Size Matters: Reese's Pieces-Stuffed Cups, Regular vs. Big Cup

The Allure of the Tender Crunch
You see it in the Napoleon.  You see it in Sugar-Creme Wafers; in baklava, in Charms Blow Pops, and in extra-crispy fried chicken.  Humans love the sensation of breaking through a crunchy shell, or through multiple layers of crunch, in order to reach a tender treasure inside.  It may not be the pleasantest task to inquire as to why: perhaps some predatory common ancestor was given an evolutionary edge by enjoying the intermingling of crunchy bones with succulent meat, and one less impediment to high-protein nourishment led to differential reproductive success. Whatever the case may have been, today even vegetarians and vegans can indulge this desire for conflicting textures, and its persistence doubtless explains the appearance on the market of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups stuffed with crunchy Reese's Pieces.  Crucially, these are available in two sizes, the traditional petite size and a fattened up "Big Cup", and we'll discover that this actually produces two very different tastes.

There they stand, clothed in chocolate armor but vulnerable to the inevitable crushing chomp.

Peanut Butter Inside of Peanut Butter?
It's easy enough to accept the appeal of crunchy nuggets inside of peanut-butter cups, but it seems only natural to wonder why the filling should also be peanut-butter based.  Why not chocolate pieces, or crunchy rice, or pretzels?  Isn't peanut butter redundant?  I asked this question myself and it drove me to answer once and for all a question that has always bugged me: is the peanut butter filling inside Reese's Pieces the same as what's inside the peanut butter cup?  They'd always tasted different to me, but I wondered if that was because of the influence of the shell's distinct flavor and texture.  To be sure, the shell would have to be removed and the peanut butter within tasted on its own.  The process of doing this is tasty enough to undertake, albeit a little offputting to describe; the shelled candies just need to be popped into the mouth and gently sucked upon like a fragile hard candy until only tender nibs of peanut filling remain.

The briefest of visual inspections suggests that the filling in Reese's Pieces is distinct from that of their peanut butter cups.  The cup filling is coarse, grainy, even a little sandy.  The contours of the pieces are tight and crisp, their surface smooth and refined, suggesting almost a peanut-flavored white chocolate. And that's basically what they are.

As the photo above shows, the two fillings look very different, and the taste reflects this.  The cup contains a loosely packed peanut-butter fudge, sandy, salty, and nutty, reflecting the copious presence of coarse-ground peanut butter.  The pieces taste more like chocolate, al dente to the first bite 
but gradually softening in the warmth of the mouth and melting away smoothly.  This answers the question of why Reese's would put their pieces inside of their peanut-butter filling.  It introduces yet another texture into the mix, bringing the taste count to four.  First you have the milk chocolate, then peanut-butter filling, then the crunchy shell, and finally the smooth, almost chocolatey pieces.  Wheels within peanut-butter wheels.

Why the Big Cup Wins
This ambitious flavor and texture packing scheme does succeed, but with an important caveat.  If you run out to the drugstore and just pick up the regular-size peanut-butter cups with the pieces inside, you'll be sorely disappointed because there isn't enough room inside a standard-issue peanut-butter cup for all of this interplay of parts to be contained.  Even though the Reese's Pieces are miniaturized for this hybrid candy, they're still too large to easily fit within the chocolate shell, and so you'll find very few whole pieces in the small-size cups. Mainly you get sherds and slivers of shell, but few identifiable remains.  The interior of the normal-size cups looks like a careless archaeological dig of a ransacked city, all tiny scraps and fragments with no intact objects.

The compressed space inside a normally-sized Reese's cup leaves no room for Reese's Pieces to fit, whereas the roomy interior of the big cup allows the different elements to arrange themselves harmoniously.

The Big Cup is much better designed for the task at hand.  Like a practical minivan, it has plenty of room for all the critical passengers.  The peanut-butter filling piles up light and fluffy, the milk chocolate retreats to the outer edges and plays a supporting role while numerous little gems of crunchy, melty peanut-butter candy sit nestled inside, ready for the Mixmaster that is the human mouth to tumble them all together, crunchy meeting creamy, sandy swimming with smooth, as somewhere deep within us, our tree-swinging simian ancestor smiles.

