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What Does Beige Taste Like?Chocolate Mix Skittles and Tea-over-IceWhat's new? What's great? What's weird? Our columnist samples offerings from supermarket aisles and fast-food menus. |
By: Mars
Suggested Retail Price: 79 cents for a 2-ounce bag
Are you ready to taste a rainbow of chocolate? Skittles sure hopes so, because it has put out a “Chocolate Mix” of its colorful fruit candies. The treats are still colorful, but now those colors are brown, light brown, dark brown, really dark brown, and beige. They represent an ambitious undertaking, for they’re meant to taste like chocolate caramel, s’mores, chocolate pudding, brownie batter, and vanilla, respectively.
It’s not clear what makes the vanilla flavor “chocolate,” but in defense of Skittles, the bag does clearly indicate a “mix” of flavors.
And how do they taste? Like the foul droppings of some deranged imp fused, through an act of satanic sorcery, with a Hershey’s bar.
Brownie batter? Sugary crap. Chocolate pudding? Slightly buttery-tasting sugary crap. Vanilla? It’s actually not bad: An effervescent note of smoke blows through the bracingly intense but smooth combin- … no, I jest. Sugary crap. S’mores? Not since S’mores Crunch cereal has there been such a crappy insult to one of America’s most indulgent homespun desserts.
Lest you think this column is penned by a highbrow, Scharffen Berger–nibbling candy pansy, I slammed an entire packet of fruit punch Pop Rocks just last week and thoroughly relished the experience. Normal Skittles? Just fine for a snack.
But there is no excuse for Chocolate Mix Skittles. They are a cancer in the bowels of the American gastronomic experience. They are awful little turds.
By: Tea Forté
Suggested Retail Price: $42 for the pitcher system, $24 for 12 large iced tea infusers
Just in time for summer, Tea Forté—the maker of those fancy teas that come in pyramidal bags—has introduced what it’s hoping will be the killer app in the world of high-end iced tea. The pricey new Tea-over-Ice system creates what Tea Forté appealingly bills as “flash-chilled” tea: In a nutshell, you dump boiling hot tea over a lot of ice and drink your iced tea on the spot.
The system consists of two stacking glass pitchers: a small one with a little lid that sits atop a larger 24-ounce pitcher. Making tea is relatively simple: Put two trays (!) of ice into the bottom pitcher, then insert your specially designed Tea Forté megabag into the top pitcher and fill the top pitcher with boiling water. Steep for three to five minutes (I recommend five, because your end product gets pretty diluted), remove bag, pour tea over ice, drink.
If you’ve never had Tea Forté before, the iced flavors (White Ginger Pear, Pomegranate Blackberry, Ceylon Gold, Raspberry Nectar) are accurately billed and delicate; the only frustration is that the damn bags float, and thus need to be hand-steeped or weighed down by a spoon. The Tea-over-Ice minipitcher takes care of that problem by containing the bag. Also, in theory, one could use nonproprietary bags and the system would still work just fine.
Tea-over-Ice is quite nice. Assuming that you’ve steeped to your desired intensity and sugared as you see fit while the water was still boiling, you’ll get three to four eight-ounce glasses of iced tea out of the deal, far more than you might expect based on the dainty size of the top pitcher. And everything looks gorgeous during the brewing process. If you’ve got a friend from out of town you’d like to casually impress, the elegance and ritual of Tea-over-Ice will do the trick. If you’ve got a party full of people, however, the old “massive jar of sun tea” method will serve you far better, unless you’ve got a hundred pounds of ice cubes and all afternoon to brew, ice, pour, and repeat.
the skittles review made me LOL. hilarious.
LOL! Thank you Mr. Norton. I will most certainly avoid the sugary crap. Fwiw I expected chocolate skittles to resemble rabbit droppings and wrote them off...your review confirmed my expectations.
The gullibility of the buying public continues to astound and amaze. A cunning new pyramidal stacking glass tea set so that one may take the unprecedented culinary step of pouring one's hot tea over ice, thus miraculously generating (whisper it!) iced tea? Why yes, you betcha, that's certainly worth $42. Plus, of course, the special larger-sized tea bags required to achieve the proper intensity of brew, you gotta buy those too. Shame the tea isn't very good, no matter how they dress it up in little pyramidal tea-lingerie.
Tea-lingerie...I'll have to remember that. Would that make Starbuck's new "Pike Place" logo "coffee lingerie"?
