These do smell nicely peach too, opening the package my nose was smacked around by a decent fruit peachy smell. There is not a lot of difference in taste and construction between the peach and the strawberry from yesterday; they are both lightly sweet (unlike the American SUGAR wafers of instant sweet coma), robustly cake cone-y and lightly frosted. The peach flavor is stronger than the strawberry flavor and highly reminiscent of the instant peaches and cream oatmeal packets. I do like the peaches and cream oatmeals.

Both wafers are exceedingly crumbly too so prepare to do a bit of clean up after munching.

My Guinea Pigs preferred the peach over the strawberry so I added a half more pea for the stronger peach flavor and the unusual peach flavor for a

Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

I have them under ‘z’ so they all bunch in one place because I would find it very disjointing to have Japan between ‘Hard candy’ and ‘Kit Kat’. It just doesn’t parse right so all countries are preceded by ‘z’ until such time as I can figure out a better way to group them. OK! Onward.

Wafer cookies. These have a nice subtle strawberry flavor which might not be fresh berry but it certainly isn’t labberry or manufactured. There isn’t a huge strawberry flavor, sadly, which means the cake cone of the wafer comes through much more than it does in the American sugar wafer cookie. Garden wafers are also a lot less sweet which is great if you want to eat more than one of these and not fall into a diabetic coma from the sugar. American sugar wafers are big on the sugar.

American wafers are also big on the gritty sweet frosting layer which these are not. Garden has 4 thin layers of light strawberry frosting between 5 layers of slim cake cone wafer cookies. The wafers are a good solid cake cone flavor and are quite crumbly. If you aren’t careful you might wind up wearing more of these than eating them.

These are a decent wafer cookie, perhaps a little lacking in the strawberry flavor but what is there is a good solid strawberry. It’s nice to be able to taste the cake cone of the cookies and it’s also nice not to be sweeted out after a couple cookies.

Rating of 3.5 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

In case you were wondering, Saltines list in their ingredients enriched flour, soybean oil, salt, corn syrup, yeast, baking soda and soy lecithin. I vote for the Taiwanese beer yeast and fresh cream. Yum. Chung Hsiang Foods soda crackers will absolutely do you proud in soup and are a tasty munch on their own as well. I ought to try them with cheese. Hmmm!

Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

Which is better; one or

two? See what I mean? Nabisco and Sunshine (my in-laws happened to have both in the cupboard much to my delight) have functional packaging. Show some crackers, maybe some soup and a logo. Bamn! Done. Not Chung Hsiang Foods though. They’ve got crackers and a little grain field and some onions there as well as some pretty calligraphy and of course what I assume is their logo. The wrapping is a pretty two toned green and you know what? American soda crackers are boring.

The Taiwanese know how to package their stuff. Incidentally, I am going to have to knock a fraction of a pea point off for lack of green bits because if you notice the actual cracker versus the picture cracker you might also notice about an 80% discrepancy of green bits between the two. I have not yet found an actual cracker which has had more than a smattering of green bits on it; certainly not the plethora of onion as represented on the package. Tsk.

But! This is probably the worst transgression Chung Hsiang Foods makes with the soda crackers. If we compare them to a Saltine, as everyone would probably be doing anyway, I’d say the Taiwanese soda crackers come out on top. They are slightly bigger on each side than your typical soda cracker and they are an interesting texture. Chung Hsiang Foods soda crackers are a less crispity cracker-y and more crispity thin pie flaky which…I guess in soup makes not a lot of difference. As a munching cracker though, I kinda miss the Saltine like crispity but these aren’t bad.

They also taste so much better than American soda crackers that I’m willing to look past the pie crispy texture for the savory of the onion and the less saltiness of the cracker in general. These are a tasty savory crisp cracker which would probably be a solid 4 pea with a little more green onion on the cracker (or less on the package picture) and possibly a slightly different crisp; although the pie flaky is growing on me. So when I post a

Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas, keep in mind that’s a tenuous 4 peas with room to grow.

You can see that they are frosted with sweet which gives a third flavor to go with the ricey, hint of wheaty and a touch of salty. I’m not sure I’d have gone with sweet per se but it is an interesting choice. Certainly these senbei have the most character of any rice cracker I’ve had but the Guinea Pigs and I are divided on the rating. One likened these to frosted cardboard, one would eat them if she was starving but not so much voluntarily, one solidly liked them and I’d eat them casually.

This does not bode well for figuring out a rating. I think the spicy flavor were better crackers but these are tasty in that category of bland rice crackers. The American palate might prefer a Ritz or a Club cracker to be sure but in the sea of all rice crackers, these are pretty tasty. Because my Pigs were so diverse in their reactions, I’m going to give these an average rating and a caveat that if you don’t like rice crackers, these are probably not tasty.

I forgot to mention the odd packaging…frosting dots printed on the wrapper. Odd.

Rating of 3 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

Senbei (or alternately sembei according to Wikipedia) is a Japanese rice cracker. By that definition I guess I’ve reviewed a lot more Senbei than I thought but only the Ame no shu look similar to these spicy fellas. That’s about all the similarity too. Perhaps Taiwanese based Hot Kid is a better Senbei maker because this time around, these fellas are delicious. They are nice and crispity even though they are about half again as thick as a Ritz. They also have a light drizzle of sweet hard frosting on one side and somewhere there is a delicious salty counterpart. Oh yeah, and the spicy.

I wouldn’t call these super spicy but then again I am used to a more Cajun spicy. For the average person, these have a spice that will build. It lingers nicely with a quiet burn but I don’t think that the spicy is enough to stop anyone but the most bland of food lovers from having two, three or even four of these right in a row.