On the left side, you see a very rare occurrence: an intact Reese's Piece within one of the small cups.  On the right, you see that multiple sightings of these full pieces are common in the Big Cup.  You can also see from this cross-sectional view just how dramatic is the texture difference between the smooth and refined filling of the pieces and the almost gravelly filling that's traditionally present in the cups.

Conclusions
Pieces within the cups are a big idea and they require a big canvas for their execution.  These Reese's Pieces-filled Big Cups may cost extra money, but it's go big or go home.

Coffee Nut M&Ms and the Opening of the American Palate

The Tastes of Americans Have Matured
(No, Really)
The past few years have seen a real explosion in the number of new M&Ms flavors on offer: pretzel-filled M&Ms, crispy rice M&Ms, M&Ms flavored with peanut butter, mint, raspberries, almonds, dulce de leche and, if the internet is to be believed, even candy apple and pecan pie.  You might have thought that Mars would be at the point of creative exhaustion, but instead they've struck out in a pleasingly complex and adult direction with their new Coffee Nut M&Ms.

Who knows how they will fare in the kiddie market?  After all, children have their own laptops and tablets, so perhaps they have a taste for strong-brewed coffee too.  But it's hard not to think of these as aimed squarely at the adult professional.

This new coffee nut flavor comes to us by virtue of having won a consumer preference contest, beating out two other peanut-based candidates, Honey Nut and Chili Nut.  That either Coffee Nut or Chili Nut were viable candidates is a reflection of the growing sophistication of consumer preferences.  Two decades ago, neither flavor would likely have been possible.  Back then, mild, inoffensive milk chocolate dominated the American market, and pairing chocolate with assertive flavors like dark-roasted coffee or spicy chilis would have seemed too risky.  But two decades of Starbucks expansion has created a taste for the burnt and bitter notes of dark-roasted beans. Plus, the growth of boutique chocolates with high cacao content and intense flavor pairings have given large manufacturers the courage to experiment with high odds of success.

The flavorless shells (yes, I sucked on 'em just to be sure) come in three themed colors—call them "dark espresso", "just enough creamer", and "accident with the CoffeeMate."

Layers of Flavor and Texture
It's really striking how subtle and complicated the flavors and textures in these candies are.  Once the teeth puncture the thin shell of porcelained sugar, the palate is immediately saturated with the bittersweet and burnt notes of whole coffee beans.  I had to do a quick double check of the ingredient list to make sure there weren't actually real coffee grounds mixed in with the chocolate.  Apparently there aren't, only "natural coffee flavor," but you may find yourself doing a double take too.  Nominally, the chocolate may be milk chocolate (there is some cocoa butter listed) but the taste impression is of dark chocolate, probably because the dark roast bean flavor is itself so similar to that of bittersweet chocolate.  But we aren't done with the "dark" flavors yet.

It's easy to forget how literally big the peanut taste is in these M&Ms.  Seemingly taking up just as much space as the chocolate itself, it's amazing the chocolate-coffee flavor has the impact it does.

The taste of these mocha-spiked chocolates is so intense because they combine three roasted flavors: roasted coffee beans, fermented and roasted cocoa beans, and roasted peanuts, all of which reinforce one another.  Coffee purists might argue that hazelnuts would have been the better choice, paired as they often are with coffee, but peanuts are cheaper and, in the company of all these other dominating tastes, quite sufficient in their nuttiness to complete the flavor impression that Mars was trying for here.  All of those volatile oils and rare essences deep within the two beans and one nutty legume twirl around together, lingering on the tongue and in the nostrils long after the contents have been devoured.

Conclusions
A skeptical customer viewing these on the shelf might have expected this to be a compromise project, along the lines of General Foods International Coffees.  Meek chocolate mixed with a whimper of coffee and a weak tribute to nuttiness from a puny peanut.  One sample will prove such a doubter, even one with dulled tastebuds, wrong.  Highly recommended.

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Major Brownie Points: Chewy Chips Ahoy Brownie-Filled Cookies

Food Science and Gonzo Baking
To the untrained eye, the Chips Ahoy® brand represents an authentic product line, a variety of chocolate chip cookies incorporating assorted flavor variations but essentially hewing close to a central identity of chocolate chip cookiedom.  But closer inspection reveals the truth: Chips Ahoy® is an experimental product development platform, a bakery skunkworks devoted to testing ideas from the conventional to the bizarre, often masking the radical nature of the experiment by hiding behind the familiar safety of the Chips Ahoy name.  If Nabisco were to release a soft citrus cookie with lemon-lime chips and a gelatinous lime-meringueish filling all on its own, a revolted public would flee the store in disgust.  But if you were to call them Chips Ahoy's Ghostbusters Key-Lime Ectoblasts, the same consumers would probably shrug and throw them in the cart just to try them out.

