Dead Snacks Munching - Recently Discontinued Items

Why Snacks Fail
The discontinued item shelf at Wal-Mart is a wonderful museum of capitalist failure.  For every sorry-looking, nearing expiration item on the forlorn shelf, there was once a passionate advocate in some company's product-development team.  Each product was test-marketed and polled, each idea had research to support its value, each piece of packaging was created by a design professional and went through iterative testing.  In other words, each of these loser products had seemed a great idea at the time.  Today at the Food Kingdom, we'll see what market failure looks like, what it tastes like, and what lessons may be learned from it.

Behold the gallery of failure, and themes emerge.  Shelf-stable ready-to-eat meals are forever being thrust at the public, but most people like their microwaved meals to be frozen.  Does anyone make that much potato salad?  And it's hard to compete against established brands like Wheat Thins, especially with a lame name like "Thin Wheat".  I mean that's not even trying.

Snack Pack Pudding Bars

Ah, Snack Pack Pudding, that childhood treat.  We were always jealous of the kid beside us who'd found it packed in his lunchbox.  And here, beckoning from the shelf is a product promising to fit that great taste into a dry snack bar.   But that's impossible, because baked goods are not pudding and there is no way to "bake pudding in" to a cookie, cake, or bar.  This false claim has a long history and it's time to put it to rest.  Since the early 80s, cake-mix companies like Pillsbury have tried to claim that their cakes are more moist than others because of "pudding in the mix" but this is nonsensical.  Let's consider what pudding actually is: milk, sugar, flavoring, and corn starch.  That's it.  There's no reason why adding any of those ingredients in any combination would make a cake more moist.  Every cake batter already has some liquid in it.  Cakes already have starch in them, usually in the form of flour, and cake mixes are dry by definition anyway so the only pudding they could contain would be "dried pudding."  There's no there there, it's just empty gimmickry.

Consider this, partisans of the "pudding baked right in" belief: once you bake pudding, it ceases to be pudding.

Now, all of this grumpy talk of pudding being an impossible ingredient in a baked good would be pretty irrelevant if this snack bar actually managed to taste moist anyway.  One technique for making a baked good moist for extended periods is actually the addition of oil, which doesn't evaporate.  Alas, no, these bars are actually drier than most snack bars of their kind.  There's a strong, dark chocolate taste and the meager caramel drizzle is nicely pungent if you like the flavor of artificial butterscotch.  Ultimately though, the dryness is too marked a contrast to the sensations conjured by the promise of pudding.  Besides, your money only gets you six small individually wrapped bars.  Broken promises, unimaginative execution, small portion size, and a dry mouthfeel equal a short shelf life.  Good riddance, Snack Pack Pudding Bars.

Let's consign this bar to the dustbin of history with the simple truth that it tastes just like it looks.

Chili-Nut M&M's

This was always a product with a limited market life unless it had won the three-way contest that Mars set up between it and two other flavors: Honey-Nut and Coffee-Nut.   Coffee-Nut won the right to become a permanent flavor and I recently gave them a very favorable review.  But it's a shame that all three couldn't have survived to be eaten another day.  Just like the coffee-chocolate candies, these capsaicin-spiked chocolates have a grown-up taste; when you bite them, they really bite back.  The chili spice is subtle at first, sounding an earthy base note that darkens the taste of the milk chocolate.  As you eat more (and you will) the heat level gradually builds up until there's a constant drumbeat of pepper nipping at the back of your throat.  These go great with a cup of black coffee in the morning and taste a lot like a boutique chocolate bar that typically retails at five times the price.

This photo does not appreciably exaggerate the intensity of Chili-Nut M&M's colors, and these colors were appropriately chosen, for they convey the fearlessness with which Mars injected real hot-chili flavor into their chocolate.

 Incidentally, it may not be too late for you to try these, even though they're off the retail market.  A good friend of the Food Kingdom recommended them to me a month ago and I was able to score a pack of three for $10 on e-Bay, with shipping included.  If you're curious of what was and what could have been, act quickly and enjoy this window into food industry experimentation.

A&W Root Beer Pop Tarts

Poor A&W.  Once it ruled the root beer world as the unquestioned top brand, but it has since been overtaken by Coca-Cola-owned Barq's, and now its market clout isn't even sufficient to keep a co-branded Pop Tart on the shelves.  I discovered those Pop Tarts at 6AM on a Tuesday morning in a dimly lit corner of the discontinued item shelf at the Chantilly Wal-Mart, waiting for someone to eulogize them, to declare that their existence hadn't been entirely pointless.  Funny thing is, they're not as bad as you would think.

It's easy to be sarcastic about such a seemingly loopy idea.  I mean who wouldn't want to take the refreshing taste of ice-cold, thirst quenching root beer and transform it into a dry, crumbly, gel-paste-filled biscuit with crumbly icing and heat it up in a toaster?  I know, right?  Here's the thing, though.  It helps to think of root beer not as a beverage, but as a flavor.  Though root beer has many flavor components in its blend, the primary flavor is sassafras, a species of deciduous tree whose leaves supply the dominant root beer flavor (so why do they call it "root beer"?).  If you think of sassafras as simply a flavor and not as inextricably bound up in a beverage, your mind opens to the idea of hot, aromatic sassafras as the flavor driver of a warm breakfast pastry.  Consider also that root beer flavored hard candy has a long proud heritage. From this point of view, the concept is no longer crazy.  I actually enjoyed these a lot, so keep an open mind when scouring the remainder shelf for interesting values.

A new flavor no more: hot root beer for breakfast simply didn't excite the masses, yet it proved to be a homey, comfortable-smelling companion during four pleasant taste tests.

I Just Couldn't

I wasn't willing to lay out the funds to subject myself to these, but the pictures say a thousand words and the caption adds a few dozen more.

You can tell from the Farmers' Market-style lettering that Sam's Club Butternut Squash Bisque is truly an artisin-crafted delight.  If you act quickly, there are still four jars left at the Chantilly location.  The rancid-peanut butter color is sure to delight your Thanksgiving guests.  And for dessert, why not treat each of your loved ones to their own "Nature's Child" Pudd'n Pouch? After a third glass of wine, everyone will surely want to slice open the package and get at every last chocolatey remnant.


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Size Matters: Reese's Pieces-Stuffed Cups, Regular vs. Big Cup

The Allure of the Tender Crunch
You see it in the Napoleon.  You see it in Sugar-Creme Wafers; in baklava, in Charms Blow Pops, and in extra-crispy fried chicken.  Humans love the sensation of breaking through a crunchy shell, or through multiple layers of crunch, in order to reach a tender treasure inside.  It may not be the pleasantest task to inquire as to why: perhaps some predatory common ancestor was given an evolutionary edge by enjoying the intermingling of crunchy bones with succulent meat, and one less impediment to high-protein nourishment led to differential reproductive success. Whatever the case may have been, today even vegetarians and vegans can indulge this desire for conflicting textures, and its persistence doubtless explains the appearance on the market of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups stuffed with crunchy Reese's Pieces.  Crucially, these are available in two sizes, the traditional petite size and a fattened up "Big Cup", and we'll discover that this actually produces two very different tastes.

