Emerald Cocoa Roast Dark Chocolate Almonds

As a quick aside, has anyone noticed the fact that this is the one-year anniversary of the last Terrific or Turd post?

Anyone?

Please?

Never mind.

This time we're trying out a super-healthy snack that really isn't all that healthy when you think about it. Not that that matters a tremendous amount, as you can tell looking back at what we've rated in the past.

So here we go...

JLam Says:

I had to do a quick doubletake because I thought BCom was going to have me testing grated parmesan cheese for out huge anniversary episode. But, I tuned it around and realized we were dealing with a crunchy antioxidant bomb trying hard to be a yummy snack.

Almonds are my second-favorite nuts.

I'll leave that thought hanging for few seconds. (Hanging for a few seconds? That's what she said! - Bcom)

And dark chocolate works well in just about every application. However, in this case, once again, the infusion of Sucralose has sabotaged an otherwise promising combination.

All-in-all I expected to like these things, and I just didn't. I wish I did, because they're probably better for me than most quick, crunchy poppable snacks. But unfortunately, I now need some sort of high-fructose corn syrup to wash my mouth out with.

TURD.

Bcom Says:

I never thought I would be trying a dark chocolate almond, or dark chocolate anything for that matter, and going into it thinking I was going to like it.

When my part-time-working, grocery-mart-bagging, beta-is-better-than-VHS, Crystal-Pepsi-is-my-favorite-soda-ever, margarine-covered-pan-fried-cube-steak-as-tough-as-shoe-leather-is-my-favorite-food roommate told me and the rest of his circle of friends that Special Dark was his favorite candy bar... Oooohhhh did the mocking begin. He got beat down like a NARC at a biker rally. (Shout out to Dennis Miller!)

But now, the rise of dark chocolate, and the deep, dark connection it's made with the female gender cannot be stopped.

"Excuse me? Is that a bag of dark chocolate Hershey Kisses?" She closes her eyes, licks her lips and says, "mmmm..." leaving the rest to my overactive imagination...

"Oh... is that a King Size Special Dark bar?---" Oh my god, she has her eyes closed and a smile on her face for so long, I think she's in suspended animation.

All I'm trying to say is that women and weirdo roommates love this stuff. And it's gaining traction every day. It seems like every time I take a peek at the snackfood aisle, something else is being drenched in dark chocolate.

Now these bullet-size almonds are not drenched in dark chocolate, but sprinkled. Ever so lightly sprinkled. A dusting if you will. I'm so gay. LOL. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Chomping through these little beauties you get the definite chocolate taste. It's not overwhelming the almond. A very good afternoon snack. Yummo. (Shout out to Rachel Ray!)

TERRIFIC!

Shearer's Home Run Hot Dog Potato Chips

B-Com Says:

This chip has it all. Nice, crisp and thick rippled chip texture. Many levels of flavor, from sweet to vinegary… somehow, they figured out how to get all the components of a delicious hot dog into the chip, and you can taste each one. As flavored chips go, this one definitely goes to the top of the list for me.

In fact, I liked it so much, I was afraid I would pound down the entire bag before J-Lam got here. So I started doing an informal product taste test among my co-workers. The results were unanimous. They would have all given it a terrific. I’m absolutely sure J-Lam will too, unless he’s a lame weirdo.

TERRIFIC!

J-Lam Says:

A hot dog flavored chip is an interesting concept, and I was really looking forward to another American fast-food inspired delicacy to the tune of past terrific Burger King Flame Broiled Potato Snacks. With that gastronomic memory top of mind, I dug in.

Unfortunately, I was a touch disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the chips are good, in and of themselves and I’ll eat them again in a heartbeat. But they don’t taste anything like a hot dog. There’s possibly the slightest hint of a sweet relish aftertaste there, but that’s it. No more.

So are they good? Yes. Do they do what they say they do? No. And for that reason, I have to call them a

TURD!

White Fudge-Covered Oreos

Mmmmmmmmm.....

B-Com says:
Wow.

These things are close to the perfect snack food cookie. This is what every famous cookie, candy bar, and chip maker wants to be when they're trying to make their icon sell as well in a new variation. Attention Frito-Lay! Attention Mars! Attention whoever the hell thought of Floats! Look to Nabisco. They got it right.

TERRIFIC!

J-Lam says:
Delicious. Oreos are, and always will be, among the best cookies in the world. But this update is a real improvement and an awesome treat. Of course, it will never replace the good old fashioned milk-dunking, twist-and-licking Oreo we've all come to know and love, and that's not their intent. But for a now-and-then yummy treat... this one's a real winner.