Limited edition flavors like these come along all the time and are usually here today and gone tomorrow.  Nabisco is promising the technological marvel of a brownie inside a cookie. But is this just another lame gimmick?  

The Turducken of Cookies?
This can-do try anything spirit yields a mixed cookie bag and in a future review we'll examine the mealy, grainy, perplexing fiasco that is the Chips Ahoy S'mores cookie.  But today we'll talk about one of the unqualified successes, the Chewy Chips Ahoy Brownie-filled cookies.  To start with, the mere appearance of the cookie is downright magical, for its completely convincing facade of a normal chocolate chip cookie turns out to be merely a micro-thin mirage of a wrapper, inside which is a super-intense double-chocolatey brownie filling.  In this era of 3-D printing, it's not hard to imagine how this might be done.  On the assembly line, an extruder would squeeze out a thin bottom layer of conventional chocolate chip cookie dough, a second extruder would squirt a dollop of brownie batter on top of that, and a final third extruder then ejects a layer of cookie batter camouflage to enrobe the rest.  But even after understanding the technology behind the feat, the sight of a credible brownie tucked behind a film-thin layer of cookie is kind of amazing.

Nothing about their outward appearance would suggest anything unusual.  Going in, I was convinced that the supposed brownie interior would be a thin, unobtrusive and flavorless brown strip, the very same cookie dough stained a different color.

The Brownie Is Real
It wasn't that long ago that the Food Kingdom had a post on the extreme difficulty of mass-manufacturing a high-quality prepackaged brownie.  How ironic that such a brownie should finally arrive encased inside a cookie.  Is the secret to be found in the protective cookie shell?  Whatever the reason, the brownie within the cookie coating is everything most mass market brownies are not: dark, deep, fudgy, almost European in its commitment to a high-cacao-content true chocolate taste.  If you recall craving double-chocolate cookies as a kid, this is that next-level triple-chocolate taste you've been waiting for.

Proving the doubters wrong, this fascinating experiment actually delivers what it promises.  You can see that the brownie filling really is of a different texture and consistency from the crumbly, buttery-tasting cookie on the outside. And although the brownie dominates the overall flavor of this hybrid cookie, the golden exterior is a true cookie, not a flavorless casing.

And Yet So Is the Cookie
The only drawback to the assertiveness of the brownie's chocolatey flavor is the way it dominates and overshadows the flavor of the cookie that's wrapped around it.  I had just assumed that Nabisco put very little effort into that part of the cookie since it's only there to set up the power-packed surprise that's inside it.  In the interest of due diligence, I did finally start nibbling around the perimeter of these cookies, just to see what the golden bits on the edges tasted like.   Surprisingly, it's truly a well-crafted chocolate chip cookie with a blonde buttery flavor, a semi-crisp/semi-chewy texture, and the best overall taste profile of any chocolate chip cookie in the Chips Ahoy® line.   Although the subtle golden brown-sugar notes of this outer cookie are completely overwhelmed in terms of what one consciously tastes when biting into these cookies, I can only assume that in some way they provide balance and complexity to the overall composite flavor profile.  They should make a cookie that uses only this batter, but of course they almost certainly won't.

Conclusions
Bold, persistent experimentation does not always yield perfect results, but expect Chips Ahoy to keep unveiling new and interesting novelty flavors.  And hope that this one stays on the shelf for a good long while.

Chick fil-A's Egg White Grill - But for Want of a Muffin...

Tyranny of the Weakest Link
"What I could really go for now is a whole-wheat English Muffin, with no butter" said noone...ever.  And yet Chic fil-A has jumped into the healthy breakfast arena with a product predicated on just such a fantasy: the new Egg White Grill, a sandwich so blandly named (as has always been Chic Fil-A's wont) that it shall henceforth be known to most customers, for as long as it stays on offer, as "#3 with small coffee."  And it is this whole wheat English muffin that stifles an otherwise promising dish in its cradle.