There they stand, clothed in chocolate armor but vulnerable to the inevitable crushing chomp.

Peanut Butter Inside of Peanut Butter?
It's easy enough to accept the appeal of crunchy nuggets inside of peanut-butter cups, but it seems only natural to wonder why the filling should also be peanut-butter based.  Why not chocolate pieces, or crunchy rice, or pretzels?  Isn't peanut butter redundant?  I asked this question myself and it drove me to answer once and for all a question that has always bugged me: is the peanut butter filling inside Reese's Pieces the same as what's inside the peanut butter cup?  They'd always tasted different to me, but I wondered if that was because of the influence of the shell's distinct flavor and texture.  To be sure, the shell would have to be removed and the peanut butter within tasted on its own.  The process of doing this is tasty enough to undertake, albeit a little offputting to describe; the shelled candies just need to be popped into the mouth and gently sucked upon like a fragile hard candy until only tender nibs of peanut filling remain.

The briefest of visual inspections suggests that the filling in Reese's Pieces is distinct from that of their peanut butter cups.  The cup filling is coarse, grainy, even a little sandy.  The contours of the pieces are tight and crisp, their surface smooth and refined, suggesting almost a peanut-flavored white chocolate. And that's basically what they are.

As the photo above shows, the two fillings look very different, and the taste reflects this.  The cup contains a loosely packed peanut-butter fudge, sandy, salty, and nutty, reflecting the copious presence of coarse-ground peanut butter.  The pieces taste more like chocolate, al dente to the first bite 
but gradually softening in the warmth of the mouth and melting away smoothly.  This answers the question of why Reese's would put their pieces inside of their peanut-butter filling.  It introduces yet another texture into the mix, bringing the taste count to four.  First you have the milk chocolate, then peanut-butter filling, then the crunchy shell, and finally the smooth, almost chocolatey pieces.  Wheels within peanut-butter wheels.

Why the Big Cup Wins
This ambitious flavor and texture packing scheme does succeed, but with an important caveat.  If you run out to the drugstore and just pick up the regular-size peanut-butter cups with the pieces inside, you'll be sorely disappointed because there isn't enough room inside a standard-issue peanut-butter cup for all of this interplay of parts to be contained.  Even though the Reese's Pieces are miniaturized for this hybrid candy, they're still too large to easily fit within the chocolate shell, and so you'll find very few whole pieces in the small-size cups. Mainly you get sherds and slivers of shell, but few identifiable remains.  The interior of the normal-size cups looks like a careless archaeological dig of a ransacked city, all tiny scraps and fragments with no intact objects.

The compressed space inside a normally-sized Reese's cup leaves no room for Reese's Pieces to fit, whereas the roomy interior of the big cup allows the different elements to arrange themselves harmoniously.

The Big Cup is much better designed for the task at hand.  Like a practical minivan, it has plenty of room for all the critical passengers.  The peanut-butter filling piles up light and fluffy, the milk chocolate retreats to the outer edges and plays a supporting role while numerous little gems of crunchy, melty peanut-butter candy sit nestled inside, ready for the Mixmaster that is the human mouth to tumble them all together, crunchy meeting creamy, sandy swimming with smooth, as somewhere deep within us, our tree-swinging simian ancestor smiles.

On the left side, you see a very rare occurrence: an intact Reese's Piece within one of the small cups.  On the right, you see that multiple sightings of these full pieces are common in the Big Cup.  You can also see from this cross-sectional view just how dramatic is the texture difference between the smooth and refined filling of the pieces and the almost gravelly filling that's traditionally present in the cups.

Conclusions
Pieces within the cups are a big idea and they require a big canvas for their execution.  These Reese's Pieces-filled Big Cups may cost extra money, but it's go big or go home.

Coffee Nut M&Ms and the Opening of the American Palate

The Tastes of Americans Have Matured
(No, Really)
The past few years have seen a real explosion in the number of new M&Ms flavors on offer: pretzel-filled M&Ms, crispy rice M&Ms, M&Ms flavored with peanut butter, mint, raspberries, almonds, dulce de leche and, if the internet is to be believed, even candy apple and pecan pie.  You might have thought that Mars would be at the point of creative exhaustion, but instead they've struck out in a pleasingly complex and adult direction with their new Coffee Nut M&Ms.

Who knows how they will fare in the kiddie market?  After all, children have their own laptops and tablets, so perhaps they have a taste for strong-brewed coffee too.  But it's hard not to think of these as aimed squarely at the adult professional.

This new coffee nut flavor comes to us by virtue of having won a consumer preference contest, beating out two other peanut-based candidates, Honey Nut and Chili Nut.  That either Coffee Nut or Chili Nut were viable candidates is a reflection of the growing sophistication of consumer preferences.  Two decades ago, neither flavor would likely have been possible.  Back then, mild, inoffensive milk chocolate dominated the American market, and pairing chocolate with assertive flavors like dark-roasted coffee or spicy chilis would have seemed too risky.  But two decades of Starbucks expansion has created a taste for the burnt and bitter notes of dark-roasted beans. Plus, the growth of boutique chocolates with high cacao content and intense flavor pairings have given large manufacturers the courage to experiment with high odds of success.

The flavorless shells (yes, I sucked on 'em just to be sure) come in three themed colors—call them "dark espresso", "just enough creamer", and "accident with the CoffeeMate."

Layers of Flavor and Texture
It's really striking how subtle and complicated the flavors and textures in these candies are.  Once the teeth puncture the thin shell of porcelained sugar, the palate is immediately saturated with the bittersweet and burnt notes of whole coffee beans.  I had to do a quick double check of the ingredient list to make sure there weren't actually real coffee grounds mixed in with the chocolate.  Apparently there aren't, only "natural coffee flavor," but you may find yourself doing a double take too.  Nominally, the chocolate may be milk chocolate (there is some cocoa butter listed) but the taste impression is of dark chocolate, probably because the dark roast bean flavor is itself so similar to that of bittersweet chocolate.  But we aren't done with the "dark" flavors yet.

It's easy to forget how literally big the peanut taste is in these M&Ms.  Seemingly taking up just as much space as the chocolate itself, it's amazing the chocolate-coffee flavor has the impact it does.

