Sirius XM Podcasts It's Dan here, and I am celebrating Halloween this week.
Are you celebrating?
How are you celebrating?
What candies are you eating?
Are you eating too much candy?
If not, you haven't eaten enough.
Now, in this week's reheat, we're going to go all the way back to 2011.
You all loved it.
So we're going to do some more of those.
In this one, I'm joined by my former co-host, Mark Garrison, to take to the phone lines to discuss all things Halloween candy with our loyal listeners.
Strong opinions and multi-page documents are shared.
Kit Kats are eating like corn on the cob.
Teabags somehow enter the conversation.
We're going to cover a lot of ground.
Now, as always, if there's a Sporkful episode that you want us to pull out of the deep freezer and reheat, I want to hear from you.
Send me an email or a voice memo to hello at sporkful.com.
Tell me your name, location, what episode you want to hear, and why.
Thanks so much and enjoy.
This is The Sporkful.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman along with Mark Garrison.
Hey there, Dan.
We're about to challenge your assumptions about consumption and drop a sporkful of knowledge on you.
Because we're obsessively compulsive about eating more awesomely.
And because if history has taught us anything, it's that the hosts of food shows need a lot of catchphrases.
Mark Garrison, how you doing?
I'm actually more energized than I thought I would because I had this leftover honey.
Someone brought some, like you know, because you know you have certain levels of honey and there's like the stuff that comes in a bear that you get at the grocery store like that.
But every now and then someone will give you like a gift of fancier honey, like that was from a very certain crop, and things like that.
So I had this like really good honey.
That was from New Zealand, where they have a lot of amazing honey.
I was there for my—sorry, this was not supposed to be a pun, but I was there for my honeymoon.
Zing!
Zing!
And we acquired some of that.
And so I had that, and it was actually quite tasty.
That's, yeah, a good honey boost.
All right, let's go ahead and get into today's topic for mastication and rumination, which is Halloween 2011.
Last year we started a tradition where we're going to do a Thanksgiving show every year.
And with different guests and different foci.
Foci, yeah.
That's the plural form.
Because Thanksgiving is such a food-centric holiday that for us to only do it once just seems incomplete.
We want to make it a tradition.
A lot of different angles we can cover.
That's right.
And we decided we're going to do the same thing with Halloween, because that's obviously another food-centric event.
So this is the first of what will be an annual show on Halloween.
And to do that, we dipped into the mailbag at theseporkfullatgmail.com.
And Mark, what did we find?
First, we want to get to Gabe Aponte.
He is in Denver.
And he wrote to us with a treatise, really, multiple pages.
And it was called An Angry 20-Something's Guide to Trick-or-Treat Candy Supremacy.
Gabe, thanks for calling in.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Now, Gabe and I mean this as a compliment I may go so far as to call this document a Unabomber-style manifesto about Halloween candy.
It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 pages.
We're not going to get into the whole thing talking with you right now, but we will post it to the website.
But there are a few specific points in here that we want to get into with you.
This document you have put together is entitled An Angry 20-Something's Guide to Trick-or-Treat Candy Supremacy.
What do you do for a living, Gabe?
I'm actually a graduate resident director at the University of Denver out here and I also go to school full-time getting my master's.
What do you study?
Higher education, college student development.
All right.
And the reason why I asked what you do for a living Gabe, is because I was assuming that it would be something that would leave you with a fair amount of free time.
All right, well, let's start with the positive because you have the top tier.
It looks like there's about just shy of a dozen here, but you have kind of what you call the Holy Trinity and the God candy.
Now I can tell you, don't study theology, because I think some people in the Christian community would say that the Holy Trinity is the three expressions of God.
But what's the God candy?
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
Okay, and you also were very clear to say any form minus the Reese's pieces.
Now, what makes it so much like the deity?
Well, I think that it's just the classic combination of peanut butter and chocolate.
It just goes so well together, so much so that now, even if you look at the Twix bar, which has been so successful with just its cookie bottom, and caramel, now is going into like peanut butter.
And now we're seeing, you know, MM's makes a peanut butter version of their candy.
And so it seems to me that just you know the fun that came up with it first.
You know, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup seems to have gotten it down to a perfect science of you know how much chocolate to you know peanut butter ratio will satisfy the cravings of an 8-year-old child.
