Thursday, July 3, 2014

Hot & Spicy Seaweed Snack- Asian Food Market: Cherry Hill, NJ

Hot & Spicy Seaweed Snack- Asian Food Market: Cherry Hill, NJ
After trying and falling in love with the Wasabi Seaweed Snacks from Wegman's, I've begun seeing them everywhere, even Walmart and Target! Most of the American grocery stores carry original and wasabi flavored seaweed sheets, so when I saw a few new flavors on special buy at the Asian Food Market I had to have them. Let's see if these Hot & Spicy seaweed snacks can possibly be better than the wasabi version.

Although the packaging is much busier than the Wegman's variety, I actually prefer this design. The nutritional information is front and center, and all of the details flow nicely into one another.

Along with being a bit busier, the packaging for Choi's seaweed snacks is also significantly larger than the Wegman's version. The sheets inside are the same size as the other seaweed snacks I have had, but they are stacked differently allowing you to have almost twice as much product.

At a glance these sheets look the same as the wasabi version, but they're actually significantly less crunchy. The spicy flavoring seems to come from some kind of chili pepper oil that is on the outside of the seaweed, which doesn't seem to be evenly distributed, so these have less of a crispy crunch to them than the original and wasabi flavors I have had in the past, but the oil does provide a nice bit of heat.

Describing the taste of these is a bit tricky, because it tastes just like seaweed sheets with chili pepper oil sprayed on top, but if you've never had seaweed or chili pepper oil that description is of little to no help. Hmm, if you've never had seaweed I would describe it as being salty and mild, similar to sea spray or ocean water, but there is a slight leafy flavoring as well that's similar to oven roasted kale. It's a flavor I really enjoy, and this specific package has an oily pepper (as in the vegetable) flavoring. The heat levels aren't as powerful as the package indicated, I found these to be medium heat at best, but the chili oil is not evenly distributed. You might get one sheet that is almost spice-less while the next one is on par with a spicy mustard or medium hot sauce.

These were a bit more expensive than the ones I usually buy at Wegman's, but I did get a lot more seaweed sheets inside the package, so I guess this was a pretty good value for the money. I liked the heavily seasoned sheets, because they actually had a bit of spice to them, but those were a bit of a rarity. All in all I liked that these were something new, at least for me, but the inconsistency in flavoring was quite disappointing. I won't buy this flavor from this brand again, but I look forward to more Hot & Spicy seaweed from other brands in the future.
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
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