The taste of these mocha-spiked chocolates is so intense because they combine three roasted flavors: roasted coffee beans, fermented and roasted cocoa beans, and roasted peanuts, all of which reinforce one another.  Coffee purists might argue that hazelnuts would have been the better choice, paired as they often are with coffee, but peanuts are cheaper and, in the company of all these other dominating tastes, quite sufficient in their nuttiness to complete the flavor impression that Mars was trying for here.  All of those volatile oils and rare essences deep within the two beans and one nutty legume twirl around together, lingering on the tongue and in the nostrils long after the contents have been devoured.

Conclusions
A skeptical customer viewing these on the shelf might have expected this to be a compromise project, along the lines of General Foods International Coffees.  Meek chocolate mixed with a whimper of coffee and a weak tribute to nuttiness from a puny peanut.  One sample will prove such a doubter, even one with dulled tastebuds, wrong.  Highly recommended.

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Major Brownie Points: Chewy Chips Ahoy Brownie-Filled Cookies

Food Science and Gonzo Baking
To the untrained eye, the Chips Ahoy® brand represents an authentic product line, a variety of chocolate chip cookies incorporating assorted flavor variations but essentially hewing close to a central identity of chocolate chip cookiedom.  But closer inspection reveals the truth: Chips Ahoy® is an experimental product development platform, a bakery skunkworks devoted to testing ideas from the conventional to the bizarre, often masking the radical nature of the experiment by hiding behind the familiar safety of the Chips Ahoy name.  If Nabisco were to release a soft citrus cookie with lemon-lime chips and a gelatinous lime-meringueish filling all on its own, a revolted public would flee the store in disgust.  But if you were to call them Chips Ahoy's Ghostbusters Key-Lime Ectoblasts, the same consumers would probably shrug and throw them in the cart just to try them out.

Limited edition flavors like these come along all the time and are usually here today and gone tomorrow.  Nabisco is promising the technological marvel of a brownie inside a cookie. But is this just another lame gimmick?  

The Turducken of Cookies?
This can-do try anything spirit yields a mixed cookie bag and in a future review we'll examine the mealy, grainy, perplexing fiasco that is the Chips Ahoy S'mores cookie.  But today we'll talk about one of the unqualified successes, the Chewy Chips Ahoy Brownie-filled cookies.  To start with, the mere appearance of the cookie is downright magical, for its completely convincing facade of a normal chocolate chip cookie turns out to be merely a micro-thin mirage of a wrapper, inside which is a super-intense double-chocolatey brownie filling.  In this era of 3-D printing, it's not hard to imagine how this might be done.  On the assembly line, an extruder would squeeze out a thin bottom layer of conventional chocolate chip cookie dough, a second extruder would squirt a dollop of brownie batter on top of that, and a final third extruder then ejects a layer of cookie batter camouflage to enrobe the rest.  But even after understanding the technology behind the feat, the sight of a credible brownie tucked behind a film-thin layer of cookie is kind of amazing.

Nothing about their outward appearance would suggest anything unusual.  Going in, I was convinced that the supposed brownie interior would be a thin, unobtrusive and flavorless brown strip, the very same cookie dough stained a different color.

The Brownie Is Real
It wasn't that long ago that the Food Kingdom had a post on the extreme difficulty of mass-manufacturing a high-quality prepackaged brownie.  How ironic that such a brownie should finally arrive encased inside a cookie.  Is the secret to be found in the protective cookie shell?  Whatever the reason, the brownie within the cookie coating is everything most mass market brownies are not: dark, deep, fudgy, almost European in its commitment to a high-cacao-content true chocolate taste.  If you recall craving double-chocolate cookies as a kid, this is that next-level triple-chocolate taste you've been waiting for.

Proving the doubters wrong, this fascinating experiment actually delivers what it promises.  You can see that the brownie filling really is of a different texture and consistency from the crumbly, buttery-tasting cookie on the outside. And although the brownie dominates the overall flavor of this hybrid cookie, the golden exterior is a true cookie, not a flavorless casing.

And Yet So Is the Cookie
The only drawback to the assertiveness of the brownie's chocolatey flavor is the way it dominates and overshadows the flavor of the cookie that's wrapped around it.  I had just assumed that Nabisco put very little effort into that part of the cookie since it's only there to set up the power-packed surprise that's inside it.  In the interest of due diligence, I did finally start nibbling around the perimeter of these cookies, just to see what the golden bits on the edges tasted like.   Surprisingly, it's truly a well-crafted chocolate chip cookie with a blonde buttery flavor, a semi-crisp/semi-chewy texture, and the best overall taste profile of any chocolate chip cookie in the Chips Ahoy® line.   Although the subtle golden brown-sugar notes of this outer cookie are completely overwhelmed in terms of what one consciously tastes when biting into these cookies, I can only assume that in some way they provide balance and complexity to the overall composite flavor profile.  They should make a cookie that uses only this batter, but of course they almost certainly won't.

Conclusions
Bold, persistent experimentation does not always yield perfect results, but expect Chips Ahoy to keep unveiling new and interesting novelty flavors.  And hope that this one stays on the shelf for a good long while.

Chick fil-A's Egg White Grill - But for Want of a Muffin...

Tyranny of the Weakest Link
"What I could really go for now is a whole-wheat English Muffin, with no butter" said noone...ever.  And yet Chic fil-A has jumped into the healthy breakfast arena with a product predicated on just such a fantasy: the new Egg White Grill, a sandwich so blandly named (as has always been Chic Fil-A's wont) that it shall henceforth be known to most customers, for as long as it stays on offer, as "#3 with small coffee."  And it is this whole wheat English muffin that stifles an otherwise promising dish in its cradle.

This is a shame because every other part of the sandwich is expertly executed.  If one were to judge the sandwich by its components like the blind men groping the proverbial elephant, one would be prepared to describe it differently.  Tasting the warm, smoky, generously portioned, and attractively seasoned chicken breast section, you'd proclaim "this is a juicy, satisfying, and exciting new way to enjoy chicken for breakfast."  If you sampled the slick folds of fried egg white, you'd say "nobody will ever miss the yolk!"  If you ran your pinky through the semi-liquified cheese slice that, upon melting, coats the muffin and the egg white slab like unctuous finger-paint, and took a lick, you might say "who needs butter when this thing is slathered with queso dip?"

And you would be right.  But all that effort is undone by the aggressively unpleasant whole wheat English muffin that sucks up moisture and snuffs out flavor like a pile of sand.

The early autumn sun rises on the first of three tastings of the Egg White Grill.  It looks like a reasonably proportioned sandwich, the top bun raised aloft on grilled chicken and egg whites draped with downfolded wings of American cheese.  But the high rounded dome of whole wheat dryness is an ominous sign.

