Pure Orange Gummy Candy

Note: Blogger appears to have eaten the pictures for this post, and I'm afraid I no longer have the originals so the best I can do is a screenshot of the product from Kanro's site. Sorry about that!

One of the bad points about writing this blog is that I rarely get a chance to return to the items I sincerely enjoyed. There's only so much junk you can eat, and despite my liberal sampling of various sweets, I am trying to be very careful about how much food of suspect nutritional value that I consume. Most of the time, I'm eating small portions and letting my husband finish the rest or eating the remainder through time.

I really like the Pure line of gummy sweets. I've only had the blueberry kind that I reviewed last October once or twice since then, even though I liked it a lot. There are a several other flavors, but none of them grabbed me enough to place trying them at the head of a long line of other curious foods until I saw these navel orange gummies. I hate oranges, but I love orange-flavored things. This is one of those rare occasions where I dislike the real fruit and like things flavored like it. Generally, it's the other way around (especially for bananas and strawberries).

These gummies, brought to us by Kanro, are sprinkled in the same sort of pixie dust coating as all the other Pure gummies. The coating is a sort of citric acid powder combined with what seems to be sugar. It adds a certain tart and sweet quality to the candy. The candies are clean to hold and firm, but soft and easy to bite into.

These taste just like orange juice. There's a strong hit of navel orange flavor. The sourness seems to ramp up the intensity of the sweetness. My husband says he finds these super sweet, but I find them merely super intense in the best possible way. I could easily eat the entire bag in one imprudent sitting, but I try to keep consumption down to no more than three 12-calorie jellies per day. Interestingly, there is paprika included as an ingredient in these, but you can't taste it at all. It's clearly included for color only.

All of the Pure gummies that I've seen are in 46 gram (1.6 oz.) bags for about a dollar (100 yen), but I think there are probably other sizes out there. If you'd like to see the array of flavors available at any given time, you can visit the Pure Pure Garden web site. It's in Japanese, but if you click on the pictures of the bags at the bottom, the illustrations of the fruit make it clear what types you can get.

There are few snacks I've had of which I can say I'd want to continue to buy them when I return to the U.S. This is one of them. I just love that sour and sweet mix with the real fruit flavor of these gummies.