07.30.06
Soken Seaweed Candy
Yeah, I know. Seaweed candy? But don’t sit there and tell me that you all haven’t been secretly expecting something of this nature to amble along eventually. Well amble it has and here it is by the way of David, the Muppet King. I don’t know if I have mentioned this or not, but y’all have David to thank for the JSFR. He used to bring all sorts of weird Japanese snacks to the weekly game way back when. I just took that idea to the next level.
Oh wait, he’s one upped me. Check out This Little JSFR present to y’all that David tMK just threw together. I too have a JSFR database but as you can see, his is on-line while mine is not. His is also more up to date (ouch) so Yay David!
OK, back to seaweed. I can’t say I was overly thrilled by the prospect of a seaweed flavored candy because seaweed? Yuck. Oh sure I’ll eat the nori wrapped around sushi but that’s seaweed with rice and raw fish. This is seaweed with seaweed (and apparently malt syrup, whole wheat flour and rice powder). I’m not that fond of seaweed, it’s awfully green in a fishy/seaweedy sort of way that I find kinda unpleasant.
Oddly, though, when you unwrap one of these critters there is little to no smell to them at all. Strange for seaweed, that stuff usually announces itself when you just sorta look at the package. Huh! And also the gumminess of the candy is probably more fun than I really want to admit. Let’s just say that they are eminently squishable and move on from there. Lastly, before we get to the eating, these seaweed candies are wrapped in an edible wrapper. Last time we encountered an edible wrapper it was attached to a Botan Rice Candy. If I recall, the Botan rice wrapper was less than stellar. Soken’s edible wrapper is more starchy tasting than rice-y tasting and it is much lighter in construction. It’s actually very light and fragile to the point of insubstantiality. Good? Bad? Well, it is edible at least even if it only tastes faintly like something sort of starchy. Maybe.
On your left: Candy still wrapped in non-edible wrapper. On your right: Candy with edible wrapper only.
As for the taste of the candy? I found it to taste sweet and slightly green. Not a green like grass clippings, but a green like maybe a more robust type of vegetation. It’s a darker, grittier green but not an overpowering green and it’s certainly not what I would call a seaweedy green. Maybe tree leaf green or driveway weed green but definitely a land bound green. Nothing in the taste says “This is from the SEA” to me. Two of my Guinea pigs thought that the taste was gummy brussel sprout and I can see that. Whatever the flavor, most people so far have either enjoyed them or found them not so bad. I’m not entirely fond of them and would give them a personal 1.5 pea rating but I’m not fond of green tasting things. So I’ll add a pea point because it was surprisingly well received but then I’m going to have to turn around and take away half a pea point for the flavor. I think a seaweed candy ought to taste identifiably seaweedy and this is not so much with the green of the sea. Do the math and Soken Seaweed Candy winds up with a
Rating of 2 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