I'm not a Skittles fan, but the above review of the new chocolate ones was so intriguingly nasty, I just had to see what all the fuss was about. So I picked up a bag today at my neighborhood 7-Eleven.
I've always viewed Skittles as small, compressed jelly beans, and these new ones do nothing to alter that perception. To me, Chocolate Skittles don't taste radically different from most of the chocolate-flavored varieties of Jelly Bellys. Perhaps even more precisely, Chocolate Skittles strike me as a newfangled 2008 version of Sugar Babies, a candy that was very popular when I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s. (I still see them once in a while on candy stands.) But as far as "sugary crap" goes, trust me, Chocolate Skittles taste like diabetic treats compared to the coma-inducing Sugar Babies.
I take slight exception to Supertaster's rationalized tolerance of the fruit-flavored Skittles over the trashed chocolate ones, apparently as if those taste any less offensively artificial than this new line does. Since most of us were kids, we've been programmed to ignore the fact that almost all fruit-flavored commercial candies taste nothing like their namesake fruits, but we've all been well-trained to associate and connect the manufactured characteristics. Likewise, Chocolate Skittles should never be confused with genuine chocolate, but they taste a lot like many of the chocolate-flavored candies on the market.
So if the notion of a new Skittles flavor intrigues you - particularly something as radically different from the rest of the artificial-fruity Skittles line as chocolate - I suspect you may actually enjoy these distinctly more than Supertaster did. Just make no mistake about it: it's ALL sugary crap.
Disagree Arthur! I occasionally crave a bag of Skittles, and I'm always open to new forms of "sugary crap," and I thought the Chocolate Mix Skittles were dreadful. Not the "why the hell did I eat those?" dreadful, but the "why the hell am I eating these I'm going to throw the rest of the bag out" dreadful.
I just love how they "invented" tea over ice. Like people haven't been making iced tea that way for -- I don't know -- centuries perhaps? (Hush, don't tell anyone, but you can actually do that with any old pot of tea and any old container of ice -- I've even done that in restaurants when they told me they didn't have iced tea. Do you have tea bags, hot water and ice? Then you have iced tea.)
My 9 year old and I decided to try the "chocolate" atrocity. My first (and only) taste of them reminded me of when I mixed Skittles and M&Ms. I never repeated that again, either. My son and I looked at eachother knowingly and tossed them (not the wrapping) out the window. Raccoons aren't too discerning.
Ruth, like I said, it's ALL sugary crap to me. But, if possible, let's try to put aside the fruity flavor of traditional Skittles. I'm wondering what your opinion is of the candies upon which I based my main comparisons above (e.g., Sugar Babies, all the similar chocolate flavors of Jelly Belly beans, and, while I'm at it, let me throw in Tootsie Rolls, other chocolate taffies, and chocolate hard candies) because I for one cannot not agree that this new line of Skittles tastes so much more "dreadful" than those more established, popular artificial chocolate concoctions.
"Cannot not" should just be "cannot."
Hey, how come we can't re-edit our posts here like on other Chowhound boards? Or directly respond to particular posts?
arthur: i, too, have wondered the same thing about the inability to edit our posts here, or for that matter, anywhere on the site besides the main boards. maybe you should post a query about it on the technical board...
When I saw these Skittles a few months ago at the newsstand in my office building, I just had to try them. I knew they would be bad, because how could they not be? But I needed to know for sure. Mr. Norton, I think you were perhaps a little to kind to them. They were so incredibly disgusting. I offered them around to my office mates "Hey, you wanna taste something awful?" and got surprisingly few takers. Of those who did - a unanimous God, This Really Sucks.
Sugar Babies aren't chocolate (or even chocolate-flavored), they're caramel. I love to eat them with popcorn at the movies- yum.
I have not tried the chocolate Skittles and probably won't. I thought they sounded gross when I first saw them, and nothing here has changed my mind.
whirlygirly, Sugar Babies may not exactly be chocolate-flavored, but neither are any of the other candies I mentioned. That's kind of my point: Labeling something as chocolate- or fruit-flavored doesn't automatically make it so. Regardless, I used Sugar Babies as my main point of comparison because I found that their explosively sugary taste and texture are what Chocolate Mix Skittles most keenly resemble to me.
