12.14.03
Tohato Caramel Corn Snack: (strawberry)
Again…is this the true name? I don’t know! Tohato is the company, that much I am pretty sure about (as I have decided that Bourbon is the company that makes the every burgers since I discovered something else that had the Bourbon moniker) and the rest of the writing on the stuck on English portion read: Tohato Caramel Corn Strawberry Corn Snack. Take your pick as to what these actually are until I can get either The Man in Japan or Rob to get me a translation. That said, these are perhaps one of my favorite so far of the Japanese snack foods.
I’m not strawberry’s number one fan by any means (my heart belongs to chocolate) but a good strawberry thing is worth tasting. These are very worth tasting. Unlike the Yan Yan, these strawberry corn doodles are the real thing. Even the packaging confirms this with a happy “All natural flavorings” listed right in the ingredients. Whooo! And it is strawberry, my friends. We opened up the bag and a big old wooof of strawberry came rolling out. It was a strawberry cloud you could taste and it tasted good.
The thing about a dusting of real strawberry flavor on a corn doodle though is that the snack’s color palate is a bit off. The real strawberry is a light pink in color and when you add that to the yellow base color of a corn doodle you get…salmon pinky orange. There is really no other way to say it other that these strawberry corn doodles look like shrimp. It’s very disturbing. They even have a crinkly “back” (you know, where the corn puff sorta bulges out of the original smoothish corn puff frame? That part) in some cases and split ends that look like tiny shrimp tails.
They don’t taste like shrimp though. They have the light fluffy very crunchable texture of a cheese puff or those Planter’s cheese balls (TheMan mentioned Cheetoes but I find Cheetoes to be a lot more compact and less happy crunchy melt in your mouth). These things were GREAT! They had a light airiness to them that just dissolved on your tongue if you held them there a bit. The flavor was great too. Think Crunchberry. In fact, these are better than Crunchberry because they did not have the sharp grating puffiness to them that Crunchberries have. I don’t know about you, but I have scraped the beegeebus out of my mouth after eating a good deal of Crunchberries. Not these fellas, I could crunch them until the cows come home and I don’t own any cows. That’s a lot of strawberry doodles.
I would be perfectly happy giving these Tohato caramel corn snacks (strawberry) a five pea rating because they taste great, they crunch most pleasingly, they are perfectly poppable and all in all a great munch. But. They look like shrimp. It’s a tad disturbing so I’m going to have to knock a half point off for their deep sea connotations and give them a
Rating of 4.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
