10.08.05
Maple and Butter Pretz
We saw this Pretz gem on our most recent trip to My Favorite Little Asian Grocery store and all of us (TheMan, Badmovie, LunarGeography and I) agreed that sweet Pretz was just too strange to not be an immediate candidate for JSF review. Personally, I was sort of wondering if Pretz was slyly horning in on Pocky’s domain since the only real differences between Pretz and Pocky are a little less salt and a little more chocolaty coating. Up to this point, Pretz has always been some sort of savory and Pocky the sweet but now? Turf War!
I can see Pocky screaming over to the Pretz shelf, “Bring it! Punk! I’ve been doing the sweet since you were a gleam in some Japanese entrepreneur’s eye, you ain’t got a chance. You want to throw down? I’ve got more varieties than you have ingredients. Any time, any place”. Meanwhile Pretz is all up and coming tough, “Anything you can do, I can do better” which causes one of those tense silences to descend on the snack section. Pretz and Pocky start jostling for position, casually flipping their butterfly knives around in a menacing pre-eviscerating sort of way, which is the cue for Pucca and Black Black to scurry for cover. And then, it’s on!
Hey, when you’re a Pretz, you’re a Pretz all the way.
Did I just devote two paragraphs on that set up? Heh, I most certainly did. Was it as good for you as it was for me?
Onwards! The packaging shows a stack of tasty pancakes with a nice photogenic pat of butter and the perfect pour of syrup. It’s so un Pretz like it even got the hermit crab’s attention. Sweet Pretz? You’re kidding right? That just goes against the very laws of JSF. Incidentally, for all you production notes geeks, when I do a JSF photo shoot I typically set the screensaver to do its screensaver thing, which happens to be ‘cycle through all my favorite pics!’. Most of them are flowers or other happy pastoral backgrounds which work pretty well but occasionally there are the strange ones that pop up that maybe aren’t so appropriate for a food backdrop. Like a hermit crab, for instance. He amused me quite a lot in this one though because he really looks like he’s all “What?? Sweet Pretz? No WAY!” and plus it was the only shot of six that was in focus. ish.
Yes sweet Pretz. Sorta. But first, flat Pretz. You get a look at them? F.L.A.T. That’s a first, your typical Pretz is more or less roundish but not M&B Pretz. Take a peek:
Typical Pretz are on the right (tomato if you are dying to know), Maple and Butter Pretz are on the left. Focal plane is just a tad beyond center. Whoops. Buuuuut you get the idea. Flat Pretz are almost reminiscent of pancakes (if pancakes were crunchy, about an eighth inch thick, a quarter inch wide and four inches long. Hmmm, sounds like the description for Decorer Pocky. Turf War?) which is sorta cool. It’s a theme!
But the taste! The taaaaaste! I know, y’all are dying to know about the sweet Pretz and whether there will be a rumble in My Favorite Little Asian Grocery store or not so I’ll let you in on a little secret: Somehow M&B Pretz stay true to the basic Pretz form and are savory as all Pretz should be. Yet, they are also sweet as the maple in the name and the syrupy pancake pic implies. If you just said “Whaaaat?” to that news, think back to Crunch & Munch or Fiddle Faddle. They managed a sweety caramel corn with a nice salty/savory kick in the taste buds just as Maple and Butter Pretz does. Except M&B Pretz has less sweety caramel corn and much more salty savory Pretz going on.
How? One side of the flat Pretz is glazed in a maple sugar coat of tastiness while the other side is your typical savory Pretz. Ingenious! And Tasty. It’s a robust sweet, if you will, with a nice mapley kick with a good balance of salty goodness all in one stick. I’ll take it! In fact, I’ll take it and give it a
Rating of 4 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