Yeah, ratios, I mean, you're speaking our language.
That's very important here.
You need to get all the way down to the bottom tier to find Reese's Pieces.
Absolutely.
Some people are going to bristle at that.
Mark and I here, we're accustomed to being in the line of fire here.
But you're really stepping out with an opinion like that.
What do you say to people who are going to come down hard on you for that kind of a stance?
I'm ready for it.
My friend came down on it, but I think most people will agree that the Reese's Pieces is just far, far below the standard of quality of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
I mean, it's smaller.
It's trying too hard to be an M&M when it should just be itself.
They should just stick to doing what they do best and keeping it in cup form.
And I'm of the opinion that, at least If you eat a Reese's peanut butter cup and then eat Reese's Pieces, they taste nothing alike.
There's something very cheap and just not textural about Reese's Pieces.
That's a good point.
The peanut butter, and I'm actually with you on this one, Gabe.
I don't like Reese's Pieces.
I think they're vastly overrated.
And you hit it on the head.
The peanut butter is very texturally different in those two candies.
It's very soft and mushy in the Reese's Pieces.
But in the peanut butter cup, it has a granularity that's quite appealing.
Yeah, it is grainy as far as the stuff in the peanut butter cup.
But I like Reese's Pieces a lot.
And I think, like one of the things that you say in there is, like you know, instead of getting Reese's Pieces, just get some peanut butter MM's.
Like, as if these were even trying to be the same thing.
Because peanut butter M&M's have a layer of chocolate.
That's a different attempt.
I mean certainly like you're not going to get the same experience with the Reese's Pieces, with the Reese's Cup.
But isn't Reese's Pieces chocolate-covered peanut butter?
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Reese's Pieces doesn't have chocolate.
What's the shell made out of?
The shell is just candy.
You say that not having the granular peanut butter filling that you have in a cup in the Reese's Pieces, having a creamier one, you say that's a bad thing.
But I like them both, honestly.
But if I had to... You would take Reese's Pieces over peanut butter M&M's?
Every time.
Absolutely every time.
Because the Reese's Pieces don't have chocolate?
That's one part of it, but the other part of it is because the peanut butter that they fill into MM's is not very good.
And the Reese's Pieces peanut butter is good?
It is, yeah.
It's creamy, I like the texture, and it goes really well with the shell.
You are really stepping away from one of your long-held stances, which is that you're always against crunchy sugar for the sake of crunchy sugar.
You don't like sprinkles on ice cream, for instance.
You say, I want something that's going to bring some flavor to the table.
Yet you will endorse Reese's Pieces which have a candy coating that you yourself cannot identify or describe beyond the fact that it's candy.
It provides texture and sweetness, and that's all you need in that point.
Well, that's what I said for sprinkles, and you said sprinkles are evil.
No, but sprinkles don't have enough flavor, and first of all, they don't have a structural purpose.
Which do you prefer, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup or Reese's Pieces?
These are different things, but if I were told I like different aspects about them, but if I were faced with only having access to one for the rest of my life, it would be Reese's Pieces.
What?
Gabe, what do you say to that?
I think it's just ludicrous here.
Well, Gabe writes in his manifesto of Reese's Pieces I find it odd that the God candy would make an abomination version of itself.
Gabe, on this front, I'm with you.
Excellent.
Another one you have in the top tier, which I really have to question, is soda.
Mm-hmm.
Now, you say another rarity...
I mean yes, it's a rarity in that you don't get it for Halloween that much, but I feel like soda it's just sort of everywhere all the time.
I can't imagine myself ever getting that excited to receive soda.
Well, it's one of those things where true, I'm playing the rarity card on this one, and It's one of those things that it's more of a refueling, because the thing I read that you should just go ahead and open it up and chug it down right there.
So it's a good, like you know, seventh inning stretch of trick-or-treating where you need that quick caffeine buzz to get you through the rest of the evening.
I still have yet to get a piece of trick-or-treat candy that's, you know...
Take five with no dough, you know, crushed into it or anything like that.
And you have on your list, you have kind of the top tier we've been talking about.
You have a middle tier and a bottom tier.
And then beyond that, you have what you call like throwaway candy items.
I'm going to turn to that page right now.
Actually, let's talk about some things that are in the bottom tier.
Why Tootsie Pops so low?
Oh, I just.
