Thanksgiving Candy Corn flavors, top to bottom: Turkey, Green Bean, Cranberry Sauce, Sweet Potato Pie, Ginger Glazed Carrot, Stuffing.
You have doubtless been on pins and needles wondering about the results of our Brach’s Thanksgiving Candy Corn taste test. To recap, a few weeks ago we invited readers to send in a stamped self-addressed envelope and receive the six flavors Brach’s has been promoting as their Thanksgiving Dinner assortment and then participate in a comparative tasting via Zoom.
What happened? The post office happened. Mail was crawling at a snail’s pace at election time and nobody received their samples by the originally scheduled tasting date. So we tried again and succeeded last Sunday, November 15, and a merry time was had by all.
During the Zoom call, we asked participants to arrange their samples in the order shown above and then we guessed about what flavor was which. Green Bean and Cranberry Sauce were identified by color and it was a good guess that the solid orange corn was Ginger Glazed Carrot. To identify the other three flavors, we’d have to dig in.
Green Bean went first since we didn’t have a salad course, and this flavor was universally disliked. The most common complaint was a “grassy” flavor; nobody thought they tasted like green beans. Next we went with the flavor on the bottom which we thought might be turkey because of its yellow bottom (=meat) and brown top (=gravy). But one taster recognized a bready taste and we realized it must be Stuffing. This was also a highly unpopular flavor; like actual stuffing it combined a number of discrete tastes but unlike stuffing they didn’t go well together.
We tried the Cranberry to cleanse our palates and everybody liked this one in the way you like candy. But the taste was distinctly cherry, not cranberry; one of our younger tasters said it reminded him of a cherry Jelly Belly. Then we tried the one on the very top and that was the Turkey–but with the slightly rancid taste of turkey skin that has been in the oven too long. No fans for this gobbler. But the last two flavors hit it out of the park. Carrot had a delightful ginger essence and Sweet Potato Pie had notes of both ginger and cinnamon. I won’t say we were stuffed when we finished, but I will say none of us wanted any more candy corn.
I’ve attended several virtual tasting events during the pandemic, and this was the most successful yet. The small number of tasters (under a dozen, counting kibitzers at the various locations) meant everybody could and did participate in the commentary, and we were discovering together rather than being guided through the process.
If you want to conduct your own tasting, Brach’s Thanksgiving Dinner Candy Corn is now available on Amazon (affiliate link!) and if you act fast you can get it by actual Thanksgiving. For obvious reasons, this item is non-returnable.
