As I discovered while doing my Great Chocolate Experiments, there are very few candies that aren’t improved by a good coating of chocolate. (Other food products, however, are a different story.) Chocolate-covered marshmallows are my sentimental favorite, but I’m also fond of chocolate-covered gummies – sometimes it’s nice to have a denser, more substantial texture to contrast with the crisp chocolate coating.
Unfortunately, chocolate-coated gummies are a lot harder to find than chocolate-coated marshmallows – I can name Muddy Bears, the chocolate-coated jellies in Bridge Mixture, and Canada’s Big Turk bar. And now, I can add Joyva Jell Rings to that short list.
Manufactured by Brooklyn’s Joyva Corp., these raspberry-flavored, chocolate-covered jelly rings appear to be completely vegan – they’re thickened with agar-agar, a seaweed derivative, rather than the more usual gelatin, and the dark chocolate coating contains no dairy products.
The sleeve contains three rings, maybe an inch and a half in diameter, on a little cardboard tray. They have a nice, floral raspberry scent, very light and tangy, mixed with the scent of the chocolate. The coating’s a little broken on some of the pieces, but like all of my All Candy Expo samples, these have been jostled around a fair bit and they seem to have held up pretty well overall.
The jelly has a nice floral raspberry note, quite mild – not too tangy, not too sweet. The chocolate coating is pretty thin, and neither sweet nor overwhelmingly bitter – it’s a nice match for the jelly, though it doesn’t seem like particularly good chocolate overall (it’s a little chalky). Altogether, they have a subtle, not-too-sweet flavor that reminds me of the nuanced taste of a good chocolate-raspberry dessert rather than the blast of sugary artificialness you get from a lot of gummy candies. They do seem high in calories for what they are, though – 190 cal for the three little rings.
The texture of these is unexpectedly soft, for both the jelly and chocolate (though it is really hot here right now). The soft chocolate provides a nice bite without a lot of crispness. Altogether, they’re just firm enough to have a toothsome texture, without being too soft – if this were pasta, I’d call it “al dente.â€
Overall, I found these quite an enjoyable experience. I’d never heard of Joyva before, but the Jell Rings made me want to try and find their other products, which is probably about the highest compliment you can give.
you never saw those before, I use to eat boxes of those as a kid, oh and they come in orange too, yum
July 30th, 2009 at 8:03 pmI love these… The company which makes them also makes honey sesame crunch
August 28th, 2009 at 11:45 pm