Befco Seaweed flavored Baked Rice Crackers - H-Mart
I picked up this bag at H-mart and to be honest, I initially had no idea what this was. The images made them look like some kind of flattened potato, but they seemed to be some kind of flavored rice cracker. Since the package was so colorful, and they were celebrating a 25th anniversary of...well, something, I decided to give it a try. (Full disclosure, the weird little illustrated characters on the package was the true deciding factor.)
There's quite a lot going on with the packaging. We've got a bold contrast of red and green that manages to not look Christmas-y (which is hard to pull off), mixed with illustrations and a big ol' number two in the bottom corner because the crackers are divided into individual portions of two.
In the grand scheme of product packaging this is really nothing special, but there's just something about it I can't put my finger on that makes it very pleasing to look at. Through contact clues, and looking at the translated nutritional information, I gathered that these were some kind of seaweed flavored rice cracker snack. If you look at the little characters on the front of the bag you can see that the circle is actually a textured sheet of seaweed, and the back of the package says "aonori" and I may not know much Japanese, but I know "nori" means seaweed.
So the packaging is pretty cute, butthose wacky-faced banana-cracker-illustrations suckered me into buying a giant bag. We've got a LOT of crackers in here. Fingers crossed that they taste good!
I opened up a packet and they smell...not great. Kind of like old fry oil and onion, so we're not off to a great start, but thankfully they taste pretty okay.
The crunch is styrofoam-like, which is something I've experienced with other fried Asian snack foods, and they have a light layer of glaze which is where all the flavoring comes from. They have a salty soy-sauce flavoring mixed with a hint of seaweed and, what tastes like, onion. If you'd ever had vegetable flavored instant ramen or any veggie flavored Asian snacks, these taste just like that. They're light, salty, savory, and a little soy sauce-heavy. It sounds pretty nice, but I don't find these to be very snack-able. Actually, this snack is giving me flashbacks to the Umaibo sticks I reviewed way back when I first started Sometimes Foodie on Tumblr! I'm having Major salad-Umaibo-dejavu.
They're better than the Salad flavored Umaibo I've had in the past, and they make a pretty okay desk-snack, but it's not a flavor I'd actively seek out for non-blog-snacking. (Which is something since I usually love all things seaweed related.) I'm pretty much eating these at my desk because they're there. I just can't see myself ever being like, "You know what I could go for? Those salty banana-shaped veggie crackers that taste like onion infused styrofoam." I think they're worth trying once, so if you see them around you might want to pick them up, but unless you really love crackers and veggie-flavored non-veggie-items, I don't think these are anything to write home about.
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
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