This is a shame because every other part of the sandwich is expertly executed.  If one were to judge the sandwich by its components like the blind men groping the proverbial elephant, one would be prepared to describe it differently.  Tasting the warm, smoky, generously portioned, and attractively seasoned chicken breast section, you'd proclaim "this is a juicy, satisfying, and exciting new way to enjoy chicken for breakfast."  If you sampled the slick folds of fried egg white, you'd say "nobody will ever miss the yolk!"  If you ran your pinky through the semi-liquified cheese slice that, upon melting, coats the muffin and the egg white slab like unctuous finger-paint, and took a lick, you might say "who needs butter when this thing is slathered with queso dip?"

And you would be right.  But all that effort is undone by the aggressively unpleasant whole wheat English muffin that sucks up moisture and snuffs out flavor like a pile of sand.

The early autumn sun rises on the first of three tastings of the Egg White Grill.  It looks like a reasonably proportioned sandwich, the top bun raised aloft on grilled chicken and egg whites draped with downfolded wings of American cheese.  But the high rounded dome of whole wheat dryness is an ominous sign.

What's Wrong with Whole Wheat English Muffins?
Trusting your sandwich to a whole wheat breadstuff isn't so unreasonable in principle; it's not like dark breads are inherently unpalatable.  I can genuinely enjoy nicely buttered wheat berry toast with black coffee.  Ham on pumpernickel is delightful.  And the most elemental whole wheat products, breakfast shredded wheat and Triscuits, are American classics.  So whole wheat per se is not the problem.  But there are nonetheless certain products where whole wheat's presence is disastrous.  Think whole wheat pasta and you start to get the idea.  And whole wheat's influence on English Muffins is similarly insidious.

One primary reason is that a glutenous stretchiness is part of an English Muffin's appeal, and whole wheat flour contains much less gluten, so this bread doesn't have the same stretch and chew.  It's more like the limp foam stuffing inside a cheap couch, spongy and moisture-neutralizing.  And whereas the glutenous dough of a white muffin will trap steam within its microscopic bubbles, creating a crisp moistness when toasted, the whole wheat muffin seems to contain deserts within deserts.  Then there's the flavor, some strange combination of sawdust and old bookbindings, mildewy, dark and stale, the antithesis of a morning brightener.  It tastes like rotted attic planks smell.

The second tasting within the Food Kingdom studios, made the dry, bland taste even harder to understand.  Look at that cheesy ooze!  But we're staring straight at this sandwich's assets.  The liabilities that undermine this sandwich are hidden from view.

Quantities and Ratios
The taste-nullifying properties of the whole wheat muffin might not figure so large if there weren't so much of it.  Fast-food leaders like Wendy's have long known that the bread in a sandwich is meant to be unobtrusive and should serve mainly as a vehicle for allowing the hands to convey the sandwich fillings into the eater's mouth without cancelling out the featured flavors.  If the wheat muffin could have been made, say 30% thinner, this would probably be a different review.  But an examination of the Egg White Grill's cross section reveals the fundamental flaw, that the muffin itself is almost twice the thickness of the chicken, egg, and cheese put together.  The photo below tells the sad tale.

This view from the third tasting (I really wanted to like this and give it every chance!) really clarifies the issue.  The cheesy egg and the chicken with genuine grilled taste are delicious and they are provided in reasonable quantities, but not relative to the over-apportionment of whole wheat bread. Dusted with powdery residue, and seemingly growing like a fungus, this nasty muffin is choking the life out of its fillings.

All in the Name of Nutrition
Using an abominable whole wheat English Muffin in place of a tasty traditional one is all the more pointless when you consider the nutrition facts, easily obtainable through a web search.  Despite its whole wheat pedigree, the Chick Fil-A muffin actually contains zero grams of dietary fiber.  As for carbs, it supplies 16 grams as opposed to the 26 grams contained in a standard Thomas's English Muffin.  But put that in the context of the standard recommendations of daily carbohydrate intake.  For a person on a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet, the USDA recommends between 225 to 326 grams of carbs per day.  Even for a restricted diet of 1,500 calories, the recommendation is for between 170 to 245 grams per day.  So the additional 10 carbs supplied by a white English muffin would only represent 1/17th of a person's carbohydrate allowance for the day under the most restrictive conditions.  The Food Kingdom recommends getting a breakfast sandwich you really enjoy.  The piece of your soul that yearns for a good breakfast will thank you.