What's Wrong with Whole Wheat English Muffins?
Trusting your sandwich to a whole wheat breadstuff isn't so unreasonable in principle; it's not like dark breads are inherently unpalatable.  I can genuinely enjoy nicely buttered wheat berry toast with black coffee.  Ham on pumpernickel is delightful.  And the most elemental whole wheat products, breakfast shredded wheat and Triscuits, are American classics.  So whole wheat per se is not the problem.  But there are nonetheless certain products where whole wheat's presence is disastrous.  Think whole wheat pasta and you start to get the idea.  And whole wheat's influence on English Muffins is similarly insidious.

One primary reason is that a glutenous stretchiness is part of an English Muffin's appeal, and whole wheat flour contains much less gluten, so this bread doesn't have the same stretch and chew.  It's more like the limp foam stuffing inside a cheap couch, spongy and moisture-neutralizing.  And whereas the glutenous dough of a white muffin will trap steam within its microscopic bubbles, creating a crisp moistness when toasted, the whole wheat muffin seems to contain deserts within deserts.  Then there's the flavor, some strange combination of sawdust and old bookbindings, mildewy, dark and stale, the antithesis of a morning brightener.  It tastes like rotted attic planks smell.

The second tasting within the Food Kingdom studios, made the dry, bland taste even harder to understand.  Look at that cheesy ooze!  But we're staring straight at this sandwich's assets.  The liabilities that undermine this sandwich are hidden from view.

Quantities and Ratios
The taste-nullifying properties of the whole wheat muffin might not figure so large if there weren't so much of it.  Fast-food leaders like Wendy's have long known that the bread in a sandwich is meant to be unobtrusive and should serve mainly as a vehicle for allowing the hands to convey the sandwich fillings into the eater's mouth without cancelling out the featured flavors.  If the wheat muffin could have been made, say 30% thinner, this would probably be a different review.  But an examination of the Egg White Grill's cross section reveals the fundamental flaw, that the muffin itself is almost twice the thickness of the chicken, egg, and cheese put together.  The photo below tells the sad tale.

This view from the third tasting (I really wanted to like this and give it every chance!) really clarifies the issue.  The cheesy egg and the chicken with genuine grilled taste are delicious and they are provided in reasonable quantities, but not relative to the over-apportionment of whole wheat bread. Dusted with powdery residue, and seemingly growing like a fungus, this nasty muffin is choking the life out of its fillings.

All in the Name of Nutrition
Using an abominable whole wheat English Muffin in place of a tasty traditional one is all the more pointless when you consider the nutrition facts, easily obtainable through a web search.  Despite its whole wheat pedigree, the Chick Fil-A muffin actually contains zero grams of dietary fiber.  As for carbs, it supplies 16 grams as opposed to the 26 grams contained in a standard Thomas's English Muffin.  But put that in the context of the standard recommendations of daily carbohydrate intake.  For a person on a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet, the USDA recommends between 225 to 326 grams of carbs per day.  Even for a restricted diet of 1,500 calories, the recommendation is for between 170 to 245 grams per day.  So the additional 10 carbs supplied by a white English muffin would only represent 1/17th of a person's carbohydrate allowance for the day under the most restrictive conditions.  The Food Kingdom recommends getting a breakfast sandwich you really enjoy.  The piece of your soul that yearns for a good breakfast will thank you.

Swedish Fish Oreos - "Raspberries" Roaring Out of the Gate

Be Not Afeared
Oreo has released yet another custom special-edition flavor: Swedish Fish, popularly known as "Swedish Red Fish", and it would be reasonable to assume that they represent just another gimmick, and a frighteningly perverse one at that.  Really, an Oreo based on a gummy snack?  That just feels weird.  What is "Swedish Fish" flavor anyway?  But in reality, these cookies seize the mild berry flavor present in the candy and supercharge it, delivering an intoxicating flavor punch of fruit and chocolate that could very well make this a permanent staple in the ever-growing roster of Oreo varieties.

A Kroger/Harris Teeter Exclusive
Although these cookies have been on the market for about a month, it took nearly three weeks for The Food Kingdom to acquire them because of an artificially restricted supply.  They're only available at Kroger or Harris Teeter, whom Kroger acquired for $2.4 billion in a 2013 merger.  Five trips to four different locations yielded only empty shelf space where these red and brown cookies had once been before a seemingly eager public snatched them up.  With the initial wave of interest subsiding, you should now be able to find them, assuming you have one of these chains near you.

If you're thinking "I don't want to taste a gummi mushed inside a pair of chocolate wafers" I can hardly blame you.  But that's the wrong way to think about them.  Instead, think fruit and chocolate, and start salivating.

Unlocking the Mystery of the Swedish Fish Flavor
If you're like me, you may have eaten the red variety (they come in red, yellow, green and "black licorice" in their native Sweden) of this "wine gum" candy for years without ever seriously considering what the flavor actually was, and I think there are several interesting reasons for that: first, the flavor isn't officially stated anywhere on the package, secondly their reputed flavor of "lingonberry" is unfamiliar to the American palate and thirdly, well...the third reason is the most interesting of all and fundamental to the success of the flavor's translation to sandwich cookie form.  Essentially, the flavor of any gummy candy will always be muted relative to that same flavor in other mediums, because gummy candies don't release their flavors easily.  Gummy isn't porous and doesn't dissolve readily, unlike hard candy which melts away as you suck on it, imparting flavor as your mouth surrounds it with saliva.  If you just suck on a piece of gummy, by contrast, nothing will happen.  You have to chew and grind your way through the rubbery substance, reducing it almost to a mash before enough denatured surface area is exposed to finally allow the flavoring to dissolve on the tongue.  And so the "lingonberry" flavor of Swedish Fish flavor is mild and vague.

Swedish Fish Oreos, on the other hand, take the same artificial berry flavor (sorry Lingonberry purists) and inject it into their smooth, fatty creme filling.   This creme filling is everything that gummy is not.  It spreads readily throughout the mouth, melting on contact and coating every crevice of the mouth with intense fruit taste.

These sinister-looking chocolate devils could be great fun at Halloween.  Tell trick or treaters they're filled with the blood of naughty children.

How Do You Feel About Fruit and Chocolate?
As mentioned above, the fruit flavor in question here probably is indeed lingonberry, a favorite fruit in Sweden for there are subtle "winy", dark, and almost distilled brandy notes that distinguish the flavor from anything else.  But if you didn't know any better you would probably have guessed the flavor to be raspberry, or more specifically "framboise" the French alcoholic cordial fermented with raspberries, the most popular brand of which is Chambord.  In fact, children of the 80's like me will probably have their nostalgia cells activated by the Chocolate-Chambord flavor combination, which calls to mind all sorts of mixed drinks from the 80s: hot chocolate and Chambord, Chambord, cream, Creme de Cacao and crushed ice, White Russians with Chambord and such.

