Imported Foods
Taste-a-Thon
Welcome to the first ever wacky-ass foreign snack taste
test. My father, in a misguided attempt to be clever in his
purchasing of birthday gifts, got me a garbage bag full of
food from United Noodle, an imported food emporium in
Minneapolis. Shopping there is like buying fireworks, evey
package is colorful, unreadable, and potentially deadly. I
chose a selection of some of the finer snack items from the
bag, rounded up two of my friends and the dog, and had us a
taste test. Lesson learned: Don't eat anything unless you
can read what the fuck it is.
The Tasters:
Richie enjoys eating foods of many varieties, and does not keep kosher despite being partially jewed-up.
Zach is a genuine fancy-pants food guy and semi-pro chef. He is also a borderline alcoholic.
Alex will mercilessly devour anything served to him. Except cottage cheese, which makes him vomit.
Moose is a dog. He once ate two quarts of used donut-frying oil and then yorked on the rug.
Thanks to all the testers who devoted their time and stomach acid to sampling all this filthy, filthy chow. We salute you. And now, on to the first item. (Note: Product names have been made up because I can't read the packages on account of me not being an anime lovin', japanese girlfriend wantin' lame ass japanophile. So there.)
These are little seaweed rice crackers that are wrapped in individual family bags of about six.
Look: Like Cheetos with no cheese and little moldy green bits.
Smell: Slightly sweet, with a hint of that fishtanky seaweed smell.
Taste: Nothing to complain about too much. It pretty much tastes like a rice cracker with a little seaweed in it. Very salty, and very thick after you chew it. Not bad, not good.
Drink Recommendation: Busch Light.
Plain, serrated rice crackers.
Look: Like White Castle fries that have been sitting out for a really long time and hardened.
Smell: Amazingly enough, none whatsoever.
Taste: Barely any. Tastes like the blandest rice cracker in the world. Not even salty. Only detectable flavor is a very faint buttery aftertaste. Not worth the effort to eat.
Drink recommendation: Plain Water
Upon opening the delightful deformed-kid-rollerskating package, we came to the realization that Nori Nori Kids was little packets of seaweed 'n' shit to dump on your prepared rice. We ate it anyways. We are idiots.
Look: Flakes of green, with bits of other stuff. Completely unidentifiable.
Smell: Like low tide
Taste. Like licking the inside of a dirty fishtank, followed by a tablespoon of salt. Profoundly undeclicious. Probably not much better served as intended.
Drink Recommendation: Clam Juice
As the only food with none of those wacky asian heiroglyphs on the package, we could only assume that the cracker nuts came from the good ol' U S of A. Which is probably the reason they were edible.
Look: Like little balls of cookie dough covered in some sort of powder.
Smell: Sort of dusty, a little nutty, not at all like BBQ.
Taste: Very crunchy and salty, basically a peanut covered in some sort of fried crunchy dough that tastes like fried.Sort of a spicy taste, but nowhere near a BBQ taste. Maybe it's some sort of crazy asian BBQ.
Drink Recommendation: Tequila Slammers
Now, on to the first of the surgary items. Out, damned salt!
Look: Sort of like a short, smooth churro, or an unrolled mini-donut
Smell: Exactly like Play-Doh. I cannot explain why. It's eerie.
Taste: Like a mini-donut that has been sitting out in the sun. It's rock hard, but not entirely un-tasty. Mostly tastes like sugar.
Drink Recommendation: Kool-Aid, any flavor
Hard tamarind lozenge guys. If your put them in a candy bowl, you will lose your friends and no one will like you anymore.
Look: Brown cough drops
Smell: Very mysterious. Like how one might imagine mummies smell
Taste: Best described as a fruity-butterscotch flavor, mixed with a little bit of root vegetable. Note: This is NOT an endorsement
Drink Recommendation: Pond water (murky)
Aww! Cute panda cookies! In two different flavors!
Look: Frickin' adorable. I can barely stand to eat them. Mine has a picture of a panda humping an egg. Oh, Japan.
Smell: Like cookies. Durr.
Taste: The chocolate ones are sort of uninteresting, but the strawberry ones are preservative-filled manna from heaven. Like strawberry ice cream in cookie form. Richie claims they used to be higher-quality, but what does Richie know? Jack shit, that's what.
Drink Recommendation: Milk, or miscellaneous nog
Like chocolate frosted flakes, you may think? Hell no.
Look: Wet, brown frosted flakes
Smell: The fakest-ass chocolate you have ever smelled.