For some reason I have a really hard time accepting the Tootsie Pop as a confectionary, like masterpiece.
But you'll take soda?
Absolutely, I'll take soda over a Tootsie Pop.
Any day of the week I will take a generic you know sandwich with a Shasta over, you know a Tootsie Pop that.
I'm going to get maybe halfway through before I'm just going to crunch my way through it and break my teeth.
You seem to have a lack of patience as far as breaking through the shell.
I feel like if you take a little more time, you don't have to lick it like an ice cream cone.
You can just do the mouth marination, let it dissolve, let it become thinner, and then you can have that real crunch and then go through.
So I assume this objection would also carry over to blow pops, the ones that have gum on the inside.
I would actually think of blow pops as one tier higher, because at least at the end of a blow pop you get a piece of gum.
Way down in your throwaway items, you list wax lips, which I totally agree with.
Wax lips suck.
But you also list candy corn.
Now, that's a sensitive spot.
Mark and I are both big fans of candy corn.
I mean, of all the foods, that is the iconic Halloween candy.
All those other candies are not associated in particular with Halloween.
They're just candies.
Candy corn is the Halloween food.
What's your beef? my beef is that it's not a trick-or-treat candy.
Sure, it's the icon that you think of when you think Halloween candy, and you think of it that way because everybody has leftover dishes of it well into March.
What I have to ask people is – I don't know about that.
I mean you talk about like, save it for your office and people are not going to eat it all the way through Easter.
But the workplaces I have been, the candy corn does not last quite so long.
So I think – I don't know if you were still doing your studies when you came up with this idea.
But I thought maybe you were working kind of the office of joy reduction or something like that.
Where people are not like actually digging into some candy corn unless –
Some of your colleagues have bought into the mistaken idea of the kind of the chocolatey candy corn, which is really really gross.
You like it just based on the sole principle that you can only get it during this time of year.
No no, I also happen to think it's delicious, but I just feel like you know, I see a little bit of inconsistency here, Gabe.
On one hand, you're putting dishes up into the top tier, like potato chips and soda, because you say that they're rarities.
And, on the other hand, you're going to bury candy corn, which is the one thing on this entire list that is traditionally specific to this holiday.
So it's the rarity of rarities.
I mean, up until recently, you could only get candy corn at Halloween.
By the logic you use to put potato chips and soda in the top tier, I feel that I have no choice but to hoist you with your own petard and insist that candy corn be promoted at least out of the throwaway category.
Alright, you've caught me.
Yes!
I am a candy corn hater, and I'm proud of it.
Alright!
Well, Gabe Aponte, out there in Denver Colorado, author of An Angry 20-Something's Guide to Trick or Treat Candy Supremacy, which is a six- or seven-page manifesto that Gabe put together one night, possibly while drinking.
And his sister emailed it to us.
We decided to have Gabe on the show.
We didn't get through the whole thing, but we will post it to the blog, which you can find by going to sporkfulcom.
Thanks, Gabe.
Thank you for having me.
Ooh, advertisements.
Yummy.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
And this weekend my friends at Sfolini and I are rolling out our limited edition Sporkful holiday pack of pastas.
These are very special pastas.
We've never made these before.
They're going to be limited edition, then they'll be gone.
There's going to be Cascatelli.
There's going to be Calabrian Chili Pasta.
Not just the regular flavor, Calabrian Chili Cascatelli, Saffron Vesuvio, and Garlic Quattrotini.
These are artisanal flavors infused into the pastas.
They're really different and really delicious.
Again, Calabrian Chili Cascatelli, Saffron Vesuvio, and Garlic Quattrotini.
And to celebrate this launch, all these pastas are going on sale this weekend, 20% off.
Also all of my original flavor pastas and all the great pastas at Sfolini, 20 off November 1st through November 3rd.
No minimum, no code needed.
This is a great chance to get a head start on your holiday shopping.
So head to Sfolini.com.
That's S-F-O-G-L-I-N-I.com.
OK, right now we're going to talk to Patty Woods.
She is the woman behind CandyYumYumcom, a blog with lots of especially reviews of candy and keeping up on what kind of what's going on in candy, both like candies that you have known and heard of for a long time and also some new things that come out that you have not heard of to check out.
So, again, that's CandyYumYum.com.
Patty, you're joining us from Connecticut.
