Frost in Translation - Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tarts

A Victim of the Flavor Craze

When Pop-Tarts were first introduced in 1964, it was a simpler time, especially with respect to flavors.  We may overstate the case if we say that ice cream came in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, but flavors were within the realm of the possible and plausible.  Baskin-Robbins had 31 flavors, but the era of extreme mix-ins and candy bar fusions lay far ahead on the horizon..  Yogurt generally came in fruit flavors like strawberry, peach, blueberry, raspberry, and boysenberry, unlike today where "Key Lime Pie" flavor has rendered plain old lime passé, and you would never dare release an apple yogurt when "Cinnamon Apple Crumble" is an option.  Today we like our flavors to be aspirational, and we fondly hope that a simple consumer bakery item will transcend itself to become something it could never be and was never intended to be.  The era of dessertification is upon us. That way lies folly, and it brings us to the sad case of the Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart, a confused embarrassment of a product that fails utterly to conjure the treat to which it alludes.

Cool creaminess and hot fudginess, magically shrunk down to a foil-wrapped, shelf stable pantry item! Or so Kellogg's food scientists hope.

Complexity Kills

Pop-Tarts as they were originally conceived are elegantly straightforward in concept, essentially jam and crackers turned inside out.  Kellogg's engineers had simply to acquire a competently produced fruit jam, refine it slightly by eliminating irregularities like seeds, thicken it by reducing the moisture content, and then encase that fruit reduction within a crackery pastry. The frill of frosting became an added option several years later.  This base recipe didn't require any its ingredients to substantially deviate from their essential nature, for jam is jam and crackers are crackers; bringing them together was child's play.  

Consider, by contrast, how many mutations in form and function are required to transform a hot fudge sundae into a Pop-Tart.  Vanilla ice cream, a cold solid, is required to transform into a hot liquid filling.  Hot fudge, a smooth and velvety liquid, is pressed into service as a hard glazed drizzle on the pastry's exterior on the one hand, and secondarily as the main flavoring in the cracker-pastry that makes up most of the Pop-Tart's mass.  Ignore for a second that a traditional hot fudge sundae has no baked elements at all.  This chocolate cracker is nonetheless supposed to anchor freakish adaptation, despite having almost nothing in common with the thing imitated.

A look inside gives us our first sign of trouble.  Look at the ratio of dry, crumbly chocolate cracker to the vanilla filling that presumably represents the ice cream in this ill-considered adaptation.

Does It at Least Taste Good?

All of these complaints about authenticity might be downgraded to quibbles if our Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart made for a sweet indulgence of some other sort, so let's now concentrate on that.  Because Pop-Tarts are consumed at room temperature roughly half the time, we'll discuss the taste in both heated and unheated forms.

At room temperature is where this "hot fudge sundae" falls flattest, as you might well imagine.  Without the flavor-spreading asset of heat, the vanilla "ice cream" filling is at its meekest, leaving the chocolate cracker-pastry to dominate.  Since this pastry crust was always indeed conceived as more of a cracker than a cookie, its transformation from neutral to a chocolate flavor is inevitably awkward.  It tastes as though industrial saboteurs dumped a barrel of Nestle Quik powder into the mixer at a saltine factory.  As for the icing, decorated with brown swirls and rainbow sprinkles, it tastes no different from the standard, eerily immovable "hard icing" that has encrusted frosted Pop-Tarts for as long as the item has existed.

After some time in the toaster, the Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart is slightly more successful.  The vanilla filling still  does nothing to remind us of vanilla ice cream, but we are at least reminded slightly of certain dishes that are hot, contain ice cream, and involve chocolate baked goods.  Indeed, "Fudge Brownie Sundae Pop-Tart" would have made a much more credible name and would have rendered this at least a qualified success.  When the warm vanilla filling combines with the warm chocolate pastry, one alternately tastes something like a warm brownie moistened with ice cream or, if one insists, plausibly even a hot fudge drizzle.  As a matter of fact, as I write this, I am tasting a toasted Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart for the third time, and they do grow on you.  But let us not dwell on how one might warm to these over time.  Let's discuss how they might have been better.

When heated, the vanilla center asserts itself a bit, seeming to expand and blend with the now-softer cocoa crust.  In the end the resemblance is more to a brownie sundae than the titular sundae that is free from any baked-good content.

The Road Not Taken

There were other options available to Kellogg's in designing this flavor and it's puzzling that these weren't pursued.  Here are just a few things I would have expected and liked to have seen.

