Sugar Savvy

To some Hanukkah is a celebration of religious freedom, a festival of lights, a time to light the menorah and share a special holiday with friends and family. 

To The Chocolate Box, however, this ancient Jewish festival is all about the chocolate coins.  Coin-shaped chocolates, wrapped in gold or silver foil, called gelt (Yiddish for money), and usually packed in little net bags are the traditional tokens for gambling with when you play driedel, a top game.  Win none, win all, win half or put one in, depending on what you spin.  The idea is not to eat your stash before the game is over (which is when everyone has either lost or eaten up their own pile of gelt).

Not everyone plays with gelt, of course.  Some use pennies, toothpicks or other candies.  But to me, it just wouldn’t be Hanukkah with the golden gelt.  The only problem?  The chocolate always tastes terrible.

I’ve had versions made by American, Israeli and European manufacturers.  I’ve bought them by the pound in fancy candy stores and by the two-pound bag in the drug store.  I’ve had dark chocolate and milk chocolate.  I’ve played with gelt in foil wrappings that mimicked poker chips, American coins and Euros.  It didn’t matter what I bought, they all tasted stale and metallic and were so brittle they broke as soon as you unwrapped them.  (Except for the year I made my own and wrapped them in aluminum foil.  Tasted great but didn’t much look like gelt.)

So when I walked into my local See’s Candies store and saw a stash of glistening gold-foil chocolate coins, I was ecstatic.  For Hanukkah this year (which starts at sundown tonight), we would have gelt without guilt. 

Tasting Report:

Description:  I bought my gelt in the See’s Candies store where it was sold by the four-ounce yellow net bag.  It contained candy coins in two sizes, one coin about an inch and half in diameter, the other an inch, nicely wrapped in gold foil embossed with American coin images.  The embossed image could be seen on the unwrapped candy, which was a rich milk chocolate color.  On the website, See’s sells the candy in a one-pound box. 

Taste:  In See’s We Trust?  Maybe not.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, but this gelt was not that good.  It had a rich and creamy taste like See’s other milk chocolate products, but it also had a very stale and metallic after note.  Maybe it has something to do with being wrapped in foil.  It could also have something to do with how thin the chocolate has to be molded to make the coins.  It was better than any other chocolate gelt I can recall (except my homemade), but it still wasn’t that good.

See’s Trivia:  Rather than some random See’s facts, I thought I’d give you directions on how to play dreidel.  Don’t have a dreidel?  Download a paper pattern one here.  Don’t know how to play?  For a good explanation of the rules, check here.

Ingredients:  Sugar, cocoa butter, milk, chocolate, soy lecithin, vanillin.  It is a certified kosher product.

Well Fed Network Rating:  On a scale of one to 10 as compared to other See’s Candies’ products, I would rate this gelt a four.  At first, my reaction to the candy was even more negative, but I think that was partly due to my disappointment.  I tried it again a few hours later and found it was not quite as bad as I had first thought.  However, since most gelt is being bought just because it is gelt and probably not being critically evaluated when it is consumed, maybe what it tastes like is not that important.  Go buy or make a dreidel and give it a spin.