The Best Buckeyes Are NOT in Ohio

Don’t tell my grandmother.

Every family has certain staple foods served during the holidays. Sure, there are all the usual suspects of turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and the like, but most families have something unique either to them or to the region. The kind of food where, if an outsider walked in, they would stop, point, and ask, “What is that?”

When visiting family in Ohio, my grandmother always made buckeyes. The recipe wasn’t unique to my grandmother. Heck, I’m pretty sure every grandmother in the state used the same recipe. If you’re not familiar with the snack, it’s basically a ball of peanut butter covered in chocolate. When it dries it looks like a buckeye seed, which is a rather annoying pod that drops from buckeye trees (especially when one drops and clunks you on the head). If you thought picking up acorns was annoying, try raking up buckeyes from a collection of autumn trees.

Of course, everything in the state of Ohio is buckeye-centric, so naturally, grandmothers everywhere would make sweets based on the seed. The snack is, more or less, an extremely dense Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup. However, Reece’s is smart with their candy, using a slim filling of fluffy peanut butter. Ohio grannies, on the other hand, form massive balls of thick peanut butter. Yes, the flavors work well together, but even as a seven-year-old, I could eat two and call it quits. It was just too much.

There was no textural difference. There was no satisfying crunch or crackle. You bite into the buckeye and it just kind of conformed to your teeth like thick gum. Hours later you’d still be scraping scraps of the peanut butter from the roof of your mouth like a dog that snatched a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

As I grew older I found myself eating fewer and fewer buckeyes when visiting. Of course, they always tasted fine. Peanut butter and chocolate can work magic. Trader Joe’s has a bag of peanut butter-stuffed pretzel nuggets coated in chocolate. Those little bastards are a problem because I’ll eat the entire bag. But buckeyes? The density is the problem. My dog is a small pitbull mix. She looks light, but she’s hefty. Like a sack of potatoes. That’s what a few buckeyes do to my stomach. Sink like stones in my gut until I’m forced to take a nap and pray for digestion.

And yet, whenever I go to Ohio, or whenever I meet someone from Ohio, they tell me they make the best buckeyes. Is the recipe different? No. Is it any less dense? No. So, I do my part, eat two (because if I take one they always tell me, “It’s okay, you can have more,” as if trying to reduce how many they have to eat), and await my heavy gutted destiny.

When I moved to Savannah, Georgia for college I eventually started dating a girl from Augusta. Eventually, I received the invite to join her for Thanksgiving dinner. I was excited to meet her family, and I assumed I’d broken free of forced buckeyes.

After taking the neverending drive from Savannah to Augusta (because there’s no interstate connecting the two) and unpacking in my designated room, I walked into the kitchen, and her mother motioned me toward a plate. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had them before, but I made something called buckeyes.”

Sigh.

I grabbed one.

“Go on, you can have more.”

I took a second and popped the first into my mouth.

It crunched.

It CRUNCHED!

My eyes went wide. It wasn’t dense at all! It had the required peanut butter and chocolate flavors, but it had an internal, airy crunch.

I finished the first, then bit through the center of the second, to further study the unusual find.

Looking it over in the light, I turned to my girlfriend’s mom. “Is that–”

“Rice crispy treats. Yes.”

Oh my god. OH MY GOD! Of course! A small little ball of Rice Crispy Treats, covered in peanut butter, then covered in chocolate. It was so simple! How had generations of Ohio grannies not thought of it? Maybe everyone was too afraid to tell them the truth. That the peanut butter stuck to their teeth, congealed to their tongues, and weighed down their digestive tract.

I grabbed a third and a fourth. My girlfriend’s mom smiled. The kind of proud smile only a chef can have when unsure of their cooking and guests end up loving the creation.

“I can never tell my grandmother about this,” I told her.

I still haven’t. So, hopefully, she doesn’t read this. Because the best buckeyes are not in the state of Ohio.

Apparently, they’re in Georgia.