None of which makes any of them any good. For the record, I repeat that I'm not personally a fan of this new (or any other) line of Skittles. I'm just saying that I think Chocolate Mix Skittles are not without precedent, and there is a pre-existing market of people who have already shown that they may very likely enjoy this precise kind of toxically sweet confection.
i've tried the chocolate skittles and "sugary crap" is right.... i made my room mates try them to b/c i didnt want to suffer alone. needless to say, we all hated the new flavors. skittles - what were you thinking? foul candy.... foul
But, but.. chocolate-flavored Jelly Bellies, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate taffies and chocolate hard candies ARE all chocolate *flavored* even if they don't much resemble actual chocolate. Sugar Babies are not. That's my point. They are not labeled as chocolate flavored. If you're going to say they're the same just because they're sugary, you might as well throw gumdrops, Jolly Ranchers, Hot Tamales, and Good & Plentys into the mix.
whirlygirly, if you ever cave in and sample the Chocolate Mix Skittles, I believe you'll see what I'm talking about. Since you admit you haven't tried them yet, nor do you have any interest in doing so, methinks thou dost protest too much about my posts.
Furthermore, the overpowering caramelized granulated sugar content of the candies I listed give them all a flavor that in my opinion is pretty darn close to that of Sugar Babies. The same cannot really be said for any of the fruit-flavored Skittles.
I just wrote above: "... the overpowering caramelized granulated sugar content of the candies I listed ..." Before anyone screams "Gotcha!", yes, I realize that those candies are almost definitely made with corn syrup, not real sugar. What I was trying to describe was those candies' specific textures and tastes. (Again, I wish this board had an edit feature.)
Actually, I can kind of see how chocolate Skittles might have a similar texture and taste to Sugar Babies. The only point I am arguing is that the other candies you named are meant to be chocolate flavored, ans Sugar Babies are not.
(ans=and, of course. I hate not being able to edit my typos!)
arthur - i am certain you are a fabulous person but i cannot believe you cannot recognize the genius that is the (indeed sugary crap) loveliness of a tootsie roll or a good n' plenty. some cheap candies i do forever love. sorry. :) :)
that said chocolate skittles sound awful.
oh i used to love sugar daddies - the lick off the stick ones when i was really little (haven't had one in a long time) but never liked sugar babies either. and i have to confess that milk duds aren't nearly as good as i remember.
AMFM, I never meant to suggest that sugary crap couldn't be genius. I consider some of my all-time favorite snacks to be Mensa-level sh-t.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to hear from anyone who has tried both Chocolate Mix Skittles AND the other candies I mentioned. My point all along has been that by doing an objective comparison with those other established brands, I believe there is probably already a large market of consumers who will appreciate (or at least tolerate) Chocolate Mix Skittles a lot more than Chowhound's Supertaster did. What I find remarkable is the seemingly unfounded consensus of people here who have taken the time to staunchly defend the older, more established candy brands that I mentioned but insist that Chocolate Mix Skittles sound too awful to even sample. Why is that? Why does a chocolate-flavored Skittle come across as so much less tolerable than a chocolate-flavored Jelly Belly? Or a Sugar Baby? Or even a fruity Skittle?
I thought the chocolate Skittles were alright... and so did a few of my friends. I don't think I would search them out in the future, they were just as sweet and artificial as the other flavors (I like them too).
Please don't judge! Haha...
Arthur, I'm disagreeing too. I have eaten chocolate jelly beans, regular Skittles, and Sugar Babies. They all appeal to me on occasion when I'm not eating Ooh La La Hand-Crafted Dark Chocolate. (The factory that makes Sugar babies is near my office and they smell great when you walk by!) On the other hand, the chocolate Skittles are the only candy I can think of that I have actually thrown in the garbage. I can't describe it very well, but they are not comparable in either taste or texture. (Well, texture in the case of fruit Skittles.)
How is it that someone who can so eloquently and rightly tear these
Skittles a new tootsie roll not take a single glance at this "tea over
ice" contraption and say, "this is the most halfassed retarded thing
I've seen all morning!"? I'm pretty sure that the suggested attempt
to use it to impress a friend would backfire. Well, with my friends
at least. Rather than getting all "wow" and stuff, I imagine their
reaction would be, "Whoa there, Chuckles, you spent fifty bucks
on a 'system' to make -what-?"
I thought Good 'N Plenty's were licorice? Not chocolate!