Ultimately, how you feel about these cookies will depend on whether you like fruit combined with chocolate.  Some people think that's an icky combination, but if you like chocolate-colored cherries, chocolate oranges, or chocolate-raspberry tortes, then the way Swedish Fish Oreos capture that dark, mysterious combination of tastes will be in heaven.

The filling tastes as red as it looks: intense, mysterious, descending into layered depths.

Conclusions
As with all specialty Oreos, the exotic flavor comes at an inflated price.  You get a much smaller box for the same money than you would with your basic white-creme Oreos.  But this adult dalliance with sinfulness is worth the steeper amount.

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Summit Storm and the Return of Real Gatorade Taste

The Missing Ingredient
Let's begin this review with a question: have you tasted Gatorade lately?  And if not, have you ever wondered why that might be?  If you're anything like me it's because, for a while now, Gatorade hasn't tasted like the sports drink that I grew up with in the 70s through the aughts; the thirst quencher with the magically slippery texture.  This magic sensation that came from quaffing Gatorade, this sense that you were drinking something wetter than wet, more penetrating than mere water, was a key selling point for most of its history.  Those ridiculously hokey computer simulations in their advertisements where the parched and pixelated thermal image of an athlete, an overheated orange and red through and through, held a Gatorade to his lips and transformed to a healthy hydrated green, were absurd on a rational level.  Yet they seemed entirely plausible based on how the drink made you feel.  Back then, Gatorade seemed to sprint down the gullet, barreling down like quicksilver into the gut, distributing throughout the body, replenishing energy and lost liquids.

Magic and Chemicals
That greased-lightning, super-wet sensation was, of course no accident, but the result of chemical engineering, specifically the inclusion of two emulsifiers: ester of wood rosin and brominated vegetable oil.  I don't honestly know if they were even intended to create the distinctive Gatorade texture and mouthfeel (throatfeel?) because their ultimate purpose is more practical than that.  The citrus oils that were used in the original lemon-lime flavor, crafted in 1965 by University of Florida researchers for the use of Florida Gator athletes, hence the name, didn't properly mix unaided.  As with any combination of oil and water, the natural inclination of citrus oils held in suspension with water was to separate, resulting in the citrus oils forming a slick top layer floating above the water layer.  But if you blend the citrus oil with brominated vegetable oil and aid the emulsifying process with a wood-rosin derivative, the flavoring oils will mix seamlessly with water in an emulsion.  And a water-oil emulsion, to the delight and gratitude of generations of athletes and other thirsty people everywhere, tastes just like one might imagine -- as wet as water but as slick as oil.

Stripped of their magic formula, the people at Gatorade have had to resort to other means to keep the product interesting, like designing flavors based on weather patterns.  Their newest creation, Summit Storm, available exclusively at 7-11, tastes like a combination of grape and melon.

Paradise Lost

It was in 2014 that Gatorade stopped being the product we all knew and loved.  A Mississippi teenager started a petition campaign through Change.org to remove the brominated vegetable oil (BVO) from the formula.  One objection was that BVO was a flame retardant, which seems a non sequitur to me, and also that Japan and the European Union had not approved its use, although the FDA did and still does consider it safe for human consumption.  There is evidence that BVO is harmful if taken in excess, as one man who consumed a vast quantity of a BVO-containing beverage found out.  To quote the Wikipedia article on the subject "[o]ne case reported that a man who consumed two-to-four liters of a soda containing BVO on a daily basis (emphasis mine) experienced memory loss, tremors, fatigue, loss of muscle coordination, headache, and ptosis of the right eyelid, as well as elevated serum chloride and...also lost the ability to walk."

Such a horrific episode is not to be minimized, but it seems to me the rarity of this result, one unheard of among the millions who have enjoyed Gatorade over the years, should be instructive.  Be that as it may, BVO was removed.  Ester of wood rosin was retained, but given the more euphemistic name "glycerol ester of rosin".  It seems to get the job of emulsification done on its own, but the slippery feel of the original is much diminished.  An echo of it remains but Gatorade is now much more of a mere flavored sugar water, with none of the mystique that has sustained it as a market leader for decades.

Enter the Summit Storm

Somewhat hamstrung, the Gatorade brand has nonetheless limped along, trying to gin up excitement with new and novel flavors and flavor lines like their "Gatorade Frost" line, whose flavors are not named after fruits but rather forces of nature like "Arctic Blitz", "Icy Charge", "Glacier Freeze" and now "Summit Storm".  "Summit Storm" was recently on offer, exclusively at 7-11 for the bargain price of two 28 oz bottles for $3 and I was thereby induced to pay my old friend Gatorade a visit.

Fortunately for our taste buds, these winter-hardship based flavors aren't actually intended to simulate the taste of weather events.  If they were, Summit Storm would taste like a murky blend of mineral-rich ice crystals and airborne particulate sediment.  Instead, these flavors are a blend of anonymous fruits with austere, spartan flavor profiles.  Summit Storm seems to be some combination of grape and melon, pleasingly semi-sweet with a semi-medicinal or vegetal kelpish note.

A view into the cloudy, purple, eye of the summit storm.  Another side effect of the chemical emulsifier glycerol ester of rosin is a bit of cloudiness, which Gatorade has decided to leverage by attaching cloud-based imagery to it.

A Ray of Light Through the Clouds

Apart from the novel grape-melon-vegetable flavor,  I did notice something else while drinking my two tall bottles of Summit Storm: some of the slipperiness seems to have found its way back into the mix.  I'm not sure of the cause - perhaps they've added more citrus  or other oils, albeit not brominated, and added more ester of rosin to increase the oil content without the aid of bromination.  Whatever they've done, it hasn't quite brought back the original slick sensation, but Gatorade is once more something greater than a mere flavored fruit drink.  We can still mourn for what has been lost; we can still resent the transient fireball of activism that killed a great product for the silent majority of innocent bystanders.  But food chemistry and the competitive marketplace continue on apace and the creativity with which industry meets the desires of the public continues to impress and amaze.

If you had examined this ingredient list prior to 2014, brominated vegetable oil would have been included.  Now there are fewer ingredients not normally seen in nature, though glycerol ester of rosin should still pull some readers up short.  Also of note is the natural coloring "purple sweet potato juice."  I suppose it must be an Andean summit storm at that.

