Bamboo Salt Seaweed Cracker - Asian Food Market
Bamboo Salt Seaweed Cracker - Asian Food Market
Here's another product that's been sitting in my to-be-reviewed pile for....an embarrassingly long time. But hey, at least this one is savory! Even though I'm a total sugar addict and there's candy in every room of my house (minus the bathrooms, because ew), it's always refreshing when I finally get to reviewing something savory. Let's see if these bamboo seaweed crackers turn out to be a breath of fresh, salty, seaweed-y air.
Why did I pick these up? Well there were a few reasons, the first being the packaging. Look at this gorgeous green color! It stood out from the other boxes on the shelves, which were mostly red or yellow, and the added burlap-texturing creates a lot of visual interest. I'm a sucker for textures. Nearly all of my personal graphic design work uses textured overlays in some way or another, so I guess this is "my aesthetic." (As the kids on Tumblr would say.) The roughness of that fabric backdrop mixed with the bright colors and the crispy looking seaweed bits? How could I not buy it? Everything about this box is well done. It's functional, colorful, the layout is appealing, and the food photos make the product look fan-freaking-tastic. The text choices for the English look a bit lazy, but if you ignore that, everything else is absolutely perfect.
Pretty box? Check! Other important factors that lead to my purchase? It's seaweed flavored! I love seaweed! I've already reviewed tons of seaweed based snacks on the blog, but never anything cracker-based.
The crackers are portioned off into little single serving packets, each containing three large crackers covered int seaweed flakes. (Each cracker is about the size of a graham cracker square, but it looks like a giant Zesta brand cracker. How many times can I use "cracker" in a sentence?)
I took a bite of one of the crackers and the texturing was really bizarre. It was dry, but also oily? I was expecting something really dry and crumbly, like a typical soup cracker, but this is more like a pie crust. It's crispy and flakey, but it has this melt-in-your-mouth fattiness that always reminds me of homemade pie crusts. I wasn't expecting this at all, but I like it! The texture is really decadent and interesting, but the flavoring is pathetic. You can taste a tiny bit of the seaweed flakes, but these are really mild. So mild they're boring. It's like eating pie crust without any of the awesome fillings. Which might appeal to some, but for me, it was really disappointing.
I had high hopes that this would be salty, seaweed-y, and delicious. They aren't. These need an added dose of salt to make them tolerable as-is, otherwise they just dry out your mouth with little to no flavor payoff. I can taste a tiny bit of seaweed, but it easily gets lost in the flour-like flavoring of the cracker itself. I bet they'd be good for serving with something else, like soup, hummus, dip, or some kind of tuna fish or chicken salad. These crackers are an interesting base for other flavors, but on their own, they're super boring. I wouldn't buy these again. If I have to jazz it up with something else I might as well stick to my normal, cheaper, crackers.
wow that's pretty aesthetic
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