Sunday, February 26, 2012

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.

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