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Testing: Reese's Pieces that are not Reese's Pieces
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Testing: Reese's Pieces that are not Reese's Pieces
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| Photo | Drew Lazor |
Meal Ticket recently received a sweet package of Reese's Pieces-ified (?) candies in the mail from the nice folks at Hershey's and decided to eat way too many of them in the name of Testing.
Reese's Pieces, as we all are intimately aware, are M&M versions of Reese's Peanut Butter cups. They debuted in the late '70s and got really famous after E.T. ate a shitload of them in the movie E.T. (In a particularly memorable and altogether shameless rip-off, Mac from 1988's Mac and Me loved Skittles with the same passion. He also liked dancing with fully uniformed football players inside McDonald's.) We've always wondered why similar candy bars couldn't get the same hit-with-a-shrink-ray treatment. Now they're here — Hershey's Special Dark candy bars now come in an array of foreboding crimson candy-coated colors, while the York Peppermint Patty Pieces rock a blue reminiscent of the KU Jayhawks jerseys.
Our favorite variety of the new Pieces line is Almond Joy, which was a surprise since that candy bar sits relatively low in our checkout-line impulse buy desirability rankings. Something about how the coconut starts tasting like gobs of shredded plastic if you chew too long. Anyways, there's none of that here, as each Joyful piece boasts near-microscopic amounts of almond, milk chocolate and coconut crammed into the shell (the elements aren't spit up separately by color, as we initially thought). How do they do it, fitting all that perfectly calibrated molar-aching goodness into such a petite package? Leave your best guess in the comments.
I recently was wowed by coconut M&Ms, sounds similar. Something about that flavor combo works extremely well as tiny pieces. I think they probably have a nanite-run production facility to make these things. It's the only reasonable explanation.
See where it says "flavor" on the ingredient statement? That's how they do it. Not magic, but the science of molecular-level aroma chemicals :-)
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