Actual hot fudge - It seems so obvious.  In addition to a vanilla filling, why not add some fudgy chocolate to the interior so that when the Pop-Tart is heated, some true gooey fudge, intertwined with the vanilla, comes dripping out.  For something with "hot fudge" in the name, the absence of anything resembling it is a mystery.

A vanilla pastry - Chocolate is such an intense flavor that concentrating it in the filling would have lent plenty of chocolate punch to the pastry.  Vanilla, on the other hand, is so mild that it needed heftier representation.  Saturating the pastry itself with a smooth French Vanilla accent might have lent balance and authenticity to this creation.

A maraschino cherry center - Sure the cherry atop sundae is just one tiny touch, but it's still the distinctive capstone that lends pizazz and personality to the treat.  It would have been a cute and whimsical surprise to put just a little bit of cherry jam somewhere inside the tart.  Guessing when the sudden burst of cherry would come would have added some suspense and a sense of discovery.

Conclusions

As the opening paragraph suggests, this Pop-Tart made a horrible first impression, and it could have done much more to resemble the dessert that it imitates.  But as I continued to eat while I wrote, its modest virtues came to the fore and its definite flaws receded in importance.  In the end, the Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart is an interesting attempt, even as it's a symptom of continuing flavor overreach in the packaged foods industry.

Introducing Dutch Treats and Filipino Flavors

An Attitude of Gratitude
It may be a corny maxim that, when you send things out into the world, things come back in return.  But writing for The Food Kingdom has already produced dividends of deliciousness sufficient to justify the claim that claim.  Two large parcels of food recently arrived at the Food Kingdom offices, one from the Netherlands, the other from the Philippines.  Today we begin unpacking these bundles of food-joy and describing their contents, beginning with the Honeycomb Crunchie and Mango Balls.  But before the edibles, let's meet some individuals.

A Trip to See Family in the Philippines
When not tasting Oreos five at a time while consulting a thesaurus for adjectives, the Food King works in a video production office with talented people like this fellow, Rich.  Among other things, Rich does amazing art, as you can see.

Rich isn't quite as cool as this picture would suggest.  His art is actually more spectacular than this reproduction would suggest.

Rich is married to Carmen, who recently traveled to the Philippines to visit family.

Carmen did not bring back a bird, but she did bring back dried squid, mangoes, and more.

A glance through the photo album of Carmen's trip actually makes one want to visit the Philippines as a culinary tourist, for some of the foods there must be enjoyed on-site to be appreciated.  Super-fresh produce appears to be available at plentiful open-air markets and meals like breakfast place a focus on vegetable and fish preparations that we might well emulate here, taking a break from biscuits, bacon, and breakfast cereal.

A Filipino breakfast of fresh vegetables (left) and danggit (right), dried fish fried up crisp like bacon.  Having savored fried salmon skin, I think I have an idea of how good it must be.

It's a shame that an extra plate of breakfast veggies couldn't make it through customs, but Carmen was kind enough to accomplish the next best thing.  Perhaps inspired by the recent package of American snacks we sent off to the Netherlands recently, she brought back to the Kingdom a big bag representing the best of Filipino packaged food.  So let's try some Mango Balls.

They're Not Gummies
Bluster and boasting aside, I'm a bit of a food coward, so I started with what I assumed to be the most innocuous item in the bag, saving the dried squid and fascinatingly named "cheese-soaked snacks" for what the package called Mango Balls.  They're individually wrapped and so I assumed they would be mango gummies, the kind you see from Japan in the international supermarkets.

The gentle colors and shiny plastic seem to promise a mellow, mango candy experience.

Actually, Mango Balls are exactly what the name (duh!) implies: big balls of dried mango.  This was a discombobulating revelation, overturning all expectations, but it wasn't a bad thing at all.  If you love mango, and I do, and you should, then there's no reason to regard these as anything other than nature's candy, for that's what dried fruit is.

It looks vaguely like a gumdrop coated in granulated sugar, but this deep-orange fragrant ball is pure unadulterated mango.

An interesting thing happens, though, when you dry mango.  The very slight bit of tartness that's present in a fresh mango, which usually gets lost amongst the sweetness, the luscious texture, and the chin-dripping juiciness, gets concentrated.  The fruit acquires a pronounced tartness and becomes something almost like an apricot.  The exterior is interesting too, because it looks as though the balls have been coated with little sugar crystals.  But if the packaging is to be believed, these balls are nothing but mango with no added ingredients.  I'd speculate that the sugar crystals on the outside somehow precipitate out to the surface during the drying process.  The bottom line is that these things are addictive and a very different experience from the dried mango you usually find in America, which are usually hard wedges, sometimes freeze-dried and sometimes almost candied, but in a bad way, like they've been dipped in syrup and then left out to dry.  Ewww.  These are different and illustrate how distinct methods of preservation yield different results.

