Chochungu-gua is a puffed rice snack from Korea. It looks like the stuff being poured on it is honey, but there is no honey in the ingredients, only various forms of sugar.
At first when you try Chochungu-gua it seems bland and not very sweet but that doesn’t keep you from reaching for another. Bam! Before you realize it, you’ve finished off the entire bag (which is supposed to contain 3 servings). Kind of like Gerber puffs; they don’t taste like much and it seems like you wouldn’t want to continue eating them, but somehow your hand keeps reaching for more. Unlike Puffs it is high in saturated fat which makes this technically a sometimes food. On the other hand, I’ve decided that one shouldn’t worry about nutritional value of ethnic foods since it makes me feel like a Food Adventurer. Domestic Cheetos – bad, maybe a little trashy. Foreign Cheeto Equivalent – dashing and cosmopolitan!
And to wash it down, I got a five pack of “Soft Drink” again from Korea.
Notice it has “Asian Taste”. That’s fierce.
And a delightful paragraph of Engrish description on the back!
The bottle is tiny and cute in its vaguely medicinal way.
The color wasn’t very enticing and it seemed to lack the full body that one expects in a yogurt drink.
Alas, it did not taste very good, too sweet, too thin, oddly sour in a not good way. I took one sip and poured the rest down the sink. Good thing it was a small bottle so I wasn’t wasting much. Today my health is unbalanced, so I might try and slam one down without tasting it. Or make some Korean medicine tea – chunky style! (Coming soon to the Museum of snack foods, even though technically medicine is not a snack)
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Speaking of foreign medicine snacks, Jagermeister used to be cough syrup before they decided it was only good for making people drunk.
Also, when I went to Australia many years ago and got a stomach bug, the hotel actually recommended TimTams as a stomach calmer. And it worked. So TimTams are good for your health.
Ya, didn’t Coke used to have cocaine in it? That’s a medicine snack, I’m sure.
I can’t get past that the front of the Chochungu-gua bag shows the honey-sugar liquid being pored on top of the snacks into an open weave basket. Picturing the resulting mess is giving me a bit of a headache.
I’m hopefully !!! traveling back to the states next week. If I bring a surprise (vacuum sealed! ) Saudi snack with me and mail it to you, will you review it? This could be my next big project. The old man is in Dubai for the week and I got time galore!
(That yogurt drink looks dangerous, btw! I think I would get a wee bit nervous drinking dairy beverages that were shipped from another continent. It’s a good thing you’re here to do it for us. )
Why has it not occurred to me until now to ask my globe-trotting boss to pick up random snack foods from his many destinations? Grace reminded me, since he was in Saudi Arabia just a few months ago, not to mention that time he went to on of the “-stan”s and to Bulgaria. Now the only thing he has on his schedule is the UK, which just doesn’t seem exotic enough to me.
He wouldn’t think I was crazy if I asked him to do this, would he?
Thank you for killing my appetite.
I was thinking about a quick snack before bad, rapidly re-doing my calorie counts in my head to allow another 300 or so.
A sour medicinal soft drink ? Puffy fatty tasteless addictive puffies ? I am so turned off to food right now I am becoming redundant.
My BMI thanks you.
Side note, I uncovered a box of ‘Tastefully Simple’ Beer Bread mix, with a nesting clump and a single dead pantry moth in it.
I will send it to you free of charge. I think it is a step up from this current selection. The pantry moth gives an added protein boost.
This “Soft Drink” looks a lot like Yakult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakult).
i used to drink those yogurt things when i was little! i like them. i see them at safeway now except its a different brand and hella expensive. nearly 4 dollars for one pack of 5 or 6!!!
the packaging on the “soft drink” is not Korean. it’s Chinese.
Hi Mimi, the package said “Made in Korea” so I went with that. I have no idea if they export it to China or perhaps even exported it from China and put “product of Korea” on the label.
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