Glad to have you on.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
It's my pleasure.
So one of the things you wrote to us and mentioned that you had discovered kind of the correct or the most optimal way, in your view, to eat a Kit Kat.
First of all, we need to kind of establish the parameters of this.
Are we talking about a four-bar Kit Kat or a two-bar Kit Kat?
Because the two-bar is probably more common in the Halloween application.
Or a double four.
They make a double four.
I haven't seen the double four.
Oh, that's like the real, like... The big one.
Yeah, yeah.
The big king size, yes.
No, we're talking about a classic four-bar.
And actually, I've learned the technical term is finger.
Four-finger, okay.
Yeah, four-finger.
And this happened when I was very young.
I would say I was probably about five years old.
And I was standing in line at Grand Union with my mother and there was a little boy in front of us and his mother handed him a classic four-bar Kit-Kat, four-finger Kit-Kat.
And he unwrapped the outer paper liner, and this is back when there was the two wrappers.
And he got to the inner silver one and he pulled out the Kit Kat and he just took a bite of the entire thing.
And this has stayed with me my entire life.
So we're talking about the entire thing.
And you were five years old when this happened, Patty?
Yes.
And if I may be so bold, how old are you now?
I am 41.
So this is nigh on 35 years ago.
Yes, it is.
And this traumatic childhood experience stays with you to this day.
Absolutely.
I wish I could find this boy, who I assume is now a man, and tell him that this is all wrong.
He's probably lying in a ditch somewhere.
This guy's probably got more issues than just how to eat a Kit Kat bar.
That's true.
It all stemmed from the Kit Kat bar.
This was such an important moment in your life that it helped to inspire you to launch CandyYumYumcom.
Is that right?
It absolutely did, yes.
I thought, I have to get the word out about how to eat a Kit Kat, and it just took off from there.
In your esteemed opinion, what is the correct way to eat a Kit Kat bar?
Okay.
You break off one finger, then...
This is a bit controversial, I understand, but I really think this is the best way to eat it.
Take your bottom teeth and scrape off all the chocolate from the outside of the Kit Kat.
From both sides of the Kit Kat?
Yes, from the entire perimeter of the Kit Kat.
This is radical.
This is a lot of work, too.
It is, but it's worth it.
It makes it last even longer.
And then you eat each layer individually.
How long does it take you to eat a four-bar Kit Kat?
I favor the experience.
Are you going to do this with every bar, or is every bar treated differently and kind of consumed in a different way?
I do, admittedly, I like to alternate it.
So I'll do the layer technique, then I'll eat an entire...
When you eat the entire finger, do you kind of break it in half and put both halves into your mouth?
Do you bite one half?
No.
Okay, what do you do?
I'd say I'd probably get three or four bites out of a finger.
Okay, all right.
Instead of that, why not just go buy some chocolate wafers?
And some chocolate.
And eat those.
It's an experience.
All right.
That's fair.
I mean, clearly you put a lot of thought into it.
I have.
So you insert the finger into your mouth and then pull it out while dragging your bottom teeth along the chocolate to scrape the chocolate off.
No, no.
I sort of nibble along the edges.
Oh, like a corn on the cob style?
Exactly.
Wow, okay.
That requires not only some patience, but some coordination.
Now Patty, I want to ask you tell me what is your pick for most overrated and most underrated Halloween candy.
I would say overrated would be Milky Ways.
I don't know.
They're great.
They're fine, but they're just kind of boring.
Is it because there's no nuts?
There's no crunch to it?
Absolutely.
See, I'm with you on the crunch thing.
I am a big crunch person.
But I feel like Milky Way is also not willing to go to the opposite extreme of pillowy softness like a Three Musketeer.
So I actually agree with you, Patty.
I think I love a Snickers and I love a Three Musketeers, but Milky Way is neither here nor there.
Absolutely.
I would say, I mean, because the question was underrated, overrated.
I would say Milky, because you often try to describe something as underrated or overrated, but every now and then something is just actually correctly rated.
And I think Milky Way is actually, it's rated absolutely correctly.
No, it's rated way at the top.
I mean, it's not at the top, though.
I mean, because, like, the most popular are, like, Snickers bars.
Gabe put it in the Holy Trinity, and you didn't argue.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay, so— You agree that it does belong in the Holy Trinity or just not?
