I’ve at this point come to accept the fact that, despite numerous attempts to get on their wavelength, the pleasures of certain snacks will always remain elusive to my palate. One particular weak spot seems to lie in the cold-served, offal-based bar foods of Southeast Asia. I’ve already twice failed to comprehend the complexities of soondae, the Korean sausage stuffed with pig’s blood and cellophane noodles. This may have had something to do with the circumstances of consumption; I nibbled on it once amid a spread of far-more-palatable dishes at a group dinner, then again by my lonesome with a beer at home, my vegetarian companion sneering with disgust at idea of supermarket-purchased intestines invading our kitchen. Hoping for a better atmosphere, I brought this package of Nem Chua, purchased on impulse from the counter at Tan Tin Hung to a rental house upstate, hoping the convivial atmosphere therein would inspire at least some drunken inquisitiveness. Unfortunately, the sight of these candy pink meat squares, looking like misbegotten Starbursts topped with bird’s eye chili slices, did not strike a chord with anyone. I ate one, sort of admiring the souse-like snap of this portable meat cube, individually wrapped in plastic within the confines of its cellophane package. I also appreciated the appearance of vermicelli strands, hidden inside like subterranean grubs, which added some additional textural interest. Beyond this, however, I can’t express much love for this vinegar-cured pork delicacy, although I’d be willing to try the dominant variety of this snack, which seems to come in a less-processed-looking roll form, under more preferable circumstances. Three days after my first fress, still trying to convince myself that I’d finish off the package, I found that the nem chua, which did not seem to require refrigeration (I refrigerated them anyway, for the sake of safety) had developed a few scattered mold spots and acquired an even more intense sour taste. Not wanting to risk food poisoning over a snack I wasn’t crazy about in the first place, I tossed the rest of the batch, marking this one down as another failure. The Bánh da lợn, which I purchased from the grocery counter on the same trip, remains resilient in my fridge, also waiting for its time in the sun. Its name translates to “pig skin cake,” a fitting bit of serendipity if nothing else.
0 Comments
Far be it from me to criticize another country’s snacking habits, but I can’t seem to get on board with the apparent Korean preference for sickly sweet, HFCS-addled, between-meals comestibles. The worst part is that most of these snacks demonstrate an exquisite deftness for balancing salt and spice, which then gets subsequently washed away by the cloying tide of sugar. The same holds true on this otherwise alluring snack from Japanese/Korean mega-conglomerate Lotte. Too bad, since this is a stellar bit of packaging that swaddles a pretty reasonable governing concept; I, like many others, spent much of my teenage years partying with large bags of aggressively seasoned snacks. Back then we had Bugles, which seem like the dominant inspiration for Teenager’s Party Time, right down to the general “compressed corn dust” taste found beneath the aforementioned overwhelming sweetness. Online sources tell me these are barbecue flavored, although I can’t detect any real kinship with the prevalent American version of this style. Dominated by a syrupy finish, these mostly remind me of Golden Grahams. Let's not forget, however, two other recently purchased Korean snacks; the one just below, with its daring, fantastically designed co-opting of American branded content, also seems more than a little similar in presentation.
The Pringles Man, at one point, seemed to possess definitively human facial features, before gradually being reduced to an ovoid, anthropomorphic egg creature with the tousled hair and moustache of a 19th century barkeep. Reducing its logo to a cipher, the brand’s design budget instead seems to have been directed toward the rest of the packaging, finding perhaps its most brilliant conceit yet in the concept of a single hooked Pringle, hanging alongside two rosy Serrano hams. These Spanish delicacies, while not on par with the world-class jamón iberico (treated so luxuriously that I recently spotted one outfitted with its own sun-deflecting jacket) still rest safely on the level of classy foods not easily approximated by potato chips. I didn’t taste these Pringles, which were purchased as a souvenir, and thus can’t vouch for their likeness to charcuterie, but they serve as yet another indicator of the slightly off-kilter world of foreign snack foods, where everything is at once familiar and totally alien.
