Street food, snacks and junk food from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Philippines, including Green Tea Kit Kat, Self Freezing Coke, MOS Burger and McDonalds.
All the weird stuff you've never heard about, but always wanted to try!
Showing posts with label Spencer Douglass Ltd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spencer Douglass Ltd. Show all posts
Well this review was a lot of fun for many reasons! Firstly the idea of a "No Smoking" candy seems like fun to me. Rather than a candy for quitting smoking, it sounds more like a candy that forbids or stops smoking from happening, the candy equivalent of the smoke police!
Secondly and much more interestingly, through some bizarre coincidence of circumstance, our friend Michael Chan who was the main face of all of the Hong Kong Government's Anti-Smoking Adverts for years, happened to arrive at our place to play Gears of War 3 on the X-Box just as we were about to film our review of Okuda No-Smoking Candy. This is doubly amusing because Michael is in fact a hardened smoker and so we immediately decided to pull him into our live filmed review.
To set the scene properly, here is first the official Hong Kong Government Anti-Smoking Campaign Video featuring none other than Michael Chan:
And now that you've enjoyed the HK Government's amusing official effort to prevent smoking, it's time to compare them with the much more unofficial efforts of the Okuda Candy Company to get you to stop smoking with their specially designed sweets.
Check out our review of the product here to see what we thought and whether or not it got Michael Chan to finally give up smoking (don't worry they are not the same videos despite the cover image):
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.
This tiny little package certainly appears to showcase a very special candy - first of all the double name "Black Black" certainly seems to imply something meaningful (even if we don't know exactly what) as the candy is obviously not just black, it is "Black Black". Secondly it specifies various strange and special things on the packet, although you can't see them from the picture above. The first of these is that it specifies that this candy is "Strong Type" obviously implying that this is no pushover candy, but rather something strong that you had better take seriously. The second and even more interesting statement on the package is that the candy is "Hi-Technical Excellent"!!! Now that certainly sounds like quite the statement, no? And it could be interpreted various different ways... One possible meaning is that the kind has been made to an excellent standard using highly technical means. Another meaning could be that the candy itself is highly technical and excellent because of that!
Once you open up the packaging, you will find that each piece of candy is wrapped up tightly in very high quality metallic paper. The sweets themselves are completely jet black once you open the wrapping paper. Combining all these factors together and the fact that the outer packaging is very high quality metallic wrap and looks very advanced and technical in itself, we have decided that this candy must be the produce of the famous Area 51 manufactured from alien technology discovered after the first flying saucer crash landed there.
To see what the candies actually tasted like you will have to check out our review here:
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!
Yan Yan is a pretty interesting kind of snack from Japan which essentially consists of a bunch of stick shaped biscuits and one or more types of a thick creamy frosting type substance to dip the biscuits into. The most common flavours are chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, though in this episode we are reviewing the yoghurt version.
You can see what a Yan Yan package looks like inside here (I couldn't find a pic of the yoghurt version so this one is chocolate + strawberry called Yan Yan Duo):
The snack is made by Meiji Japan and has been around for some time, at least since I was a kid (I'm 38 now...) and is very popular throughout Asia. You can see how to eat this tasty snack here:
To see what Arne and I thought of the Meiji Yan Yan Yoghurt Cream Snack just check out our review from Crazy from Kong below:
Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!
The Ebi Burger, which means Shrimp Burger in Japanese, was the very first ever Asian specialty burger from McDonalds that we ever got to review!
It was really fun getting to eat and then share our experiences and opinions on one of the wacky (yet often delicious) burgers that McDonalds release specially for the Asian marketing. Honestly you Americans, Canadians, British, French etc. really miss out! I know they do release specialty burgers in all countries around the world, but nowhere near as frequently as in Asia and nowhere near as crazy, wacky and fun. Of all Asian countries, Japan has by far the most crazy and the most frequent specialty McDonalds Burgers - Carbonara Burger, Idaho Burger and Shogun Burger - to name a few, but Hong Kong (where we are based) is not too far behind and we get some really weird and great McDonalds products out here. The last special burger I had was today; it was the McDonalds McCurry and it was fantastic!
The Ebi Burger also has a big brother, the Mega Ebi Burger, which is a double patty version. You can see what one of the real burgers looks like here:
By the way, this was the first review where we added a short humourous piece to the end after the credits. This has become a little feature of our show since then, as we always try to find an amusing outtake or scene to put at the end. So make sure you watch it all the way through!
I really want to tell you exactly what it tasted like, but then that would be giving away the game... So to see whether the Ebi Burger was good or not, you'll have to check out our Crazy from Kong review below:
Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!
For those of you who live in the West you have probably never eaten this sweet snack before, but it is extremely popular in Japan and other forms of it are also eaten throughout Asia, especially in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. You can see another more traditional version of red bean cake which is popular in Chinese territories, as well as Japan here:
All red bean cakes are essentially made of a different type of outer layer usually either a modern sponge cake like covering or the more traditional glutinous rice based cake and then a filling of a type of thick "red bean jam" made from Azuki beans and sugar.
The concept is not too dissimilar to the idea of a "Jammie Dodger" in England (a kind of jam filled biscuit) or Jelly Donuts in the States. But in this case instead of being made from a naturally sweet fruit based jam, the filling is produced from beans which would typically be used for making savoury dishes in the West.
To find out what we thought of the Japanese Red Bean Cakes we ate, check out our review below:
Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!
