08.14.10
I-Mei Fried Cookies (sesame)
Good weekend Junkies, today I hop over to Taiwan to bring you more I Mei Fried Cookies. Sadly, these did not come from Mom’s House but from my Second Favorite Asian Grocery Store: Hua Xing. Previously, Occasional Guinea Pig and snack provider Sean Whose Name is Nate sent us a package of seaweed cookies (1 pea) and a package of Peanut cookies (3 peas). He said there were other flavors and lo! I found them at my local haunt. Junkies, meet I-Mei’s Sesame Fried Cookies!
Mom’s House is still a wrocking name for a food place though. Hua Xing’s got nothing on that.
Anyway, I farmed these out to several sets of Pigs, including my immediate local cadre as well as the Wednesday group, so there was quite a lot of representation. There were also quite a lot of varying points of view but I’ll try and distill them all down into one essence of cookie. First, I am amused by the smattering of sesame on the cookie. It’s black sesame which is a nice contrast to the light brown cookie, but it’s clustered weirdly like someone was in a hurry and flung the sesame seeds on the cookie as it rolled by on the cookie conveyer. It’s got seeds, good enough. Next cookie! That’s neither here nor there in terms of the cookie itself but oddly noticeable.
Next I took a sniff and…well…it’s not as delicious a sesame as I would have hoped. It smells of faint poor man’s sesame in a vaguely nutty way (but not like identifiable dark toasty peanut butter, which is the smell I usually associate with tasty sesame) but is also smells of poor man’s fried in a “We should really change up the deep frier oil”.
As for the taste, the sesame cookies are sort of a bland generic crispy cookie base which could be a poor man’s thin fried shortbread/graham cross or more probably a thin ubiquitous unremarkable chocolate chip cookie without the chocolate chips to break up the monotony. They remind me a lot of Arrowroot cookies, those not quite cookies that you give toddlers for teething given the I-Mei cookie base isn’t very sweet either. It’s not a bad taste, but it’s also a very boring but munchable taste. The sesame isn’t that prominent either so sadly, these cookies are not saved by any sesame WOW. Bland with a comforting Peanut butteryness about them.
One of my Pigs mentioned that the crackers taste fishy but only one other Pig could corroborate the taste. All of the people who tried the cookies agreed that they tasted like they were fried in old oil so maybe that’s where the fishy comes from. Certainly, the Peanut fried cookie was better despite the sesame having the same sort of crunchity crunch (and the same sort of dryness too). Life is too short to eat boring but serviceable old oil tasting cookies, I’d recommend the Peanut if you have the choice.
Rating of 2.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