TERRIFIC!

Ritz Crackers - Brown Sugar and Cinnamon

A perennial cracker superstar gets a new sweet coating... yeah. We cringed too.

B-Com says:
The taste, I'm sad to say, is like an imitation graham cracker. Let me tell you thta I let a couple of women in my office try these crackers before I did, and they were all "oooohhs" and "aaahhhsss". They swooned over these things. Couldn't get enough. So Ritz is obviously doing something right. But for a big burly man, like me, give me a delicious graham cracker any day over this thing. I think Ritz should be salty and buttery. The sweetness really turns me off.

TURD!

J-Lam says:
Uh... What happened to my Ritz? I, like put it in my mouth and had to physically tell my jaw to go ahead and chew because it was screaming at me "what is this thing in my mouth?" I mean, it really doesn't taste horrible, it's just that our brains are programmed and conditioned by years upon years of consistency that when we close our lips around a round, serrated-edged, bright yellow snack cracker from a brown wax-paper sleeve that came out of a red box with "RITZ" across the front in yellow over navy blue... it's gonna taste like a Ritz. My brain revolted when this cracker hit my tongue, and there's not enough time in this life to get used to it.

TURD!

Dubble Bubble Halloween Combo Pack

America's original bubble gum attacks with a four-part horror show for Halloween! With varieties like "Slime Ball" lime flavor, "Pumpkin Seedlings" with candy seeds inside, "Count Blacula" with cherry blood and "Horror Eyes"... we ask, scary? Eh...

J-Lam says:
I will forever remember Dubble Bubble as the brand that first led me to an understanding of TMJ. At the tender age of nine I threw one of their ubiquitous pink cylinders in my mouth and chowed down with the mistaken impression that Dubble Bubble was kind of like Bubble Yum.

Not so.

The resulting instant pain and day of discomfort was technically caused by the strain of my lower jaw moving about an inch to the left of my upper jaw. But the real cause was that Dubble Bubble was rediculously hard gum. Only rivaled by Topps and Bazooka Joe, both of which at least come to you with edges and corners that make you instinctively slow down.

Anyway, I do have to give Dubble Bubble props for packaging their same-old-same-old flavor in a brand new look for the Halloween season. These four varieties look good, and their fun names and decor will no doubt appeal to the little trick-or-treaters to which they're aimed. The gum tastes as good as it always has, i.e. it's tough and hurts to chew for more than a few minutes, which is ok because the flavor is gone at that point.

Each flavor has a very slight difference as you crunch down on the candy coating, but after a few moments, you're chewing the same old thing you've chewed before, so I hesitate to agree with the flavor labels. All-in-all, though, not a bad rehash for a brand that has stood the test of time and continues to provide solid chewing entertainment for the 21st century.

TERRIFIC!

B-Com says:
As I'm looking at the Halloween-style package of gum, with four different flavors (?) I have a few questions:

1. The packaging says Halloween "combo". I'm not sure if that refers to the fact that there are different varieties in the bag, or the fact that sometimes the individual wrappings include one gumball, sometimes two, and sometimes one and a half (which must be a warning to the other gumballs that if you don't take your vitamins and say your prayers, this could be you!)
2. After getting over the combo question, I wonder if the four varieties are supposed to be one bubble gum with three unique flavors and an eyeball-painted original? Or is it the filling that provides the additional flavor? Or am I being fleeced? Only one way to find out...

Horror Eyes is straight-up sugar gum: it looks like an eyeball, but it doesn't taste like one. 30 seconds of sugary flavor that dissipates to the nothing erasure taste you need to spit out to pop another piece.

Pumpkin Seedlings looks like a pumpkin, and when you bite into it you get this little burst of irritating flavorless specks that get jammed in your gums and leave you feeling "I am now annoyed at a gumball." They felt like they were burrowing into my gums. Very unpleasant. I couldn't think of a good analogy. Lame, sorry.

Where this gets interesting is in the lime (Slime Balls) and the cherry (Count Blacula) filling. In those cases, I did definitely note the flavor. The fillings are quite dense, so when you chew into it, they actually changed the consistency and flavor of the gum. If you happen to remember Rascals (which was a candy that turned into a gum) this masterful work of engineering turns from a gum into... mush? I had a hard time keeping it together in my mouth, and once it did finally solidify, the flavor was gone.

So the gums that taste the best don't even last the full 30 seconds you get from the worse flavors. So here's my dilemma. It's sugar gum, so I'm going into this knowing 30-seconds-or-less is the rule. Trash it, get another piece. So... what do I base this on?

