Ocean City NJ Boardwalk Fudge

So I'm ending the summer with a post I should've used to begin the summer. It's funny. I'm telling you all where to go to get the best boardwalk fudge when you're not going to get any fudge for another nine months. And why aren't I making my own? The post is a big mess-up in a few respects.

But then again, now that the summer has come to a close and you have (hopefully) been eating astounding amounts of fudge for the past three months, this may be the perfect time for a post like this. Now is when you will be best suited to discuss, dispute and deliberate over my decisions.

Anyone ever been to Ocean City? It's great. I've gone there all throughout my childhood and it has hardly changed--it has the same boring rides, mediocre beaches, and awful food as always, but it's all so endearing. And by awful food, I meant awful real-food--don't try to have a nice sit-down dinner-- but the junk food there is great. Ice cream, funnel cake, fudge, fried oreos, it's all there. 

When I went down with my family, we would always go to the same hotel. It was right off of the boardwalk, and right as you walked on the boardwalk from the hotel was a place called Steele's Fudge. I've always been loyal to Steele's. It was the place we always went to and I had always loved it. We never really tried anything else. It was just the best.

Last weekend I was walking along the Ocean City boardwalk with a few friends. We were talking about food--that's all I talk about--and fudge came up in the conversation. They mentioned that they wanted to go to Fudge Kitchen because that was the best. I disagreed. I claimed that Steele's was better. But then I thought about it, and realized I had nothing to compare it to. I didn't really know if Steele's was the best, I had allowed a bunch of factors other than taste to enter the equation...

So we set up (my mom really set it up) a blind taste test. My mom bought chocolate fudge from six different places on the boardwalk and we brought over the neighbors, who tasted the fudge. The test was completely blind. The fudge was the only isolated variable. They had to be silent when they were eating so as not to alert the other tasters of something. They were not shown the preferences of other tasters (I didn't participate because I don't love chocolate fudge. It's good, but it's good just because it's straight sugar. I try to avoid such things if the reason that I like them is only because they are straight sugar and instead indulge in things whose taste I find appealing in addition to their sweetness.)

The six companies are as pictured. Which is your favorite?

The winner was Shrivers. Overwelmingly. Out of six testers, 5 picked Shrivers as their favorite. Steele's did really poorly, though in my defense, I only eat their vanilla fudge. We used chocolate because chocolate is the classic and we thought it would best exemplify the shops' skills. Next summer I will have to do the same test with vanilla. And I'll do it at the beginning next year ;)