My paternal grandfather, growing up in 1920s Brooklyn, had 11 brothers. Setting aside issues of bedroom management, meal logistics, domestic scuffles, etc., the sheer fact of having an entire basketball team’s worth of siblings, all of them of the same gender, sounds completely overwhelming. Not so for the 10 brothers behind this Israeli onion-flavored snack, who appear to have put their combined energies to good use, producing small ribbons of fried, cracker-y matter that taste a bit like burnt Funyons. This is much more pleasant than it sounds; these things are potent but not greasy (shades of the center region of a nice bialy) and don’t need a coating of flavor dust to convey a strong, toothsome taste. The bag, on the other hand, is a complete conundrum. Written mostly in Hebrew, with some hovering onions and a ticking clock (to indicate the bag’s ‘fast food’ properties?), the whole thing seems a tad mysterious. Is the name a reference to Joseph’s 10 brothers, who threw him in a pit out of jealousy over his many-colored coat, or are there actually ten strapping young lads behind this product? The internet provides no clues; this may be the first foreign snack I’ve consumed about which I can find absolutely zero information whatsoever. Procured from Holyland Market in the East Village, which is notable for its total focus on Israeli products and high variety and volume. Also purchased on this trip: some jarred amba (a useful sandwich condiment), a bag of fluffy fresh pitas, delicious baked bureks and a box of whole wheat matzos. A future post will cover my attempts to perfect, and expand upon, the ancient institution that is matzo brei.
Here I am imagining a feature which compares bags of chips to one another, which presumably will occur any time I buy two different, suitably interesting bags on the same shopping trip, and then have occasion to photograph them side by side before one is consumed. And so, welcome to the first (and last?) edition of Chip Comparison, featuring two East Asian offerings from the global Lays Empire. The Thai chips, pictured to the right, were purchased from Elmhurst snack emporium Sugar Club and labeled ‘seashell’, although the seafood pictured appears to be a scallop. I’ve admittedly had a hard time with nautical flavors since New Year’s Day 2014, when I left a half-eaten bag of Hwa Yuan’s ‘Oyster Omelet’ chips on a hot stove, suffusing my entire apartment with a sweet, oystery funk, but these were far from overwhelming. The seasoning was piquant and gently fishy in the style of many seafood chips, a market that the maritime sections of Asia appear to have cornered (Walker’s ‘Shrimp Cocktail’ style seems tame and ketchup-y by comparison). The Magic Masala, purchased from the Jackson Heights Patel Brothers, presents a much more familiar flavor profile, albeit one that’s also completely dissimilar from most American-market preparations. The main difference here is not the masala spice seasoning, which is only a few tweaks away from a BBQ or sour cream and onion, but how clearly the individual spices come across. The Indian market, I imagine, would not take kindly to chemical interpretations of flavors that can be easily conveyed via simple, natural powders. This brings us to the bag design; notice how both feature entire potatoes transmorphing into sliced ridgey shards, indicating the focus on freshness, which appears to be a company-wide concern. The Thai potato definitely looks a bit chunkier, a difference not reflected in the chips themselves.
Sometimes you find the best things when you’re not even looking. Case in point: the astonishing appearance of this delightful collection of chips as offerings at a recent birthday party, sourced from a Chip of the Month Club with an expansive sense of humor. A quartet of flavors designed to approximate the characteristic snacking tastes of corn-fed ‘American’ eaters, these seem about authentically down-home as Larry, actually the nom-de-shtick of Pawnee City, Nebraska’s Dan Whitney. There was debate at this gathering about whether Whitney is a faux-hick opportunist, a skilled performance artist or just a middle-aged comedian now trapped in character forever, but most agreed that the chips flavors were surprisingly reserved, despite the bag’s claims of screen-door-bustin’ flavor. Arranged randomly for this picture, the order here ended up being a pretty good scale of their quality. The ketchup chips (a puzzling Canadian phenomenon that would probably be fodder for a future post, would I ever deign to purchase a bag) were good for what they were, less assaultive and one-note than the Fire Engine Red Herr’s variety, still bit too aggressive for my tastes. The ‘wings’ were accurate but uninspiring, like powdered Frank’s Red Hot sprinkled over thin chips. BBQ was less oppressively sweet than most varieties, but also not especially compelling. The revelation here was biscuits and gravy, which also somehow had the fewest ingredients of all the flavors, a mere half dozen or so, if you allow for the bag’s decision to bundle ‘seasonings’ together as one. There’s no real hint of biscuit here, but the gravy taste is piquant and subtle. These are only the tip of the iceberg, in addition to a line of bread mixes and, for the inevitable punchline, dog foods. Most of these products do not seem very enticing. As for the Gravy Chips, it’s worth noting that while all snacks roughly approximate some broad cultural taste, few combine folksy aw-shucks simplicity, a balanced flavor profile and corporate mascot grotesquerie so cohesively.
