Slop Rocks

pop rocks but make them real sloppy

Happy Valentine’s Day, clowns!

Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper would all like to wish you all a beautiful day. In fact, they’re offering to be your Valentines. Those little shits are the best.

There’s one particular subject that I’ve been asked to tackle for Food is Stupid multiple times now, and that’s the concept of Pop Rocks. Pop Rocks are pretty fucked up, if you think about it.

They basically consist of sugary crystals that you pour into your mouth, and once you do that, the little pebbles explode in your head. All you’ll be able to hear after that is a cacophony of clicking noises directly in your brain, and you will regret having eaten them. Then you will immediately eat some more.

Multiple people have asked me if I could try making them at home. Davida’s sister-in-law Mandy (hi, Mandy!), once suggested I make soy sauce-flavored Pop Rocks, and most recently, my pal Echo asked a more general, “Can you make savory Pop Rocks?” question.

Echo’s inquiry is what got me thinking about the subject again, so everyone thank them. I’d like to plug their bookshop, Literati Press Comics and Novels, which helps foster the creativity of writers local to the Oklahoma area, especially including comics creators. You can browse their shop here.

I found a recipe for homemade Pop Rocks online from a site called Science Notes.

I figured that if I was going to do a cool experiment at home, I might as well depend on a site with the word “science” in the name. The ingredients were pretty simple: I’d need baking soda, citric acid (which I bought online), multiple sources of sugar, food coloring, and some sort of flavoring.

When it came to the flavoring agent, I figured dumping something water-based in might somehow screw up the candy making process, so I went to the dry spices aisle to get some ideas.

That’s when my eyes landed on some sloppy Joe dry seasoning, which I didn’t even know existed. Right into the basket it went.

“Slop Rocks,” whispered Davida, absentmindedly. My head exploded.

The first step in the candy-making process was mixing together two cups of plain ol’ sugar, a half cup of light corn syrup, and a quarter cup of water.

Once I stirred it all together into a somewhat vulgar-looking viscous white fluid, I clipped my new candy thermometer onto my Dutch oven and slowly turned up the heat.

As the mixture bubbled away, I contemplated the packet of sloppy Joe seasoning.

“Slop rocks,” I muttered to myself. “This is fucked.”

I’d never seen a product like this dry McCormick seasoning before, but admittedly, we only eat sloppy Joes once a year, if that. When we do, I usually pick up a can of that Manwich shit, primarily because it’s called Manwich. Who the fuck wouldn’t want to eat something called Manwich?

For this spice blend, apparently all you need to do is cook some ground meat, add tomato paste, water, along with the seasoning packet, and suddenly you have sloppy Joe filling.

What’s amazing is that apparently there’s a lot of McCormick customers who fucking hate this shit. It only has a 2.9 out of 5 rating on McCormick’s own site, split between seven five-star reviews and eight one-star reviews, with nothing in between.

One one-star review says:

For as long as I could remember, my mother made sloppy Joe for us. We always thought it was a treat, but I now know the reality is it was easy to make. Fast forward many years, we would make it, and I still viewed it as a treat. Now, you ruined it.

It's now somewhere between chilly and what the sloppy Joe used to be. It's very salty and has some spices added that make it more of maybe a Mexican dish. Like other reviewers have said, I had to throw more than one batch out because no one would eat it. I can't help but think McCormick conducted a focus group with a bunch of people with burned-out taste buds.

Once we noticed the change, I hoarded all of the old style I could find, and I probably have 15 packets or so left. Now it really is, in fact, a treat because when it's gone, it's gone forever. Well done, McCormick. You ruined a wonderful thing, and by the recent reviews, I am not the only one who feels this way.

Damn. This person even took a jab at the focus group McCormick gathered together to reformulate the recipe. That’s cold. Maybe as cold as “chilly.”

Another one-star review said, a little more succinctly:

This is the only brand of sloppy joe mix I have ever used and it was delicious but now it tastes nasty! I'm not sure why they changed the recipe to this disgusting stuff. I really hope they fix this. I honestly can't imagine anyone with any level of taste enjoying this trash. 🤮

But neither of these hold a candle to my favorite one-star review, which simply reads:

Please bring back lawyre's sloppy joe mix

Once the mixture hit 300 degrees F (it climbed slightly after this) to hard crack stage, which is when you can turn a sugar and corn syrup mixture into a glass-like candy, I pulled it off the heat.

Then I stirred a half cup of citric acid and a teaspoon of baking soda into the mix.

Something odd I noticed was that this recipe wasn’t weight-based, but rather volume-based. I felt like I was becoming a mad scientist by using a cool thermometer, but I never got to whip out my scale. What kind of bullshit science was this?

Then I stirred in half of the sloppy Joe seasoning (which seemed like the right amount), and considered its color for a minute.

As it stood, the mixture was decidedly not sloppy Joe-like whatsoever, so I decided to mix in a few drops of red food coloring.

Or…was it blood?

The world may never know.

I poured the mixture, which now somewhat resembled taffy, into a pan lined with parchment paper.

I resisted the urge to stick my finger in it, however. I’m going to warn all of you that sugar burns are among some of the worst injuries you can sustain in a kitchen, since melted sugar retains so much heat. It’s practically like getting lava on your skin, so always be extra careful when you’re melting sugar for any reason.

Anyway, that’s why I siphoned a bunch of it into my ass using a beer bong.

After about an hour and a half, the candy base had hardened into a brittle glassy texture.

I cracked the thing open and took a look at the cross section.

While the candy base was quite dense, if you look carefully, there were all sorts of microbubbles in it. Interesting. I put the big chunks into a Ziploc bag and smashed them with a meat tenderizer until they became roughly the size of Pop Rocks.

The gang eyed the Slop Rocks suspiciously.

It was finally time to try some. I popped a small amount into my mouth and felt carefully. While store-bought Pop Rocks burst violently in your mouth, this was more of a gentle fizzing sensation, which was somewhat disappointing. From what I could tell, the slightly effervescent feeling came from those microbubbles popping open as the candy dissolved in my mouth.

I read later that real Pop Rocks are made by forcing carbon dioxide into the candy base at a whopping 600 pounds per square inch, and there is no piece of home kitchen equipment that could replicate this. At least it sort of worked in a children’s science experiment sort of way.

But what was really concerning was the flavor. At first the citric acid hit me with a mouth puckering tanginess, then the spices from the sloppy Joe mix kicked in, leaving me with a strong aftertaste of garlic and onion. But after the candy dissolved away completely, the citric acid sourness, combined with the garlic and onion powder, left me with an aftertaste that was so familiar that I started getting upset.

Puke. It tasted exactly like fucking puke. Davida came in, and without letting her know what I just experienced, I said, “Try some of these.”

She put a small mound of them in her mouth and her cheeks sucked in. Then she started making a face.

“Barf, right?” I asked. “It tastes like barf?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It tastes like when you get to the end of puking.” Here I sought out to create homemade Pop Rocks, and I accidentally stumbled upon how to replicate a fake vomit flavor. All it takes is some sugar, citric acid, and the McCormick’s sloppy Joe seasoning that everyone hates. Incredible.

I felt like the entire thing wasn’t quite as savory as I’d have liked, however. So that’s why later this week for paid subscribers, I’ll be experimenting with a different, more savory flavor. Italian beef.

That’s right. Beef rocks.

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Thanks again for the extra inspiration, Mandy and Echo! Don’t forget to check out Literati Press Comics and Novels. I’m sure there’s something for all of you.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week. You’re the best.