Local is in and no company is more hyper-local than One in Fork Farm, makers of silky caramels made with ingredients from companies in and around Portland, Oregon.

One Fork Farm is a micro-company consisting of young husband and wife team, Dave and Jess Herzog. They make and wrap their caramels by hand in the commercial basement kitchen of a local church and sell their products at the local Oregon City Farmer’s Market and, most recently, online. Crafted in small batches, they make their caramels with no corn syrup or anything artificial and the results are absolutely delicious.

The Herzog’s make four different flavors of caramels and we tried them all.

Vanilla Bean Caramels– These creamy caramels are a vanilla lover’s delight. The caramels are stuffed with flecks of real vanilla bean and topped with vanilla bean-infused sea salt, which gives it a sweet-salty tang that’s additive. These candies are made with sugar, cream, wildflower honey, blue agave nectar (sweetener), butter, bean paste, and vanilla bean sea salt.

Butter gives One Fork Caramels their silky texture; honey offers a soft sweetness.

Spiced Chai Caramels-Made with Masala Chai Tea from Tea Chai Te in Portland, this flavor offers the buttery taste of caramel spiced with aromatic flavors such as ginger, cardamom, anise seed, cinnamon and coriander. It’s sweetened with sugar and raw wild honey.

Coffee Rum Horchata Caramels– This is One Fork Farm’s take on Horchata, the traditional rice milk and cinnamon drink popular in Mexico and they’ve nailed the sweet, creamy , spicy flavor. They mix agave-based caramel with homemade horchata and add Portland’s Below Deck Coffee Rum to kick up the flavor even more. The result is unusual and quite tasty.

Bet you can’t eat just one of these creamy delights.

Wildflower Honey Caramels– The creamy combination of Willamette Valley wildflower honey and salt harvested from the Oregon Coast make One Fork Farm’s Wildflower Honey Caramels one of our favorites. The honey offers a sweet, silky sweetness and the sea salt gives just the right salty notes.

Real Bottom Line: If you want wonderful handmade caramels with satin texture and unique flavors, you can’t do better than hyper-local One Fork Farm Caramels. For now at least, you can only buy them locally in the Oregon City area, but we suspect that won’t be the case for long. Be forewarned that these caramels have no preservatives or other artificial ingredients and are simply wrapped in waxed paper, so you’ll want to eat them promptly (the package suggests four weeks or sooner). ). If you keep them too long, the honey crystallizes and ruins the silky texture. We’re guessing this won’t be a problem—at least it wasn’t for our staff here at realfoodtraveler.com. – Bobbie Hasselbring, RFT Founder

www.oneforkfarm.com/our-caramels