03.17.07
Cacao Pretz
A while back I mentioned when I reviewed Kurogoma Pocky that I had picked up some new Pretz as well. This is all you Pretz lover’s lucky day for today I unveil Pretz: Cacao.
I actually cracked into the other Pretz flavor (yes, I found two – count them – two new Pretz flavors the same day) at the same time and did a compare and contrast tasting. You’ll have to wait until next week (or when you click on the next JSFR link if you happen to be browsing the archives sometime in my future) to understand why this needed to be, but suffice to say that it did. And I was hungry, but mostly because the two flavors are closely enough related that I wanted to taste them side by side. Bet you’re wondering what the other flavor is now eh? Muahahaha.
Anyway, Cacao Pretz are yet another sweetie Pretz (round stick 3: flat stick 2) to add to the Pretz quadrafecta (quintafectra?) and if Pretz doesn’t stop horning in on Pocky’s territory there is going to be a snack food rumble. In fact, when I opened Cacao Pretz, I immediately noticed their extremely dark brown coloring and thought for a moment that they might be chocolate coated. That would certainly spark things off between the two stick snacks but fortunately, the Pretz only look covered in rich, tasty, dark chocolate. What they actually were was a nice, cocoa-y, buttery, crackery, slightly sweet stick snack.
They have the Pretz crunch, which I’ve discussed before but I’ll do a little refresher crunch for those of you who might have forgotten. Take a Ritz cracker and a graham cracker and either breed them, cross pollinate them, intermingle their atoms (with the power of your mind!) or crush them together and reconstitute them; however the manner of combining crackers is accomplished. The resulting snack stick has the buttery crispiness of a Ritz but the dense, grainy and sweet of a graham cracker. For this Pretz, add a good helping of cocoa flavoring and a touch of sweet so the cocoa bitter isn’t overpowering and wala! Cacao Pretz.
If you remember Harvest (chocolate) crackers, these are really darned close, save with a bit less crispity crunch and a bit more sweet. And of course Pretz shaped, not Harvest shaped. I liked Harvest, I like Pretz in general, I like chocolate and I think Cacao Pretz did a very good job of getting chocolate to represent in cracker form. It even whiffs nicely of cocoa and that is a beautiful thing. I think it’s beautiful enough to get a
Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5.
