Marnie Shure For Taste Of Home
Marnie Shure For Taste Of Home
Published on Oct. 31, 2024
This season, we’re tasting all the Thanksgiving-themed food we can find. Now let’s gobble gobble.
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Thanksgiving shouldn’t be relegated to a single day of feasting. This traditional cuisine can be enjoyed throughout autumn, and food and beverage companies have found numerous clever ways to evoke Thanksgiving flavors in limited-time seasonal products to keep the party going (anyone remember Brach’s Turkey Dinner Candy Corn?).
To figure out which product reigns supreme this Thanksgiving, we assessed each one according to a few criteria. One, does the product taste like the Thanksgiving food it’s replicating? Is it flavorful and interesting? Does it have the craveability factor that keeps us coming back for more? Join us as we rank these Thanksgiving-themed foods of 2024.
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Marnie Shure For Taste Of Home
5. Lester’s Fixins Pumpkin Pie Soda
The novelty soda brand Lester’s Fixins has no shortage of odd flavors: Bacon, Peanut Butter & Jelly and Buffalo Wing are some of the quirky sips sold in 12-ounce glass bottles. The Pumpkin Pie flavor doesn’t taste nearly as unpleasant as I was bracing for, and it’s significantly more like pumpkin pie than Jelly Belly’s attempt (more on that later). Each sip offers prominent cinnamon notes, and the pure cane sugar from which the soda is made suggests something baked at home from scratch—at least as much as a bright orange soft drink can possibly suggest that. This sits last because it’s the last thing I’d reach for a second time, but I have no ill will toward Lester or his fixins.
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Marnie Shure For Taste Of Home
4. Jelly Belly Holiday Favorites Jelly Beans
If any brand was going to release a package full of cacophonous seasonal flavors, it’s Jelly Belly, which has dedicated an entire segment of its business to tricking us into eating confounding beans. By contrast, this Holiday Favorites bag is pretty tame, containing Egg Nog, Candy Cane, Hot Chocolate, Pumpkin Pie and Cranberry Sauce flavors. For our purposes, the latter two are the Thanksgiving flavors to investigate.
The Pumpkin Pie candy is almost laughably off-base, suggesting nothing close to pumpkin or, indeed, any other particular flavor. It’s flatly syrupy and tastes more like Circus Peanuts than anything else. The Cranberry Sauce jelly bean, though, is unquestionably the best Jelly Belly bean I have ever eaten. It’s immediately assertive, and while it tastes more sweet than tart, it has a deep fruity flavor with none of the typical sickly sweet aftertaste of other jelly beans. Jelly Belly, if you’re willing to sell me a 5-lb. sack of Cranberry Sauce beans, name your price.
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Marnie Shure For Taste Of Home
3. Good & » …