S’mores are having their moment.
They do every summer and fall, as they should when we gather over fires and put food on sticks to roast. Doing that probably connects us to our ancient roots, though I’m pretty sure our ancestors didn’t put fluffy blobs of sugar on sticks and catch them on fire.
Roasting a marshmallow to its golden perfection and then creating a sandwich between graham crackers with a bit of chocolate is a classic. The first written recipes started appearing in the United States in the 1920s. Summer camps likely played a huge role in establishing the popularity of the food. It is a way to involve a youngster in outdoor cooking that almost inevitably produces delicious results.
That combination of chocolate, marshmallow, and graham cracker is hard to beat and now food manufacturers are capitalizing. You can now get s’mores Pop-Tarts, s’more-flavored Bailey’s Irish Creme, a s’mores version of Oreos, and a bag of chocolates at Costco that combines traditional ingredients with caramel. Hershey’s will sell you a s’mores-making kit and Amazon will bring it to your house if you wish.
You can even buy a s’mores maker that sandwiches the marshmallow and chocolate inside graham crackers, prompting me to wonder why you’d unnecessarily roast the whole sweet sandwich over the fire when you don’t need to.
At Tinker Street, an Indianapolis wine bar, I once had a deconstructed s’more with chocolate mousse, crumbled graham cracker, marshmallow made from scratch, and a bit of vegetable ash to mimic the smoke. Artisan in Elkhart has done a version as well. I’ve even done my own riffs on that for dinner parties.
It’s human nature to fiddle, even with a classic such as a s’more, whose very name is a contraction of “some more.” But can you really improve on this combo?
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