Alex Goes Snacking, Part 1

Adventures in the Snack Aisle of Viennese Grocery Stores

I am a great lover of snack foods.  Is it salty, crunchy, fake-cheese-flavored?  Is it a candy or a biscuit or a chocolate?  Something to eat between meals or after meals?  If any of the above, the chances are that I enjoy it more frequently than I should.  So, since we have arrived in Vienna and been eating our own food (rather than eating out, as we had done when staying in hotels), I’ve been paying close attention to the snack aisles at Viennese grocery stores and trying as many of the more unfamiliar items as possible.

Throughout our trip, I will periodically provide updates on these gustatory adventures.  What odd things have we tried?  And how were they?  Pedant that I am, I think it’s useful to have a grading mechanism to force myself to ponder – with precision – how good a particular snack was and why.  To that end, I’ll be using a tried and trusted 5-point grading scale.

A note on the 5-star scale 

Gelsey and I have used this scale for some time in our review of restaurants.  (We maintain a spreadsheet of all the restaurants we’ve eaten at together, each with a quantitative score from each of us.)  The quantitative grades correspond with qualitative assessments as follows:

• 5 stars – perfection. (Everything about this is perfect.  Nothing should be changed.)

• 4.5 stars – excellent. (Great experience; great food.)

• 4.0 stars – very good. (Good food plus great experience or great food plus okay experience)

• 3.5 stars – good. (Would happily go again if convenient)

• 3.0 stars – satisfactory. (Would go again but only if someone else proposed it)

• 2.5 stars – fine (with tone). (Would try to avoid going again but would relent if pushed)

• 2.0 stars – poor. (Disappointing. Would not go again)

• 1.5 stars – bad. (This place shouldn’t be in business.)

• 1.0 stars – very bad. (No redeeming features.)

• 0 stars – beyond categorization. (Implies a category error, as in “I am not sure this was a restaurant,” or “I’m not sure this was food.”)

On to the reviews!

Erdnuss puffs: 4.0 stars

Erdnuss (Peanut)-flavored things are everywhere here (a bit of a surprise to me, honestly), and these did not disappoint.  The texture is something between a cheese puff and the fried veggie sticks they sell as a healthy snack.  The flavor is unambiguously peanut.  “A peanut-flavored puff?” I hear you ask skeptically.  Indeed, that was my initial reaction too.  But it’s just the right amount of peanut-flavoring.  Any more, and it would overwhelm the taste of the puff itself.  Any less, and it’d be hard to notice at all.  These were popular with Gelsey too, who thinks we might have to get them again. 

Pepper-flavored cheese puffs: 1.5 stars

I love Cheetos, so how bad could these be, right?  They’re just knock-off Cheetos with a bit of extra flavoring… pepper flavoring.  Not black pepper flavoring, though.  Bell pepper flavoring (as you can see from the smiling dog holding a red bell pepper in a disembodied paw on the packaging). 

The first issue here is with the texture.  A cheese puff should have at least some crunch.  You want to bite in and hear the crunch as you break the puff in two.  These just sort of dissolve in the mouth.  When you do bite them, they offer no resistance whatsoever to the coming together of one’s molars.  It would be impossible to know if you had accidentally left the bag open in the pantry for the last 3 years because they couldn’t possible get any softer. 

But if I might describe the texture as inadequate, the taste would more accurately be described as unpleasant.  Fake pepper flavoring is, unsurprisingly, not good!  Really, it’s quite bad.  I mean, peppers themselves are fine.  We put them on salads or cook them in stir fries because they give a bit of different flavor and texture that’s not too objectionable.  But I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who goes, “OMG, I LOVE bell peppers.”  And for the flavor of these puffs to be enjoyable, you’d really have to be someone who had that reaction to bell peppers. 

Eis Zapfen: 0.0 stars

We have been looking for mints.  We like mints.  We brought a few with us, but we are running low.  So we looked in our supermarkets (yes, plural) for something like a mint.  The only things we could find were gum, Tic-Tacs, and… this. 

Google translates ‘Eis Zapfen’ as ‘ice cream cone’.  ‘Eiszapfen’ translates as ‘icicle’.  The next lines of the packaging read ‘refreshing ice candies.’  Given that there was nothing else that seemed to suit our needs, we bought a pack of refreshing ice candies.  I was soon left wishing I had purchased an icicle.

I did have some reservations about this even from the outset.  Blue is not a food color.  Other than blueberries, which are extremely dark and sort of purplish, there are basically no blue foods.  Bluefin tuna meat isn’t blue.  Blue raspberry is a made-up flavor.  Blue cheese is literally cheese gone bad.  Blue plates are said to make food taste worse.  So I was made suspicious by this bright blue bag of ice candies. 

Upon opening up the bag and unwrapping a candy, I was tempted to call poison control.  But neither knowing the number for poison control nor how to say, “I believe there’s been a mistake and someone is selling poisonous goods in the grocery store,” in German, I was left with no choice but to proceed.  If some of these got loose around a nuclear power site, the person stumbling upon them would undoubtedly pull some emergency lever to shutdown the entire plant. 

And they would have good reason to do so.  Despite my now floor-low expectations for this candy’s flavor, it somehow managed to fail to meet them.  Miraculously, it tasted exactly as it looked, except worse.  It just tasted blue.  The only flavor of comparison I could think of was the solution at the barbershop they use to sanitize the combs and scissors.  These taste like that. 

I now hear the skeptics in the audience muttering, “like you’ve ever drunk barbershop sanitizing solution,” and no, I haven’t, I’m still writing this.  But I am 100% convinced that if I drank that solution, it would taste like ice bonbons.  Maybe better.  The candy lasted only about 10 seconds in my mouth before I hurriedly ran to the wastebin to expel it there, tie the bag shut, and race down the stairs with the bag to deposit the now clearly radioactive trash in the garbage room. 

But, dear reader, I take my task of reviewing the best and the worst of Austrian snacks for you seriously, and so for this particular edition and against my better judgment, I shall try another, simply to confirm that what I have heretofore reported has been done with precision and without hyperbole. 

If anything, upon second tasting, my previous report understated the extent to which these candies should be banished from the earth, flung to the farthest reaches of the galaxy for the protection of all humankind.  The toxic combination of bitterness and fake sugar produces the effect of biting into several whole cloves while also pouring a packet of Kool-aid powder directly into one’s mouth. 

This second time, however, I was prepared.  Gelsey had brewed me a nice cup of mint tea in advance, so I could easily wash away the offending flavor quickly.  Half a mug of tea in, I can still feel the radiation burns on my tongue.  Part of a deliciously butter pastry later, I can still feel the lingering tingling of barbershop solution on the part of my tongue it touched.  Please make it stop.