Licorice Soft

Taste is a very personal kind of sense. So there will be never a categorization that fits the bill.

But we try to guide you through the different level of available licorice. Licorice has a wide variety between soft and hard, and sweet and salty.

By Salty its actually not meant Salt as you know it from the spice shelf. In Licorice Salty refers to the amount of salmiak salt. Salty liquorice, also known as salmiak, is a variety of licorice flavoured with ammonium chloride. The typical american Licorice contains almost nothing of it and makes it a very low tasting licorice. The northern europe Licorice of the old world is way stronger and you have to like the taste of it. Salty licorice is an acquired taste and people not familiar with ammonium chloride might find the taste physically overwhelming and unlikeable. Ammonium chloride gives salty licorice an astringent, salty taste (hence the name), which has been sometimes described as "tongue-numbing" and "almost-stinging".

Also don't get fooled by the looks. As an example the very famous "Katjes Salzige Heringe - salty herring or salty fish" is a low level salty tasting, very soft licorice. And it is sprinkled on the outside with sugar. So it looks real salty, but it isn't. Its more sweet and salty 1/3.

So we go ahead and have put our licorice in categories that give it a salt level from 1/3 (regular salty) to 3/3 extreme salty. Maybe, there could be another category 4/4 if we find something more powerful as we know today. So it can be as well sweet (as the herrings) and at the same time salty cause it is not salt spice but salmiak salt. But this categorization is a personal indication and you can have a total different opinion on that, so please take this only as a generell idea and not as a promise.