After Three Swings, Mac n' Cheetos Strikes Out

Cheeto Pride Before the Fall
At least they won the first 24-hour news cycle.  When Burger King announced their new Mac n' Cheetos a few weeks back, the internet exploded with squeals of delight, and it's easy to see why.  BK was promising to marry two of America's guiltiest pleasures, creamy mac and cheese and intense, orange-dusted Cheetos into one portable snack, solving in one step a problem that we didn't know we had: the ability to take the melty rich taste of macaroni and cheese on the go.  One promotional product picture embodies this aspiration, showcasing  drippy cheese sauce running like a stream through a shapely cluster of macaroni, all safely encased in a radioactively orange fried shell, glistening with just the right amount of fryer oil.  Even if you would never dream of purchasing them, they were an understandable object of desire.  This is the kind of innovation of which a broad spectrum of Americans could feel justly proud; a bright orange object we could all agree on. It's interesting how the hype has died down, isn't it?  That's because the not-too-well-kept secret of Mac n' Cheetos is that they completely miss the mark, falling somewhere between a botched experiment and a con job.  I tried these woeful fried critters three times just to be absolutely sure they were as bad as they first seemed, before concluding they were inherently awful.  Let's dig in and dissect the anatomy of this failure.

Implausibly bulging at the seams with more pasta and sauce than they could reasonably hold, this promotional shot of shiny, crispy, creamy Mac n' Cheetos pieces shows us what we wanted to see.

Trial #1

The excitement showed no sign of abating when I called ahead to my local Burger King on the day of the product's debut to make sure they were available.  "Do you have the new Mac n' Cheetos?" I asked, and was answered with a breathless and beaming "We sure do!"  By this time it was 10:30 at night, so I was a little apprehensive that they might not be at their best, but like so many people I just couldn't wait to get my hands on munchable mac and cheese.  So off to BK I went.  The first warning sign came when I placed my order and the cashier remarked "Oh, yea, Mac n' Cheetos, they're good when they're fresh."  The response in kind would have been to turn tail in a huff and call out "I guess I'll come back when they're fresh", but who wants to be that person?  And besides, I was hungry.

Back at the Food Kingdom home base, the air is pulsing with excitement.  On their very first day of availability, the Mac n' Cheetos nuggets, "dangerously cheesy", are ready to burst onto the stage....

On biting into a Mac n' Cheetos piece for the first time, the first thing you wonder is where the sauce is.  The promotional photo shows a creamy, runny cheese sauce, and the package cries out that they are "dangerously cheesy" but reality is a depressing diptych of truths: they're both dry and strangely hollow.  As the photo below shows, there are no identifiable or distinct macaroni elbows but rather a mushy mass of anonymous, overcooked pasta.  The sauce has hardened and shriveled, and about 30% of the interior is empty space.  The taste is empty too; not repulsive or anything, just bland.  Ketchup can enhance lesser macaronis and cheese, and the same is true here, but this first foray leaves nothing to get excited about.

Behold the desiccated and paltry interior.  Note also how thick the fried coating is.  Far from a thin barrier that barely contains a bulging mass of pasta and sauce, it actually takes up as much space, and provides as much bulk, as the pasta itself, adding to the feeling of dryness, and making it hard to taste what cheese there is.

Trial #2

On the second time around, you could tell that Burger King's rank-and-file had stopped believing in this dish, and it felt as though they weren't even trying to prepare it well.  Though the product had only been on the market for a week, they seemed already to have run out of custom cardboard product holsters, or they didn't care to use them, and were instead throwing the breaded pasta mini-logs into the paper sleeves reserved for "chicken fries".  And although they were ordered at the height of the lunch rush, they didn't taste any fresher than they did the first time.  Again they were dry and again the interior seemed to be equal parts air and filling.

The thrill is gone: how sad does this look?  And what are those sickly black spots?  They appeared prominently the second and third time they were ordered and raise questions as to how Mac n' Cheetos are actually heated.  One would suspect they are thrown in the fryer, but these look like scorch marks.  Are we supposed to think of them as "flame grilled" in some weird way?

Though ordered at the height of the lunch rush, this piece seems almost petrified, as though it had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, its moisture evaporating away.  Neither macaroni nor cheese sauce is the least bit identifiable.

Trial #3

The third and final time they were slightly better.  This time there were at least some congealed remnants of what once may have been a mildly flavorful cheese sauce.  The weird black markings, resembling grill marks, were once again noticeable, but at least they weren't unsightly.  With enough ketchup they were palatable and reminded me of the cheese fritters that The Magic Pan used to serve. This was still nothing like what the eating public had been led to expect, but it wasn't offensive.  It is time to ask, though, why Mac n' Cheetos fell so far short of everyone's expectations

Where did all the moist cheesiness go?  Some of it probably got absorbed by the breading, and other moisture was probably driven inside the pasta itself as the product steamed within its dry shell.

Assessing What Went Wrong

The Mac n' Cheetos experiment failed in a number of ways, some of them predictable and all of them, I believe, explicable.  Let's take the two biggest failures in turn.

Overall dryness: To understand why the macaroni and cheese inside the shell was so dry, it's first helpful to understand that there are actually two varieties of mac and cheese: the type prepared on the stovetop and the kind that you bake.   Stovetop macaroni and cheese consists of freshly boiled macaroni, cooked al-dente firm, and still moist and slick from the pasta water, which is immediately blended with a bechamel cheese sauce and served immediately after the cheese and macaroni are blended.  For this reason, the dish is still moist and the macaroni is swimming in thick, cheesy sauce.  Baked pasta, on the other hand, is much drier because the pasta continues to cook as it bakes, drying from the circulating air and from the fact that, even if it's enrobed in sauce when shoved in the oven, that sauce will be absorbed by the pasta as it continues to cook.  That's why baked macaroni and cheese often features a layer of melted cheese on top -- both to trap moisture and to ensure that the product is still visibly cheesy even after the macaroni soaks up the cheese sauce.  Mac n' Cheetos are more like the baked mac and cheese.  The mac and cheese inside the breading may have been saucy prior to cooking, but as it steams, it dries out and also goes limp.  As the sauce is soaked up by the pasta, it leaves voids within the shell and the pasta goes formless and mushy.  Because the crisp outer coating was far thicker than it needed to be, it overwhelmed the shrunken pasta interior and exacerbated the dryness problem.  It's also an open question whether these things are even fried.  The outside never seemed to have the thin film of oil that things get when they come from the fryer.   Instead, it has that crusty dryness that usually comes from spending too much time exposed to hot circulating air.

The Lack of a Bold Cheetos-like Flavor: As far as appearances go, Mac n' Cheetos do seem to capture the spirit of Cheetos with their bright orange color.  But, leaving the dryness aside, that punchy, bright cheese flavor that make Cheetos so addictive was absent, and one wonders why.  I suspect that it's more difficult than people suspect to "bake flavor into" things and that, if BK really wanted to give these that bright orange Cheetos punch, the way to do it would have been to sprinkle them with that trademark Cheetos orange cheese powder.  But to do this would have required segregating them from other fried items like fries and onion rings, lest the powder spill uninvited onto them, and Burger King may not have wanted to add that step of labor to the process.  

