For the Love of Candy

Name: Zotz

Manufacturer: Ambrosoli

Rating: 5/5

I’ve always had a fascination with carbonation (hey, that sounds like a beat poem). Soda and I are best friends, and as a kid I used to drop Alka-Selzter Tablets in water to watch them fizz up. So when I heard about Zotz I knew they were up my alley, and I had to have them. I ordered a box of Zotz–watermelon, cherry, and apple. There’s also a grape-orange–lemon pack I need to get my hands on.

Zotz come in single-flavor strings of three. They’re hard candy, a little bigger than my thumbnail, with a white dot in each end. This dot is powder, which dissolves in the mouth and leaves a hole at each end. This is a nice feature, because it means you can suck the powder out if you want to (and which I usually do). The powder is very fizzy and very sour and it pops and fills your mouth. The hard candy is high quality–it’s smooth, breaks easily, and doesn’t leave any sharp edges.

The flavors are as follows:

Watermelon is pale pink and has pear undertones and a slight floral flavors. The rest of the flavor is artificial Jolly Rancher. Not my favorite flavor, but I don’t hate it

Cherry is a pale red and it has an immediate burst of sour cherry, with pineapple flavor to follow. It doesn’t have much of that medicinal flavor that I hate, which is awesome. Cherry is my favorite flavor usually, but this was my second favorite.

Apple is a pale green. It has a lot of that artificial apple flavor that I happen to love. It also has some, bright Granny Smith flavor to it. This is my favorite.

I can’t find anything to dislike about this candy–the bright flavor I love mixed with tons of fizz and the right hit of sourness. Highly recommended.

Name: Hi-Chew Lemon

Company: Morinaga

Rating: 4/5

I did indeed receive my shipment of Zotz, and I shall be reviewing them next week. Why am I not reviewing them now? Because there’s over 100 pieces in my box ‘o Zotz and I don’t think the roll of Hi-Chews are going to last much longer.

Hi-Chews are made my Morinaga, and this is my first experience with this candy company and now not the last. They come in a pack about the same size and shape as a package of Bubble Yum and are decorated with the Hi-Chew logo and pictures of the flavor inside, in this case lemon. The package promises natural and artificial flavors and indeed as soon as I picked up the package in World Market I was assailed with the scent of fresh lemonade. The individual pieces are the same size as a piece of Trident, but much thicker, and wrapped in white. The candies themselves are a milky white-yellow with a bright yellow core.

The chews do have a yummy, bright lemon flavor but there was something missing. It wasn’t an issue of chemical versus natural it was more of a question of intensity–I guess I was expecting more of a punch because of the yellow core, but it wasn’t there. Just a sweet, slightly tangy, slightly floral lemon.

It took me awhile to figure out how to describe the texture, as it was honestly something I’d never come across before. I did finally nail it–it has the same texture as a piece of gum midway through, when the softness has been chewed out but it hasn’t reached impossibly rubbery levels. I know that doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement, but I loved it. It’s somewhere between a gum and a candy and absolutely addictive.

I couldn’t give it my highest rating because of the slightly blandness of flavor, but I still can’t wait to try the other flavors.

Hello one and all. I apologize for my absence. Real life got in the way of blogging. Real life sorted out though, as much as it ever can be, and candy and I are back. Look for a review of Zotz on Friday-I’ll be keeping up the once a week posting schedule, since time and finances keep me from posting any more than that. Graduate school is a pesky thing. It’s nice to be back.