sugar in my next batch? I could make my own natural sour gummy candy! And I did.
Recently, I bought a bag of candy — Haribo sour gummy bears, of course — and brought them to my desk to conduct a quick, informal sensory evaluation. I pulled out one bear of each color: red, clear, yellow, orange and green. They didn’t smell like much, so I skipped straight to taste. Clear, my childhood favorite, was pineapple, tangy and tropical. Yellow was lemon; orange orange. Red was some sort of generic artificial berry. But my first taste of green, my least favorite, which I’d always called lime and often thrown away, caught me off guard. I fished a second green bear out of the bag. Then a third. I put them in my mouth and let the sour coating dissolve away. Then I chewed. As the unmistakable aroma of artificial strawberry flavor flooded my mouth, I couldn’t help bursting into laughter. I’ve been eating gummy bears since elementary school. But I’d never really taken the time to taste them until now.
Samin Nosrat is an Eat columnist for the magazine, a chef, a teacher and the author of the cookbook “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” which has been developed into a new Netflix show.
Nations have flags and anthems — but they also have their defining treats. Here are some candies that capture the spirit of the countries they come from.
By ELISE CRAIG OCT. 23, 2018 Photographs by CLAIRE BENOIST
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Worldwide, nearly 70 percent of cocoa beans come from Africa, and Ghana is the second-largest producer in the world, with a G.D.P. that’s partly dependent on cocoa export. Even so, Ghana has few producers of actual confections. (The entire African continent consumes only about 4 percent of the world’s cocoa beans.) Cocoa Processing Company Limited in Tema is one of them. Every year, the company says it processes 65,000 metric tons of cocoa beans, but it also has a line of chocolates and candy bars, including its lemon-flavored Akuafo Bar. Akuafo means farmers, and it’s meant to be ‘‘a dedication to farmers whose hard work and sweat sustain the Ghanaian economy.’’
Roller Liquid Candy Of all the candies in the world, Chupa Chups might have the most famous designer. In 1969, Enric Bernat, the Spanish businessman behind the lollipop brand, asked his friend Salvador Dalí to create the well-known logo. Though it has had some tweaks since then, that daisy-shaped logo — and the fact that it’s placed at the top of the pop — remains, as does the name, which translates to something like ‘‘sucky suck.’’ Since they were first released in the 1950s, the candies have become available in 177 countries and even made it to outer space in 1994, when Russian astronauts brought them to the Mir space station. Today, the best-selling flavors are strawberry and cola, which happen to be two of the original five, along with mint, lemon and orange.