11.08.03
Yan Yan (strawberry)
While Snack Food shopping I often get a couple different varieties (hence the foray into two kinds of Gooey Cake evilness) and when I picked up Chocolate Yan Yan I grabbed a pouch of Strawberry as well. I was expecting Strawberry dipping bliss on a stick so when I peeled the top back I was a little startled to discover the strawberry dip looks a lot like the putty they mix up for dental impressions. Still, pink is pink and (mostly) it’s the taste that counts. That explains most of my cooking right there. So I dipped a stick.
Well it is strawberry, after a sort. Unfortunately, I don’t think these strawberries ever really actually spent time growing in the ground on a farm somewhere out in the happy sun with birds and flowers and all that. I don’t think they were even grown hydroponically. My guess is that the strawberries that flavor this Yan Yan started as bottles on shelves somewhere in a lab and rolled out of there labeled “Strawberry flavor number 17” or the like.
It has flavor though, you can’t deny that. The first thing my brain registered (after “Ewww, dental putty) was Ooo, strawberry! Then, microseconds after the burst of fruitiness I could taste a definite chemical aftertaste. I would describe it as “lingering sweet that is a bit cloying and tends to hang out badly in the back of your mouth”. Not as grand as the chocolate wonderful by any means.
On the other hand, I did not run out of dip. Here’s another oddity between the strawberry and the chocolate: The accompanying sticks taste better. I don’t think they really do but I found myself looking forward to the rest of the stick flavor after the strawberry taste flooded my mouth. The sticks and dip work very effectively together, more so than for the chocolate (where the primary function of the stick was a crunchy vehicle for the dip). Maybe it’s the less sweet, blander than a graham cracker quality of the stick that smoothes out the strawberry flavor. Or maybe the stick acts like a starchy potato and soaks up the bad parts of the strawberry taste. Who knows, but it was a much more interesting mesh of stick and dip that the chocolate.
I was not so impressed with the strawberry variant of Yan Yan but it’s not utter vileness either. Go with the chocolate if you can because I’m giving Yan Yan (strawberry) a
Rating of 2.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
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Snack Love’s 2 cents
TeeDoh said,
November 27, 2011 at 6:17 pm
You got a bad batch of yan yan.. Yan Yan consistency is suppose to look just like the chocolate part.. I have been eating yan yan for years and I just bought 4 of them and the strawberry on all 4 of them are totally different then what I’ve had before.. I tried it and it tasted terrible!! Not like the normal yan yan strawberry. So I only ate the chocolate part and threw away the strawberry part because it was bad. It’s suppose to have the same consistency and look like the chocolate side but in a bright pink. Not bubbly looking..