Look closely and you can see the little fibers that are naturally a part of sweet, tender mango flesh.  In a fresh mango these can either be quite visible or imperceptible, depending on how you cut it and upon how ripe the fruit is.

Can You Buy Them?
Yes! For convenience's sake, you might first check to see if your local international supermarket carries them, but failing that, you can buy them from Amazon.

From Manila to Ridderkerk
We first met Kelvin Wilson a few weeks ago when we sent him a huge box of American snacks so that he might vicariously visit this country through, of course, its junk food.  Kelvin has been busy since then, preparing an even bigger box of food that expresses his complicated culinary heritage.  It's "complicated" because Kelvin was born in England but moved with his family, economic migrants of a sort, to the Netherlands when his father found work in a Dutch shipyard.  Now this mixed heritage is passed on to his children, Lucas, Robin, and Alice Leaf.  So it was a mental itinerary strewn with Cadbury's as well as stroopwafels that Kelvin travelled, along with Lucas (who loves Skittles, by the way) when seeking to repay my transatlantic hospitality in kind.  And. did. they. ever. In the photo below, you can see the Crunchie on the top layer at the lower left.  Let's investigate what's within that golden wrapper.

My eyes fairly popped out of their sockets when I saw how much was packed into the box.  Kelvin tells me that postage was the same whether he sent 5.5 kilos or 9.1 so he had no reason to hold back.

The Honeycomb Crunchie

If a generality may be offered about European sweets based on what I've tasted thus far, one might be that Europeans like air in their candy.  The Aero, to be reviewed later, is chocolate injected with air bubbles for a cloud-like taste, and schuimblokken ("foam blocks") are very firm chunks of sweetened dextrose (believe me, it tastes better than it sounds) that snap when you bite down on them, but then instantly dissolve into a chalky wisp in your mouth like cotton candy.  Even the untamed, weighty-sounding Lion Bar isn't hefty in the way that a Snickers is.  So it is with the Honeycomb Crunchie, which is a kind of hard toffee that's been frothed up to a crunchy yet light consistency, then enrobed in chocolate.

It looks filling with its sharp, volumetric angles and seemingly impressive mass.  But the Crunchie crunches, but then dissipates into a chocolatey honey-caramel dream.

I'm calling this bar the "Honeycomb Crunchie" to distinguish it from the many variants that its popularity has prompted, like the Champagne Crunchie, the White Chocolate Crunchie, and even a Bourbon Crunchie that was briefly introduced into America until being pulled from the market due to a boycott by western factions of the Southern Baptist Convention.  But the proper name for this flagship version is simply Crunchie.

What Exactly is This "Honeycomb"?
According to the ingredient list, there is no actual honey in the honeycomb but the toffee, due to its aeration, has a golden color that's reminiscent of honey and the power of suggestion is strong enough that I would have believed the toffee to contain some honey if you told me so.

No, the gradient from deep brown to golden yellow is not an accident.  This is what happens to toffee when it's whipped up into a honeycomb structure and allowed to harden.  This may be weird to the American tooth and tongue, but it's worth your while to try it.

Once you've penetrated the sweet waxy milk chocolate coating, the toffee's texture is the most fascinating thing about the Crunchie, for the stuff is truly hard, almost to a tooth-threatening extent. At the same time, because of the aeration, this honeycomb is paradoxically dense yet light, the  texture a combination of a malted milk ball and a Butterfinger.  It might be compared to calcified meringe, or better yet, you might put it this way: if you were to build a village entirely out of candy, Crunchies would be the cinder blocks.

Wikipedia tells me, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the huge slabs of toffee are cut down to individual serving sizes with focused jets of oil.  This makes sense for the same reason that we cut cheese with fine wire slices.  You don't want to shear or fracture the brittle toffee, so you want your cutting method to be minimally invasive.

Can (and Should) You Buy It?
Yes! You should buy it, for the Crunchie, beloved in Britain since its introduction in 1929 is unlike anything you'll find in the United States.  Its crunch is a little transgressive, a little dangerous, but the classic chocolate-toffee flavor combo will please anyone who loves classic candies.  You can find it for rather inflated prices at import-shops, but if you don't mind buying a box-full (and why would you?) Amazon once again comes through.  Here at the Food Kingdom, we still have a huge bag and box full of Dutch Treats and Filipino Flavors to make our way through.  Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more of the best of each.

HOME

Like Our Facebook Page and Never Miss a Post