Candy Is Dandy Gets Scholarly About Sweets
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite candy bar, though my go-to answer whenever someone asks is Reese’s Fast Break. I love the salty peanut butter, sweet nougat, and snappy chocolate coating. I loved (and lost) Reese’s Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Cups, too, and I’m also a big fan of an Abba-Zaba (although these are harder to eat now that I have fillings). Generally, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but when I get a craving, it isn’t satisfied until I get my teeth around something sweet. However, when I chat with Candy Is Dandy podcast co-host Daniel Zafran, who has a big sweet tooth, I can’t help but get caught up in his almost academic reverence for understanding, deconstructing, tasting, and rating various types of candy.
“The longer we do this, and the more I think about it, my mom is obsessed with chocolate, and my grandma was beyond obsessed with chocolate because her dad owned a candy store in New York in the 1930s, I guess, something like that,” he tells me over Zoom. “So she was always constantly eating the candy out of that store. But towards the end of her life, when she was living with my parents, she would just take a 1lb bag of Hershey's Kisses into her room and just sit there and eat it. And it definitely got passed down through the generations.”
Candy Is Dandy occupies a unique space in food podcasts because it’s the only—as far as Zafran and his co-hosts are aware—podcast that focuses exclusively on candy. New episodes are released on the first and third Wednesday of every month, with each one focusing on a specific candy. Zafran, Greg Gonzalez, and Beto Sistos take turns choosing a candy, which they’ll research the history of and present to their co-hosts before all three taste and review it.
“Greg and Betos oftentimes bring something in and they have said it’s brought them back to [a memory like], ‘I was with my mom on a road trip,’ but I have yet to have that emotional breakdown,” Zafran shares (though that could change if he ever found a mint-condition box of Butterfinger BB’s). As for whether his tastes have changed, which could impact the nostalgia of certain flavors, he says, “I don't know if it's me that's changed, or a lot of these candies have changed. We've done several episodes where someone will bring something in and say, ‘I think this is my favorite candy.’ And then we try it and something is different. I definitely still have the candy tastes of a child. I really like very sweet, chocolatey things. But I know that several of these candies have openly said they've changed their recipes, or maybe some have just stopped trying as much. But I think for the most part, I still eat the same childish things.”
Now that he co-hosts Candy Is Dandy, Zafran says he finds himself reaching for candy at the grocery store, in doctor’s offices, and when he travels more than ever before. He admits that less-sweet candies, like many of the treats from Southeast Asian countries, don’t appeal to him. This is partially because he leans more toward chocolatey candies, which aren’t as common in that area of the world.
“I love chocolate and mint, although apparently, that’s not the majority opinion. That is shocking to me,” he says. “It’s so good. An Andes Mint or a York Peppermint Pattie? Those are objectively good things. But chocolate with peanut butter is probably my favorite. Chocolate and strawberry is also very good.”
I couldn’t eat chocolate for almost a decade, which I didn’t share with Zafran during our interview, but frankly, he’s right. Chocolate and mint is divine (even though as a kid, I thought mint was “spicy,” which prompted my mom to tell me things were minty if she didn’t want me to eat them), as is chocolate and peanut butter, as is chocolate and strawberries. I don’t reach for chocolate as frequently as I reach for a sweet application of peanut butter or a classic cookie dough moment, but Zafran has a point.
The Candy Is Dandy hosts
That said, his inclination toward chocolate doesn’t necessarily inform his choices for Candy Is Dandy.
“Greg tends to go with old-time candies, like Look! bars and Junior Mints and stuff like that. Beto likes to pick things that have 60 different flavors and then make us try all of them in order,” Zafran explains. “A lot of people lately have been sending us things from Canada or from England, things that you can't really get in the United States. So a lot of times I go with that so that those won't melt by the time we get to trying them.
“But I did consciously—from the beginning—try to focus on a lot of international things. I know we have people listening around the world who can't get a 3 Musketeers in New Zealand or whatever. I tend to lean towards things that are maybe harder for us to get, but easier for other people around the world to get.”
Unfortunately, many candies that could be featured in an episode of the podcast aren’t because tracking down the history is nearly impossible. Things get discontinued, sold, bought, renamed, repackaged, and reformulated all the time. In fact, just looking up Abba-Zaba bars for this piece led me down a rabbit hole of candy history (partially because I had confused them with Whatchamacallit bars, another candy I liked as a kid).
“Every time we delve into something, it's like, well, ‘I didn't expect this to be the story of it.’ One thing that has always stuck in my head was when we did Butterfinger. One of the early marketing gimmicks for Butterfinger was that they would drop them out of airplanes over crowds of people, and people would fight each other to get Butterfingers,” Zafran says. “And maybe this is too sad of a story, but a kid won a contest to be on one of these flights, and that kid grew up to be the guy that flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The first time he was ever in an airplane was one of the Butterfinger publicity drops.”
During our interview, I noted that the Butterfinger-to-atomic-bomb pipeline is shorter than you’d think. I’ve since learned that Ferrero, the company that makes Butterfinger, has a factory in Israel, which has been committing nonstop genocide against the Palestinian people since October 2023 (this time). The only thing Butterfinger can’t stop laying a finger on is war crimes.
Zafran thought Butterfinger was his favorite candy until he analyzed it on Candy Is Dandy—a realization he says was embarrassing because he “came in so confident.” After two years of recording, he has yet to find the “perfect candy,” which would earn five “cavities” (the show’s star-rating system) from him. He and his co-hosts have realized “fun-sized” candy bars are sometimes better than their full-sized siblings and he has fond memories of the episode where they tasted Ghirardelli chocolate squares, but describes the Jelly Belly episode as “one of the worst experiences of my life.”
“I had always maintained that Reese's Peanut Butter Cups was the perfect candy, but when you're sitting there basically in a vacuum eating it and thinking about it, it's really like, ‘This is kind of gross.’ What's good about a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is that it's kind of gross. So I did rate that really high, but it's not perfect. It's bad chocolate. It's bad peanut butter, but together, for some reason, it works so well,” he says. “There could be an artisanal, perfect peanut butter cup that has the finest chocolate, but it might not be as good [as a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup]. A lot of people, complain to me: ‘Your scores don't make any sense! You're describing something as bad and you're giving it a good score. You're describing it as good and giving it a bad score.’ Sometimes bad is good, and sometimes high quality is bad.”
For now, Zafran is clinging to Peanut M&M’s as his favorite candy, which have yet to be analyzed on the podcast: “I'm kind of scared that I'm going to have that taken away from me again.” But neither Gonzalez nor Sistos will introduce this classic to the group. “It’s got to be on my terms,” Zafran says.
Candy Is Dandy releases episodes twice a month wherever you cast your pods. Follow the show on YouTube and TikTok for short-form “candy autopsy” and history videos, and follow @CandyIsDandyPod on social media for updates.
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