Are these things fun? Yeah, absolutely. If I'm a kid, do I want to just tear into this whole bag and have it next to me like a vampire needs blood? Sure! So, with that being said, even though all of the above seems kind of negative, I really think they've hit the mark on this product. I'm going to do the old loop-the-loop on this one and give it a

TERRIFIC!

Guatamalen Candies' Tropical Marshmallows

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivonewb/2747853165/

I tried really hard to find a picture of these things for you, but I didn't have my camera with me, and the rest of the 'net is apparently just as unimpressed as we were by Guatemalan Candy's Tropical Marshmallows. Here's the link to their odd website: http://www.guandy.com/. There's a picture on there if you're willing to hunt blindly for it.

J-Lam Says:
I'm a pretty easy-going guy. I don't complain much, especially when it comes to food. So it's pretty rare for me to actually get offended about something I try for Terrific or Turd. I mean, it's not easy to get me downright ANGRY about foodstuffs, and when it happens, I'm just as surprised as everyone else. But let me tell you, the results are rarely pretty. Tremendous amounts of destruction, and potential bodily harm may ensue! In fact, I would venture to say that when food pisses me off, there could very possibly be death on the agenda...

Fortunately, I couldn't be bothered getting angry at these things. They're marshmallows. I mean, if they weren't all manner of weird, layered pastel colors, and if they didn't claim on the package to contain assorted tropical fruit flavors, I could have enjoyed them with as much empty satisfaction as I would any marshmallow. It's air-puffed, chewy sugar with a powdery coating of something-or-other that keeps it from sticking to your fingers, right? Not much to it.

As it stands, these get an immediate turd simply because they aren't what they claim to be. There is no fruit flavor, there is no "assorted" anything. It's just marshmallows with artificial color added. Carcinogenic air-puffed sugar. Whoop-dee-doo.

TURD!

J-Dag Says:
I tried the yellow-blue combination, but it doesn't matter. There is no flavor at all. It's not fruity. It is a

TURD!

D-Wag Says:
The pink-white marshmallow reminds me of chewing on a pencil eraser. Have you ever toasted a pencil eraser?

TURD!

B-Com Says:
Well, you can see this did not go over really well. Yes, I thought these soft, pastel colored fruit-flavored gems had promise. When I think of marshmallows dancing in my head, it's these little beauties I picture. I watched as three of my fellow taste-testers completely trashed them, and even though I agreed with them, I really wanted to find SOMETHING to praise. Something that would make the whole exercise worth it.

Here it is: There are two recipes provided on the package... OK, there's one recipe, and a Spanish translation of that recipe. Also, they're GLUTEN FREE!! That's great for all you gluten-haters out there! They're made with halaal gelatin for those of the nation of Islam!

And here's the creme de la creme: This product contains NO GENETICALLY MODIFIED SUBSTANCES! (Yes, it actually says that right on the package.) That's obviously what makes it so good.

Bottom line: does it taste like marshmallows? Yes. Does it taste like assorted tropical fruits? No.

TURD!

Doritos Collisions – Cheesy Enchilada / Sour Cream

The all-American snack chip gets a hot new flavor!!!! …again.

J-Lam Says:

I’m getting a little tired of Frito Lay’s recent “flavor of the hour” Doritos marathon. Don’t get me wrong, Doritos in just about any variation will always be a serviceable snack, and these are no different. They’re tasty. Not exactly like cheesy enchiladas and sour cream, but close enough when you’re chowing them four at a time and chasing with cold hot chocolate. (Don’t ask.) But I bristle at the gimmicky marketing that has resulted in about 112 variations of cheese Doritos, about four of which I would be able to peg as different without a package telling me so. Still, all in all, it’s still Doritos. So, it’s still

TERRIFIC!

B-Com Says:

MMmmmm…. Doritos! This is the good stuff. Cheesy Enchilada has the nice thick, powdery dusting of flavor and spice you’re used to. The corn chip is light and crispy. The Cheesy Enchilada flavor comes off spicy and cheesy just as you would expect.

The only thing I don’t understand is the Sour Cream. Logically, this should be a lighter, cooling flavor to counteract the spicy kick of the Enchilada, just like real life. But in this bag, the Sour Cream flavor gets beat all to heck by the monstrous Enchilada. It’s like a hero cop who gets framed and lands in the general population at the state pen, where he put away half the lowlifes in the state. He gets completely FUBAR’d. You find him completely covered with Cheesy Enchilada fingerprints, his spirit broken and crying at the bottom of the bag. IF you know what I mean…

Otherwise,

TERRIFIC!