07.22.07
Orion Pizza Cracker
TheMan and I, along with Scott H. decided to kill some time after breakfast a while back so we meandered over to The Most Korean of Asian Grocery Stores. They are the people who have the wall of Kim Chi and let me tell you, they take their Kim Chi seriously. I had no idea there were that many different kinds of Kim Chi. They also tend to have more Korean snacks than Japanese snacks but hey. Asian is as Asian does.
Along with some new Peppero and more Pocky (really? There can be such a thing?) we picked up these fellas because hee! Seriously. Check out the box. It’s standing up on edge in the picture but if you lay it flat it looks like an itty bitty pizza delivery box. Hee points! Then when you open up the package, the crackers look like itty bitty pizzas! More hee! points. They smell incredibly pizzarific too, all tomato-y and full of zesty pizza spices. Mmmm, several lots of delicious olfactory points there.
(also, check out Orion’s home page if you are bored and/or into clicking. Speaking of hee!)
They even taste as pizzarific as they smell: The spices and the tomato-yness with a nice chasing of cheesy holds up its end of the pizza bargain beautifully. But…all this pizza goodness is sitting on something like a sweet Ritz cracker and that just shatters the pizza ideal they had going. Don’t get me wrong, the cracker is perkily crunchy and cutely round and even has a checker waffle pattern on the back like they were baked on a wire pizza rack but…it’s sweet.
We liked them a lot despite the odd sweet but they could be so much more if they had a different base cracker. In a Combo, these would be deadly and they probably wouldn’t do half bad on a pita like chip or maybe one of those round flat cracker deelies you find in a Gardetto’s mix. What are those called? Anyway, Orion Pizza Crackers are not any of those alternate crackers so I’m going to have to deduct pea points for the sweet quasi Ritz cracker base.
I haven’t tried them as instructed, but I suspect that microwaving the crackers won’t alleviate their sweet problem. It’s an interesting serving suggestion though; I’m half tempted to pickup some pizza Combos and nuke them, just to see what happens.
Enough chatter, it’s time to rate these Orion Pizza Crackers. If they were on a savory based cracker, I’d be perfectly happy to plop down a 4 and a smidge rating and let it be. But Orion went with a sweet cracker and that’s going to cost at least a half pea point. On the other hand, it had a lot of amusement going for it which might almost recoup the half pea point loss. If I did quarter pea divisions, I’d give this a 3.75+ but you can really chop a wasabi pea up that fine so when I give Orion Pizza Crackers a
rating of 3.5 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas, think of it as a really, really enthusiastically high 3.5.
