Kanikko Crab Snack - Eating Baby Crabs...

Well these were really a weird snack! This snack was bought for us by Emma Moosa and was essentially a bunch of tiny little deep fried crabs inside of some giant crab packaing. You can see what they looked like here: 

As you can see from the picture above, the crabs were presented in their entirety with their tiny legs, claws, shells and even eyes intact (presumably their tiny little brains too...). On top of that, these were not a variation of the ever popular "soft shell crabs" that are served in Japanese and some other Asian restaurants all year round, but rather appear to be regular hard shelled crabs just in small sized and fried to crispy. As a result they were still pretty tough and brittle, as Arne described "it was like eating teeth". The flavour was intensely fishy and they were pretty stinky to boot.

Overall this was very far from being a tasty snack and I think was a pretty gruesome experience for all involved. Check out our video review to see our full reactions and meet our special guest star Emma:  

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

Fish Gummy Candies - Made With Fish Blood, Guts and Ground Bone!!!

Well we were very excited about doing this review, as both Arne and myself love Japanese gummy sweets and these ones came in some super cute, high quality fish shaped packaging which you can see in the picture above.

Arne's packaging was blue and mine was a sort of rainbow colour, indicating that they were most likely different flavours and in addition the image on the front of the packaging seemed to indicate that the gummies contained some sort of yummy filling.

However, we started to get worried when as we saw what was on the back of the packaging for the first time:

A very detailed fish skeleton with fish scale bones, empty eye socket and all... Not quite sure what this meant for our candy, we decided it was just some bizarre Japanese semi-cute / semi-disturbing design like Gloomy Bear. 

Boy were we wrong... 

Well we opened up the packaging, pulled out a couple of the cute little fish shaped gummies and popped them into our mouths and... promptly almost vomitted!!! 

Yes, these were absolutely disgusting and they smelled horrific too. The flavour was something like stinky fish guts boiled down into a jelly-like state and congealed to full gummy stage with the addition of some chemicals. 

"What the hell is this?" was the immediate thought that went through our heads. The most likely explanation we could come up with after getting over the desire to vomit and discussing it, is that it was some kind of "con" candy designed to trick young children into eating healthy (and disgusting) fish products. And apparently that is exactly what it was! After talking to some of our fans who were familiar with this product, they were able to explain that it is indeed a trick candy and that it is made with fish bones and possibly filled with fish blood... 

Well I can honestly say this was the most disgusting candy I had ever eaten in my life. 

To see our the full horror and shock of the experience, watch the video below: 

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