Dried Squid - One of Asia's Most Popular Snack Foods!!!

This snack is one of the most popular snack foods across the entire of Asia, variations of it are eaten across Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore and this particular famous brand is from Thailand! I grew up eating this version of the dried squid snack in Hong Kong in the 80's. And to be accurate this particular variant is Dried Cuttlefish, a species similar to squid, which is equally common here, but might not be so well known in the West. Both are pretty damn ugly as you can see here: 

The number of different dried squid snacks and the different styles in which they are prepared is many and often depends from country to country. Here are a couple of different examples: 

Typically the squid is seasoned and then dried and sometimes also barbecued after being dried. Typically the flavour is sweet, sometimes with a hint of spice and the texture is very very chewy! Everyone seems to love this snack across Asia and you can find it in kids lunch boxes, on desks at work and served on occasionally on tables in bars instead of peanuts. This used to be one of my favourite snacks as a kid, but to be honest it must have been somewhere between 10 - 20 years since I'd eaten it last before opening this packet for Crazy from Kong. 

To see what I thought, check out our review here: 

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong! 
And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass Blog

Lotte Specialité Salt and Caramel Chocolate - Famous Korean Chocolate Maker Jumps on the Salted Caramel Bandwagon!!!

Ok, the first thing that annoys me about this product is that the rubbish quality screengrab from our own video is the best picture I can find of it on the whole internet - in fact it is the only picture! The second thing that annoys me about this product is that it sucks. I mean it really sucks. It's worse than the rubbish picture above. It tastes terrible, the texture is terrible, the consistency is terrible, basically it's just a terrible product.

Credit to Lotte for being ahead of the curve by a few years with the whole Salt and Caramel in everything trend (you can see from our reactions to the salt component that this was something very new and unlikely to be good sounding to us), but the product is just incredibly poorly executed.

Now I want to balance this review by stating clearly that Lotte are a great company with a long history and a tonne of great chocolate products and snack products. They were established in Japan in 1948 and South Korea in 1967 and have been going strong since then. It is unfortunate that the second product we reviewed from them was so bad! They do have a whole range of other unusual chocolate bars under their specialité such as:

Lotte Specialité Rum Cake Chocolate

Lotte Specialité Marron Glacé Chocolate

But sadly I've tried none of them and none of them seem to be available in Hong Kong anymore, so I'll never be able to find out if they were any good or not. I hope we'll be able to review Lotte's standout product "Koala no March" sometime in the future. In the meantime here is the review of the Lotte Specialité Salt and Caramel Chocolate:

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong! 
And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass Blog

Lotte Pepero Nude - The Most Famous Biscuits in Korea!

Pepero is an extremely popular Korean biscuit produced by Lotte since 1983, though it is actually a copy of the Japanese biscuit Pocky which has been sold by Glico since 1966. Pepero has become so popular in Korea that there is even a "Pepero Day"!!! This is basically the equivalent of Valentine's Day in other countries and consists of young people and couples Pepero Sticks, candies and romantic gifts. It's held on 11/11 every year and is said to exist because the date resembles 4 of the biscuit sticks. Lotte does about 55% of their Pepero sales for the year in November and all kinds of special versions are available at that time as you can see here: 

Typically Pepero (and Pocky for that matter) is a long thin biscuit dipped in chocolate or flavoured chocolate. However, the Pepero we are trying today are "Pepero Nude" which as the name implies are a type of "naked" biscuit by Pepero standards, with no coating on the outside. Instead there is something quite unexpected about these particular Pepero. 

Check out our review video below to find out more: 

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!

And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass Blog