Indeed, this whole project was not so much a failure in conception as a case of lazy execution.  Burger  King could have added more cheese taste with a sprinkling of cheese dust but they didn't want to take the time and effort.  They could have begun with a slightly undercooked macaroni filling and an excess of slightly thin sauce, and allowed the ratio of cheese to sauce to even out as the item cooked, the sauce thickening slightly as the pasta came to the proper degree of doneness.  Finally, they could have made more of an effort to serve them fresh out of the fryer, but I'm beginning to think that these were transferred from a bag to an oven and finally to a holding area, compromising any possibility of freshness or tenderness.

Conclusion

Burger King captured a nation's imagination with an exciting idea, and threw it all away.  Expect these to be gone within a month, never to return.

Burgers for Breakfast - The Diner Experience Recreated

Burger King Battles Back
As with many industries, success in fast-food depends on hype, momentum, seizing people's imagination, and of course giving the eating public what they want.  McDonald's proved this recently with all-day breakfast.  The novelty of noshing on pancakes or an Egg McMuffin at lunchtime, the lure of "getting away with something" by buying a cheaper breakfast item rather than a relatively pricey burger-based combo, the frisson of individuality that one experiences from eating one mass-produced item while everybody else consumes another; all these things have rallied the Golden Arches from the doldrums, and their revenues are surging based on first quarter earnings reports. Naturally, Burger King wants in on the action.

So why doesn't Burger King just copy McDonald's and offer all-day breakfast?  Well, breakfast at Burger King just isn't as popular as it is at McDonald's, where morning is the strongest part of the day, sales-wise.  People just don't have a jones for a Croissanwich in the noontime heat, never mind French Toast Sticks.  Managing the logistics of all-day breakfast would represent a sizeable investment in processes and equipment retooling that Burger King likely would never recoup.  So, how to steal a little bit of McDonald's thunder on the cheap, offering a popular item at an unexpected time of day?  The question practically answers itself: burgers for breakfast.

No cheerful backlit sign, no warmly glowing windows welcome the breakfast visitor to Burger King. The dominant mood is morose as our breakfast experiment begins.

The atmosphere is equally depressing once inside as the cranked-up flatscreen blares the morning news to no one.

My Own Private Idaho Potatoes
If you live near a Burger King that happens to run a busy breakfast business then your experience may vary, but my Burger King is situated in an open-air food court of sorts, a huge asphalt expanse off a highway exit ramp, that's home to about seven different fast-food chains that serve the commuter crowd that works at surrounding businesses.  Most workers don't arrive before 8AM, so both of the times I had burgers for breakfast, I was the only one in the restaurant.  The staff hasn't been exactly annoyed to see me, but they've certainly been surprised, even more so when I've ordered burgers.  The corporate office may be pushing this menu option, but employees seem to find it a bit eccentric.  Both times, they've politely warned me that there will be a wait since the burger would have to be made-to-order.  As you'll see, though, this is quite the blessing in disguise.  When you're the only one in the restaurant, the order takers and the cooks are fairly unstressed and are able to provide a welcome amount of individual attention.

Once you place your order and are informed of the delay, you're given your beverage, in my case black coffee, asked if you want hash browns or fries (I chose fries), and simply told to take a seat and wait.  As you can see in the pictures above, it can be a bit bleak, and if I were a more of an assertive and demanding personality, I might have asked that the television, set at full volume, I imagine, so that the staff can hear it in the back, be turned down.  Setting that aside though, the time passes fairly quickly as you read your morning paper or, in my case, a dystopian military techno-thriller.   When I sat down, the occupying forces of a Kazakh battalion in the American South was digging an all-terrain vehicle out of the mud.  By the time our heroes had begun their ambush of the Kazakhs, my freshly prepared Whopper and straight-from-the-fryer potatoes had arrived, delivered right to my table.  On the second visit, I was called to the counter to pick up the order, but in both cases the experience was more like being in a lonely diner off the interstate and less that of interfacing with the food-industrial complex.  The whole thing was poignantly civilized, a bit of culinary-philosophical meditation at the edge of the world.  Yea, ok, but how were the burger and fries?

In the slowly gathering morning light, black coffee and a Whopper with cheese (fries obscured by the thick and copious wrapping paper) await consumption.

The Early Bird Catches the Fresh Lettuce and Tomato
From the very first bite, the benefits of ordering a burger with lettuce and tomato early in the morning became clear.  Think about it: most restaurants do their prep work right when they open; at no time will the lettuce be crisper than when it has just been taken out of the walk-in refrigerator, its cells plumped with the water in which it's been rinsed, before the heat of the kitchen and the passage of time has even started to turn it limp.  At no point will the tomatoes taste fresher than right after they've been sliced, probably only an hour earlier.  Even the bun is at its freshest, for it only left the plastic storage bag minutes before when the cook opened it for the unexpected order.  You can even see this in the picture above, as the burger's posture is high and erect, steam having not caused any component to sag.  This is the Whopper as it was meant to be, with the hot stuff piping hot and the cool stuff cool and crisp.

The interior of the bun is fluffy, the June tomatoes are thick and ripe, the crisp lettuce is piled high, and the beef is flame broiled.  What would you rather munch on between sips of black coffee, this or a limp and stodgy Croissanwich?

The fries too could not have been better, for they were fried to order, slid into their holster the moment the doneness indicator on the fryer chirped.  It's worth noting that these are the recently redesigned fries, thicker cut and without much, if any, coating so that they boast a delicate crispness on the outside and fluffy moist starchiness within.  On both visits I also noticed that they were minimally salted, allowing me to season them to my preference with salt and a sprinkle of black pepper, just as I used to do at the Tastee 29 Diner on Route 29 in Fairfax, VA.  Completing the diner experience was the black coffee, which interacts with the brown caramel notes of broiled meat and golden fried potatoes in a different way than soft drinks.  As I alternated, in pensive solitude, between bites of fresh custom-seasoned fries, strong coffee, and a hearty but garden-fresh burger, it occurred to me how rare this private, intimate experience was.  It was a feeling entirely new in a fast-food restaurant and one that could become addictive for as long as BK decides to keep this experiment going.

Because the fries are thick-cut, you get more real potato taste than usual, and they stay hot longer because of the lower ratio of surface area to interior space.  Finally, because they are very modestly salted, it's possible to season them to taste with just the right amount of salt and pepper.