Well, no, no, no.
No, I agree that it is, but I don't think it should be.
Right.
Okay, all right.
Now, I think that's a good pick.
I was struggling to think of my most overrated, and I'm with you.
I have a most underrated, too, but I want to hear yours first, Patty.
Okay, underrated.
I would say, hmm, I would say Take Five. which is a fairly new candy bar.
Yeah, Gabe spoke highly of that one, too.
Yeah, not a lot of people know about it, but it has everything.
It's got pretzels, caramel, peanut butter.
My pick for most underrated, I'm going to go $100,000.
Oh, nice one.
Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah, I would.
For underrated.
I'd probably go with either like a Heath or a Score, like any of the good, like really toffee chocolate bars I find to be pretty great.
That's also a good one.
Yeah, they're really tasty.
You get one or two in your bag.
Yeah, yeah, they're tricky to find.
I love to crunch them up and put them into my cheesecakes as well.
Works pretty well.
Do you have a most overrated mark?
You know, what I would probably say is most overrated, not because I dislike it, but just because I feel like it occurs far too much in a bag for the level of quality it is.
But I think any of the either Blow Pops or Tootsie Pops as far as any sucker that has a soft interior like that, I think they're fine.
We talked about them with Gabe, and I think they're better than he thinks they are.
But but I don't think they're they're as great as they are, at least when I was growing up.
Like they tend to show up in bags like I feel like way too much.
One more issue to cover with you, Patty, which which you raised with us.
You asked, is it possible to be too old to go trick or treating?
What's your take?
I will freely admit, one of the reasons I decided to have a child was so I could go trick or treating.
I'm just laying it out there.
I'm pretty sure that's one of the Dr. Spock-approved reasons for childbearing.
So at least I have an excuse.
But the kids that are like the 18- 19-, 20-year-olds that wear a baseball hat and a sports jersey and call it a costume.
That bothers me.
And I feel that that's not candy-worthy.
And you wrote, I think you wrote you had kind of a two-tiered system of what you offer at your house.
I do.
I like to have little bags stuffed with all the top tier candy bars for all the cute little kids.
And then for the older kids that can't be bothered with a costume, I clean out my pantry and distract my husband nuts.
But I put in tea bags, the granola bars that nobody wants, you know.
Tea bags?
Yeah, I know.
I know.
It's wrong.
I hope you don't give him like a canned pineapple or something.
Stranger stuff has happened.
I know my house is going to get egged some year.
Yeah, I was about to say because some of the older teens they tend to be less shy about expressing their disapproval through semi-violent acts.
That's true.
I know.
I know.
It's a risk I'm willing to take.
I'm going to go so far as to say that there's no minimum or maximum age for trick-or-treating.
I think everyone should be able to have candy on Halloween if they want it.
It's not so much like ageism that I hear from you.
It's kind of like, hey, if you're going to go trick-or-treating, bother to put on a costume.
You know what?
You're right.
If these older kids did come with a full-fledged costume, I might be more forgiving.
How do you feel about, let's say, like my friend Allison, who took her kids when they were eight months old and couldn't even eat candy, took them out and took her to dinner for about five hours that she could get a pillowcase full of candy?
But she did dress them up.
She dressed them up in very cute costumes.
So there was effort.
How do you feel about that?
I did it, too.
I couldn't wait to get my son in a costume at 10 months old.
Yeah, I think that sounds perfectly fine.
Perfectly fine.
Patty Woods from CandyYumYum.com, thanks so much.
Happy Halloween.
Thank you, gentlemen.
You, too.
All right, folks, well, that just about does it for this week.
Thank you so much to the eaters who joined us as special guests today.
We hope this episode helped you to prepare for the wonderful day coming up which, of course, is Halloween.
Happy Halloween to everyone.
As always, check out everything we're doing at sporkful.com.
You can find our blog, our videos, various social media things.
We love hearing from you, whatever way you want to do it.
Obviously, Patty and Gabe.
They sent an email to thesporkful at gmailcom, but we'd love to hear your comments on Facebook and on the blog and your tweets.
You can connect with all of it at sporkful.com.
All right, until next time, I'm Mark Garrison.
And I'm Dan Pashman, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
This reheat was produced by The team that produces The Sporkful.
Today includes me, along with managing producer And senior producer.
Our engineer is Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
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And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