Taste: Opinion varied. Richie claimed it tasted exactly as a choco flake should, even with milk. Zach said they weren't bad, while I thought they tasted like choco-anus. Depends on how much you like chocolate, because this shit is a choco-O.D.
Drink Recommendation: Whatever the opposite of chocolate is
Yan Yan is a container containing several sticks that have the pleasure of being dipped in a flavored frosting goo and devoured. It also comes in other flavors, but this was the only one I hadn't eaten.
Look: Brown sticks, with some sort of white frosting. Hopefully contains no semen.
Smell: Like fake vanilla, but in a good way
Taste: Tastes like awesome. Richie described it as "Like eating frosting with a chocolate finger," and Zach and I concurred.
Drink Recommendation: Coffee, and not some pansy-ass mochacchino
Hand's Cup is a terrible fruity ripoff of Yan Yan. Anyone who buys this instead of the Sweet Yan gwts what they deserve.
Look: Same as Yan Yan, but with shorter, greasier sticks, and orange colored goo that is also greasy. When stirred, it becomes chunky. Profoundly unappetizing.
Smell: Not too bad, kinda mango-like
Taste: Aaargh! Grody as hell. Tastes like evil mango, mixed with too much evil sugar and evil grease. Richie sez: "This shouldn't be a snack. I like mangoes, but... no." The dog, however, had different thoughts, and devoured it enthusiastically.
Drink Recommendation: Non-Evil Mango Juice, with cheap liquor
This is an example of how much better the japanese are than us at science. It's gum, but it starts out as cottony stuff! Fuckin' A!
Look: We all had different thoughts on this. Zach thought it looked like a green sterile pad, Richie thought it looked like a green version of those powder bags that baseball pitchers use, while I thought it looked like green asbestos. Go figure.
Smell: Mostly like green apple
Taste: When he first put it in his mouth, Richie said "This is no fun, you can't control it!" while zach simply thought "this is fucked up." However, after enough chewing, the huge wad of powder cotton decides to turn itself into a little was of cream soda flavored gum. Awesome, but mostly for the experience, not really the taste.
Drink Recommendation: Dehydrated milk, or something else created with all sorts of science
The whole point of this gum is to mix two of the four included flavors to make a new flavor, and it actually works pretty well. We'll break it down using the suggestions on the back of the package.
Bananna + Orange = Cream Soda: Mysteriously fruity, sort of like bubblicious, not really like cream soda.
Lemon + Orange = Cola: Actually tastes kind of like cola. I was amazed.
Apple + Lemon = Lime: Tastes more like apple-lemon. No dice on the lime.
Apple + Bananna = Pear: This one was a real shocker. Tastes almost exactly like pear
Orange + Orange = Orange: Wey hey. I didn't think they'd even bother to list these, but they did, and it tastes like orange.
Lemon + Lemon = Lemon: Actually lemony, not like fake lemon
Apple + Apple = Apple: Probably the most realistic tasting apple candy ever. I am very impressed, professor.
Bananna + Bananna = Bananna: Nothing exciting here. Just like bananna.
Lemon + Bananna = Lemon Bananna: Not too creative of them, don't you think? It does taste like lemon bananna though.
Apple + Orange = Apple Orange: Yeah, that's about right.
All in all, we thank you Professor Orangemosexual for making delicious gum that runs out of flavor far too quickly.
My first judgement of this snack (henceforth to be referred to as shit) came from some delightful engrish on the back of the package that said "Series Foods for Leisure Time," which was probably suppoed to be translated to "Evil foods that make you want to gouge out your eyes and then vomit."
Look: Like festively wrapped, extremely skinny, rubbery shits
Smell: Nutmeg, asshole, and a hint of lemon
Taste: Bleeeech. It tastes like a cigarette dipped in lemon fresh Pine-Sol, then rolled in feces. Do not eat at any cost. For chrissakes, the dog wouldn't even eat it. We threw it to him, and he caught it and spat it out. After that, if you waved one in front of him, he would run away. If the dog won't eat it, it is most certainly not meant for human consumption (However, just because he does eat something, does not necessarily make it fit for human consumption either). I also made my father eat one for thinking it would be funny to buy me this. Comedy can be so cruel.
Thanks to Zach, Richie and Moose for helping me eat all this stuff. Most of it was thrown away because there is no way in hell anyone would tolerate a full container of most of this stuff. I can only hope these products have a long and unpleasant like in a landfill somewhere, making raccoons and rats miserable instead of us. Farewell, imported asian snack foods. You shall not be missed.