Conclusions
Burgers for breakfast are the best-kept secret going in fast food right now, and I encourage anyone with memories of eating burgers at Denny's or a diner at 3AM to activate nostalgia before what I predict will be low profitability prompts BK to pull the plug on this venture.  Don't doubt it til you've tried it.

Hostess Milky Way and M&M's Brownies: Can the Brownian Knot Be Cut?

The Hostess Hitting Streak Grinds to a Halt
Hostess had been on a tear since their miraculous resurrection by Greek-American billionaire turnaround artist C. Dean Metropoulos, using their newly-modernized manufacturing processes to crank out novel new items like the delish Caramel Sea Salt Cupcakes.  But their two new themed brownies, coated with M&M's or with caramel frosting and Milky Way pieces, fall flat.   Or perhaps it's better to say they simply fall prey to the seeming impossibility of creating a truly great brownie in a factory setting.  We'll have more on that later, but first let's talk about the factors that were at least under Hostess's control.

Untruth in Packaging
As a general principle, anyone who complains that a food product doesn't look like the picture on the package just needs to grow up.  Companies have a right to photograph their products in the best light possible and the package depictions will always be somewhat idealized; you mustn't mistake the cardboard carton housing your microwaved pasta dinner for a representation of reality.  The perfect chunks of chicken in the picture will always be a little plumper than what comes out of your oven, the gloss of the sauce a little smoother, the colors in the vegetables a little brighter.  But with these two brownies, Hostess crosses the line into deception, promising a totally different kind of brownie from what they deliver.  Let's first look at the Milky Way brownie.

The picture on the box promises that the base brownie will be smothered in chewy, gooey caramel, with hefty chunks of Milky Way candy thrown on top for good measure, adding textural diversity and an added boost of milk chocolate taste.  What you get instead isn't even caramel, but a gritty, sandy icing.  It might be the same icing that Hostess puts on their Sea Salt Caramel cupcakes, but while that icing works in the context of a thick cupcake, it's a real letdown when the consumer was expecting a rich caramel-turtle-like taste experience.  As for the Milky Way pieces, they're not the chunks that you see in the picture, but cast-off fragments, shards and particles of Milky Way dust.

Hostess promises chewy, stretchy caramel atop its brownies, but actually delivers a crumbly caramel-flavored icing sans sumptuousness, stretch, or even richness.

The M&M's brownie isn't quite so dishonestly presented, for at least it boasts a goodly amount of the candy-coated chocolate pieces, more in fact than are shown on the package.  Once again, however, Hostess gives us a substantially different icing than you get in the photo.  On the box we see a velvety sheet of glossy chocolate draped over the brownie, with a rainbow of chocolate pieces gently nestled into the soft, accommodating dimples of fudge that the icing affords.  The real icing, in contrast, is a dry and brittle crust of cocoa-stained confectioners icing.  Rather than draped, it looks laser-printed and bolted on, a rigid encasement more than an enticing adornment, and since the brownie underneath is a dry biscuit-like slab of cocoa bread, the whole act of eating it is a pleasureless affair.

Which icing would you rather eat?  And don't say it makes no difference.  Perhaps if Hostess hadn't done such a great job of meeting expectations in recent months, this bait-and-switch would feel like less of a betrayal.

Why Are Boxed Brownies So Difficult to Get Right?
All of the above complaints notwithstanding, Hostess's primary sin here may not be faulty execution so much as a lack of wisdom in once again trying to bring a shelf-stable packaged brownie to market. This is something that food companies have struggled to get right for decades and each time they fail. Intriguingly, these individually-wrapped brownies almost always fail in nearly identical ways.  Here's a list of the most common offputting traits.

The Scent of Dried Prunes - Next time you try an industrially baked brownie, hold it up to your nose and inhale deeply.  Usually a strong aroma conveys a mixture of wet coffee grounds mixed with dried fruit of the raisiny or prunish variety.  Though these brownies don't actually contain dried prunes, that was once a featured ingredient in a low-fat brownie from nearly two decades back which attempted to reduce the amount of fat by replacing shortening with prune puree.  Amazingly, that brownie didn't taste significantly worse than these.

A Uniformly Damp Texture - Why are brownies so popular in the first place?  Apart from intense chocolate taste, I'd argue that the other great attraction is their two simultaneous textures: crackly on top and around the edges, soft, dense and fudgy on the inside.  Packaged brownies never seem to be able to replicate this.  The medium-dense crumb on the inside is unchanged at the edges, and the cake square is limp and flabby throughout, robbing each bite of the excitement that comes with variability.

This picture gives a good view into the depressing sameness of texture that is common in packaged brownies.

I've often wondered why, with the arsenal of food technologies at our disposal, we should have such trouble creating a boxed brownie that's crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside.  One theory, though, is moisture migration.  When you wrap the brownie, you create a closed system where all the moisture inside the brownie simply has nowhere to go.  If it escapes into the air, it's still trapped inside the package and will get reabsorbed into the brownie's outside skin.  If the moisture is trapped in the center, it will eventually migrate through the cell structure of the brownie into the edges.  We forget that even the best homemade brownies only hold their double texture for a few hours uncovered and only a few days under plastic wrap.  After that, they dry out.  So if you're a manufacturer whose brownies will ship long distances and sit on shelves for long periods, you have two options: create a brownie that's uniformly dry or uniformly damp; that choice you have, but the uniformity is not optional.  It's a decent theory, but just as I was considering it, a co-worker brought a complication to this idea into the breakroom: brownie bites.

This supermarket brownie bite was everything that the Hostess brownies weren't.  Check out the crumbly, crusty, uneven skin and the dark tender interior.

Somehow brownie bites, those miniature cupcakes of baked brownie batter, manage to overcome all the aforementioned difficulties and taste just like a brownie should; fudgy and soft in the center, light and crackly at the edges.  Does this mean that the packaging theory is invalid?  I've actually written to an industrial food scientist to get a clear answer on this, and I'll update this post should I get an answer, but my instinct is to say no.  I think brownie bites succeed where industrial brownies fail because of a different delivery and consumption schedule.  Brownie bites are usually made by a local commercial bakery and shipped the same day to the retail outlets that sell them in under a week's time.  If they were to sit on a shelf for several weeks, they would probably dry out completely. Brownies such as Hostess sells have to sit for many weeks, if not months, and have to be formulated differently so that they stay reasonably fresh and moist for a much longer window of time.  Hostess has figured out a way to make this work for Twinkies and cupcakes, but brownies are still a struggle.   Still, there are tantalizing hints out there to a better way to make an industrial brownie.  Consider, for instance, Keebler Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies.  Those are crisp on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside.  What are they doing that industrial brownie bakers might duplicate?  The consumer desire is out there.  We'll see how the nation's food scientists respond.