National Snack Food Month

Dried cranberries are my ultimate favorite snack.  I'll sprinkle them on salads, bake them into muffins, mix them into my trailmix...  but ultimately, when I have dried cranberries, I'll eat them by the handful.  Oh, I try to limit and slow my intake by using a scoop or a bowl, but I'll keep going back for refills.

 

So when I saw that Craisins now had flavors, I figured I would give them a shot.  So I bought one of each flavor plus the original (which I just adore) and did a taste test with my roommate.  We tasted some of each flavor and compared them to the originals.

The flavored Craisins can be summed up very easily: Blegh!

All of the flavored Craisins had weird chemical aftertastes.  I've never had that with the regular Craisins.  The cherry-flavored tasted like normal Craisins at first, then they tasted like a rotten batch of maraschino cherries.  And normally I like maraschino cherries, chemicals and all!  The pomegranate ones were the least offensive with a faint pomegranate flavor, but still had a lingering chemical flavor.  The blueberry-flavored ones were the worst- it was just all chemical to me.  I thought maybe it was just me and that I was sensitive to some chemical used in the flavoring process, but my roommate had the same negative reaction to the flavored Craisins.

You can see a bit of a color difference. 
Left to right: original, cherry, pomeranate
and blueberry-flavored craisins.

I opted to use the pomegrante-flavored ones in a recipe, hoping that cooking them would make them better.  It seemed to help, so maybe the flavored ones would be good for baking.  Still...  I'll be sticking to the non-flavored dried cranberries.