My first visit to Mexico, back in 2013, was pretty tame affair as far as eating goes. Imprisoned in a labyrinthine relaxation compound by well-intentioned, generous parents, I was able to snag one good local meal (turkey in chilmole) from the resort's 'traditional' Mexican restaurant, some respectable tacos and a few smoky glasses of mezcal. Otherwise the trip was marked by bizarre poolside burgers, serviceable selections (coldcuts, tinga taquitos and nance in syrup, among many others) from a breakfast buffet catering to a mixed American and well-heeled, cosmopolitan Mexican clientele, and the odd snack item from the Oxxo across the street. Here I went a bit overboard, purchasing Pinguinos, Gansitos and Bimbuenelos, the latter drying out in the plane's cargo hold and collapsing into a sugary dust, which slipped through my fingers Treasure of the Sierra Madre style. None of these products were very different from the American snacks they seemed to be emulating, and none of them were very good. On this trip, with so much else to eat and so little stomach space to waste on frivolous junk, I mostly opted out of digging into these mass-market nooks and crannies. That doesn't mean I stopped documenting, and compulsive photography under poor lighting did yield some new information, such as the fact that 'nuez de la India' is not a flavor but an alternate name for cashews, as well the much-less-snackable candlenut, which several translation services improbably claim are also known as 'hombre nervioso.' The hot chile and citrus pairing seems to be a popular one; I bought a bag of corn and cactus derived snack sticks which utilized it, and it also applies to the Takis wave which has swept north to consume so many American adolescents.
On a recent trip to Target’s Atlantic Center location, I wandered into the dollar deals section, the best place to find such delicacies as slightly battered Charleston Chews and Whales crackers, a snack that far outshines its more-famous Goldfish competitors. On this occasion another option presented itself, with the unexpected appearance of this imported Israeli snack, in a bag illustrated with two vaguely sinister, presumably pizza loving youths. Despite the label, these Bissli bites have no real hint of pizza flavor - closer to a thin, wheaty crouton with a vegetal aftertaste - likely owing to the classic cheapo ingredient trinity of corn starch, MSG and dehydrated onion and garlic, various configurations of which assure that nothing ‘Pizza-Flavored’ ever tastes anything like pizza. Of course Bissli isn’t just in the pizza business, they also deal in taco, falafel, ‘grill’ and other varieties, which pleasantly enough all come in different shapes, a choice which at least conceivably suggests that each configuration was chosen to perfectly match its corresponding flavor profile. The vague taste of these gently palatable, grid-shaped wheat snacks also brought me to another, bigger question. What is the inspiration here? To wit, what is pizza like in Israel?
The international fad for chips that taste like prepared dishes has never really caught on in the US, let alone ones that simulate entire meals. The exception proving this rule of late has been the growing fascination with Doritos, specifically their secondary career as the load-bearing frame for ever-more fanciful Taco Bell constructions, which has yielded the surreal spectacle of the Doritos Locos Tacos flavored Dorito, perhaps the first instance of a snack food attempting to replicate the taste of a repurposed version of itself.
|
The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
Archives
February 2022
Categories
All
|