I also wanted to mention that the cracker is a hearty rice cracker. Of the rice crackers I’ve tried, this one has an unusual almost wheatiness to it except there is no wheat listed in the ingredients. I don’t know how they did that, but it makes for a nice ricey cracker with a hint of wheaty depth. I rather quite like it.

Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

That’s not to say that these Taiwanese (Haters, please note this statement wherein I identify the product as TAIWANESE and not Japanese before you fire up your outraged comment) Sugar Wafers are bland and mushy. On the contrary, the thinner wafers carry a nice micro crunch (in comparison to the robuster American Wafers) for their slimness and the waffling pattern helps keep it real.

Actually, I’m not sure what the waffling pattern does for a wafer but I wanted to mention it in the review. I’d hazard that the waffling makes the wafer studier if I was pressed to come up with a reason for it. I’d also say that it makes the wafer a little more visually interesting. Waffling also has the side benefit of breaking up the surface so that the wafer doesn’t glom onto your tongue in one giant flat hard to remove pile of wafer goo. I think that’s true of pretty much all cake wafers, not just the Taiwanese ones as cake wafers have the ability to, once moisten, partially dissolve into a (tasty) lump of wafery goop.

Wasn’t that appetizing? Wafer goop. Mmmm. Actually, these ‘cookies’ are pretty tasty. The wafery bits are the standard cake cone like you might find in the domestic Sugar Wafers or an ice cream cone bottom (the…cone part). The wafer bits aren’t flavored anything but cake cone flavor (vanilla? Well not overtly VANILLA but whatever the base cake cone flavor is) and the strawberry frosting is nice and light with possibly a touch of “not berry fresh”. It’s good, it’s sweet, it’s not particularly Crunchberry, although there is a small element of the Crunchberry in the flavor. I am not impressed but neither am I horrified by the strawberry. I’ve also eaten several of these things and enjoyed each one so there you go.

Lastly, the whole sugar wafer is a lot less sweet than the American counterpart. Almost refreshingly less sweet, especially if you’ve ever experienced spontaneous time travel from the sugar rush after binging on an American made Sugar Wafer.

My “assistant” looks on.

Inspector Tycho “helps” with the shoot.

Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

I have a confession to make. I’ve never had fresh ripe passion fruit that I know of. I might have had passion fruit as a drink (or as a fruit drink mix) but I couldn’t really tell you what passion fruit is supposed to taste like. I can tell you what the impression of it is for me and that is something vaguely citrussy, kinda tart and pink. I have no idea why pink but there you go.

These taffy like entities are similar to the other chewy candies: Taffyesque but a bit stiffer. It’ll warm up as you chew it and feel almost “normal” so plus American Palate Pea Points there. As far as flavor, it’s sweet, fruity, and noticeably tart. I imagine that it might be passion fruit but whatever it is, the fruitiness is nicely done.

However.

There is an undercurrent of manufactured which spoils what could have been a really tasty taffy. I might have called these my favorite I-Mei (and I really liked the lemon) but that hint of chemical in the background makes me grumpy. For all the pleasing wrapping, and the Chewy Candies have all been subtly eye pleasing in their simplistic pretty packaging (albeit the passion fruit is more abstract than the others), and the smoother Asian taffy texture and the delicious fruitiness, that last hurrah of “PASSION FRUIT FLAVOR NUMBER 5″ pretty much sours the experience.

If you can abide the aftertaste, give these a 3.5 and then some. I, however, am cranked by a pleasant experience robbed.

Rating of 2.5 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of orange taste because there is indeed a rather pleasant orangeness as well as a creaminess to them. The two combine to create an almost orange creamsicle flavor and I love orange creamsicle (!!). There could be a little more citrus tart if you want to get all fruit flavored technical on these Chewy Candies but you know what? Creamsicle wr0cks. There is enough mellow and sweet orangy to do the flavor justice, even if it’s still a bit of a walk to get to “from the tree orange”. I also am digging the creamsicle nature of these which is nice and refreshing.

The ubiquitous Asian bouncy taffy syndrome is not as pronounced in Orange which makes me even happier. Plus, there is the pretty wrapping which is pastel orange and white this go around. In the landscape of Chewy Candy, these are every bit as tasty as the Lemon.

Rating of 3.5 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.

Strawberry certainly smells of candy sweet strawberry goodness. I was surprised when I opened the package, having opened the Orange first (SPOILERS!!!) and gotten away with out an olfactory assault. Not so much with Strawberry. I even went back to the Orange to see if I had somehow missed the pow’ful aroma but no, Orange is more subtle than it’s strawberry cousin. Strawberry certainly has an extra awesome strawberrific smell even while it’s still in the package. Go Strawberry.

I also like the individual wrapping. It’s pretty and pink and generally nice to look at.

The candies are also a pretty pastel pink and have those ubiquitous bumpy caramel ridges down the backs. They are really sweet too, but not as strawberry as one would imagine given the initial whiff. They are rather a light yet serviceable strawberry with maybe a hint of manufactured in the background. It’s not a deal breaker at all, especially when you consider that there is also a creamy undertone to these which is much stronger than the very slight chemical taste. If you could convince the Starburst people to make a mellow flavored strawberries in cream Starburst, this would be really similar.

The taffy texture is a bit odd though. I happen to have a strawberry Starburst (it’s the one in pink if you are eating an original flavor variety) and while the Starburst is much more powerfully strawberry flavored, it’s also more tart and a lot smoother to chew. I-Mei’s strawberry flavor is sweeter and creamier and the taffy is much bouncier. It’s that Asian taffy bouncy thing again, although I-Mei isn’t as bubblegummy as some of the other taffies. I think the lemon was a touch better and a bit more refreshing but these are not bad at all. I’d give it a quarter more pea points than the official

Rating of 3 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.