It seems like more and more food companies are joining in on the ‘limited special edition’ bus lately. What once used to be this short exclusive list which included breakfast cereals, ice cream, and a couple restaurant chains, has expanded now to huge proportions. Taco Bell went from a couple recurring menu rotations per year to miraculously managing to pump out limited time menu items on what seems like a bi-monthly basis now, simply by stacking cheese, meat, and tortillas in different orders. Lay’s has been doing the “Do Us A Flavor” with whacky chip varieties every Summer for a few years now. And especially Nabisco, namely with Oreos, has been finding various new ways to inject the longtime standard cookies into your veins under the guise of new ridiculous flavors. We’ve covered quite a few of these on PCFG for better or worse (was red velvet cake really frigging necessary guys?), and lo and behold a new variety has popped up for Summer 2015.

S’mores are treat. Let’s not beat around the bush. Unless you’re the most miserable son of a bitch, you can’t dislike s’mores. They’re a really neat combination of flavors and textures which just quite can’t be replicated correctly indoors. We’ve all tried doing it over the stove, and some companies have even ventured into making special “s’mores maker” machines which attempt to capture the essence, but nay, much of the flavor comes from the nice smokey taste you get from an authentic campfire. Despite that, I wholly admit there are quite a few other foods out there which feature s’mores ‘flavor’, and for the most part they tend to get it right. Really it’s not a difficult flavor to imitate, just chocolate, marshmallow, and graham. So when you’re not aiming for the real thing, it’s a pretty good shot.

S’mores Oreos actually are fairly ingenious. Rather than simply throw in some s’more flavored cream inside, Nabisco went the small, extra mile and instead produced a pretty accurate graham-flavored cookie wafer in place of the generic chocolate ones. It’s not a true graham cracker, but thanks to the thin, crisp texture of the wafer part of Oreos, it’s a pretty good emulation. Inside meanwhile is a half and half combo of both chocolate and what’s supposed to be marshmallow flavored creme. So good for them. Chocolate, check. Marshmallow, kinda check. Graham, check.

The only real downfall of these cookies is the creme which is supposed to taste like marshmallow. I’m not really convinced it’s anything different from their regular Oreo creme filling. It’s not bad, per se, but it just doesn’t have the same light flavor that marshmallows have. To their defense, marshmallow creme has such a non-flavor in all honesty. It essentially tastes like sugar, just with maybe the slightest hint of vanilla. And yet, that’s kind of what Oreo creme filling is, though it just doesn’t come off as the same thing. The chocolate creme meanwhile, is, well, chocolatey. It tastes like chocolate. It gets the job done. So actually the marshmallow isn’t the biggest deal since it’s so subtle even in real s’mores.

As a whole, the cookies do deliver a pretty good s’mores imitation. Does it perfectly substitute the real thing? No, that’d be stupid. They’re cookies. But as a variety of Oreo designed to taste like s’mores, they’re great. And actually they’re probably one of the better flavors Nabisco has produced in the past couple of years. On top of that, the limited time notion actually makes sense for once, considering s’mores are really only a Summer snack. They go great on their own, or with milk. Dip ’em, twist ’em, etc… They’re a winner.

The only true negative with S’mores Oreos is that, as with all of their limited edition flavors lately, the package is noticeably smaller than regular packs, despite costing the same. (Come on Nabisco, why you gotta be that way?)

Should you buy S’Mores Oreos?

Yes