Gummy candy
Confection
Top 10 pairings
Gummy candy is the broad family of soft, chewy, fruit-flavoured sweets set with a gelling agent into springy, translucent shapes — gummy bears and worms, wine gums, gumdrops, jelly babies, fruit pastilles and Turkish-style pastes. Built from sugar, glucose syrup and gelatine (or a vegetarian gel such as pectin or starch), they are among the most universally recognised confections on earth, sold everywhere from pick-and-mix counters to pharmacy vitamin aisles.
Picking a good onedrag
Glossy, springy, looseFused, weeping, furred
Dulled and faintly tackyEveryday bestThe all-rounder: pick-and-mix eating, lunchboxes, or pressed onto iced cakes and bakes, where a little cling is no bad thing.
Press one, then pull two apartSprings back slowly; two pieces cling a little but part cleanly with a pull
The surface in the lightDull and matte, the polish worn off and the moulded edges softened and rounded
Smell the open bagStill fruity but flat and generic; you have to put your nose in to find it
The bag and the labelA sealed supermarket bag or a fresh pick-and-mix scoop, pieces still moving freely