Text 10849, 98 rader
Skriven 2014-03-14 09:01:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: travel tastes 320
=========================
A bad run of tastes during recent travels that were
otherwise pretty satisfying.

Lily O'Brien's is an Irish enterprise that is trying
hard to break into the international candy market.
I had some of its products in Ireland and was not
struck one way or the other, so had no reason to say
anything about them; but recently I have been served
some new examples, mostly by airlines, which are
guided by the bottom line rather than any real wish
to satisfy the customers.

In United business, one of the giveaways is little
two-piece boxes of truffles, such as you'd get on
your pillow in a fancy hotel room. The ones in the
hotels are better. We got a number of these, all
the same two - an orange cream that was way too
sweet, with mediocre and tasteless chocolate, and
an even more cloying sort of undifferentiated
sugary molassesy concoction.  C-

I don't know where the sultana and crispies cluster
came from, perhaps the Lufthansa lounge or the
flight to Turkey. This was a serious miscalculation:
what could have been an okay crispy treat was undone
by the guaranteed minimum of 22% raisins, so the
already cloying not great chocolate was overwhelmed,
flavorwise, and further sweetened by these fruit bits
whose appeal is unknown. The crispies were harder and
flatter than Rice Krispies, but my main objection is
that there weren't enough of them to make a difference. D+

The company's slogan, "Passionate about Chocolate," is
as far as I can see the only thing that stands out
about it, except perhaps the blind audacious ambition
of its marketers.

=

Rivella - this is a soft drink made from cheese leavings
and is 35% whey, and yet in the interest of science I
tasted it! using several milk pills in the process. The
taste is sourish, with a sort of citrus tang followed by
a weird rotten cheesy taste, not too strong. The drink
is semi-sweet, and if you like, say, pineapple cottage
cheese or raspberry yogurt you might also like this. Of
course this is a Swiss product, but the company that
makes it is trying to break into markets outside that
country. I am guessing it will fail. C-

=

Cailler Branche l'Originale - I don't know why the huge
nostalgia that this brand evinces. These are perfectly
ordinary milk chocolate (tasteless) coating a stick-shape
log, hence the name, of hazelnut goo (tasty). The chocolate
is of mediocre quality and very sweet. Trades on the Swiss
tradition without delivering at all the Swiss experience. C-

Kagi wafers - another riff on the same theme, flavorwise.
I liked these better - the chocolate was darker, though I
believe it still contained milk; it covered hazelnut-flavor
sugar wafer arrangements - nutella-like substance layered
with styro-like wafer cookies. The neutral starch cut the
sweetness and added some textural interest. Think hazelnut
flavored sugar wafers coated in sweet, somewhat dairy-tasting
couverture. These are made in Switzerland mostly for the
middle eastern and Asian market but are distributed pretty
much everywhere except the U.S. C+

=

Utz Mystic potato chips (40% reduced fat) - these were not
nearly so good as Cape Cods. I always prefer full-fat chips,
but after some uneasy years of trying, Cape Cod has managed
to cobble together a palatable product that offers decent
fried-potato flavor while not staining your napkin too much.
Utz is not there yet. C

=

Cold Fusion (Newport, RI) key lime sorbet - this wouldn't be
so bad but for the fact that it tasted more artificial than
if it had been made with artifical ingredients. In this case,
the only peculiar ingredient was maltodextrin, but where does
one get key lime juice in Rhode Island? C

Batch (Boston) vanilla bean ice cream - a huge disappointment -
ingredients were milk, cream, cane sugar, egg yolks, nonfat milk,
vanilla beans. The dominant flavors were egg (bad - should be
secondary, and these weren't the freshest of eggs) and nonfat milk
(just plain bad - why do this?). Almost no vanilla, as if they
had used old beans or something. Rosemary refused to buy Hood for
her guests, but it would have tasted better and at 10% the price. C-

___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
 * Origin: Fidonet Since 1991 Join Us: www.DocsPlace.org (1:123/140)