Japanese Sugar

On a recent trip to a Japanese grocery store I came across a collection of flavoured sugars. While I can’t read the packages my assumption is that you’re supposed to sprinkle this sugar onto toast (likely with butter) to give plain toast a sweet boost. While I think this is a good idea, I feel like there’s more you can do with these sweet sprinkles, and toast is only the beginning. So I picked up 3 of the flavours and I’ve decided to do a taste test and not only see which is best, but which one works beyond toast.

To get started I figured I would taste test them with toast as intended.

The first flavour I picked up was Melon-Pan. Now I don’t have a history of enjoying melon flavoured... well.. anything, but the one exception is Melon-Pan (or melon buns) from Japan. I not only enjoy these melon flavoured buns, but I seek them out every time I visit Japan. The main reason I love them is that they really only have a hint of melon, and the rest is a wonderful buttery flavour.

This Melon-Pan Toast flavour on the other hand is very melon heavy. I’ll be honest, I was kind of expecting this, but I figured I’d give it a try anyways. I’m sure if you slathered your toast with even more butter the flavour would die down a bit, but at this point I find it to be a little too melon forward for my liking.

Next I decided to try the Vanilla Sugar flavour. This one seemed like the simplest of them all and also seemed to be the most versatile. It even feels like the kind of sugar sprinkle you could use for baking in a pinch. The real trick of this particular sugar is that the quality of the vanilla has to be fairly good for it to work. A cheap/fake vanilla flavour might be a little off putting.

On toast the vanilla seems pretty good. I’m not entirely confident that it’s pure vanilla extract, but I feel like it might be a blend of fake and real vanilla. There appears to be some black spots in it, which could be vanilla bean. The flavour works well on this toast, however I wonder if the flavour of the whole wheat bread is helping it out a bit.

Finally I went with the most ambitious of all of these sugar sprinkles, Caramel Cinnamon. This is either going to be the best of the bunch, or it might disappoint. The flavours are fairly common with this kind of treat, after all cinnamon and sugar is probably the oldest sweet toast powder out there. I’m just worried that they might over do it and it might just be overly sweet.

On the toast this one kind of disappoints. The problem isn’t the cinnamon, but the caramel. In hindsight I should have thought about that before getting it. Caramel is really just a form of sugar, and hardened caramel can sometimes just taste like brown sugar. If you don’t burn the caramel a little in this case, the flavour can be too subtle and lost. That’s pretty much what we have here, it really just tastes like cinnamon sugar. Not that it’s a bad thing, but there’s nothing really special about it.

Now it’s time to expand the tasting and see if these sugar sprinkles work on other foods. I decided to start with apples.

The Melon-Pan sugar just didn’t work at all. I thought maybe there would be a hope, since they’re both fruit, but the melon is just too fake a flavour and it really clashes with the real apple. I’ll be honest, I don’t have much hope for the Melon-Pan at this point, but I’ll keep trying.

The vanilla is fine, but with the real apple flavour it seems to highlight how strong or possibly fake the vanilla flavour is. Again, I’m fairly certain there’s real vanilla in these sugar sprinkles, but I’m not convinced it’s all real vanilla. There’s just something odd about the flavour of this apple and the vanilla.

Cinnamon, sugar and apples, it’s a match made in heaven, and works here as well. It’s a fine flavour combination that’s been around forever. Again, the caramel doesn’t really come through, but I really enjoyed this as it was anyways.

I’ve decided to stay with fruit, and I went for a banana next.

Melon-Pan didn’t really have a hope of working with a banana. I guess if you really like this fake melon flavour, and don’t really like bananas, then you might enjoy this. The melon flavour is just too strong and doesn’t work with the banana, but covers it up instead.

The Vanilla is surprisingly good. I’ve used banana and vanilla together in baking, but I’ve never thought of just putting vanilla on a banana before. It’s doing what vanilla often does in baking and making the banana taste a little better.

I thought the Caramel Cinnamon would work, but I’m wrong. I can taste the banana, and I can taste the cinnamon (still no real caramel flavour) but at no point do they really merge into their own flavour combination. It’s as if they’re each fighting to be the dominant flavour, rather than working together.

Popcorn seems to make sense... right?

I’ll be honest, I don’t hold much hope for the Melon Pan sugar. It’s not surprising that melon flavoured popcorn isn’t that great. As I’ve said before, if you like fake melon flavour maybe you’ll like this, but I do not. I didn’t have much hope of this tasting good and I was rewarded as expected.

While the Melon may not be great, the Vanilla keeps surprising me. As it turns out, vanilla popcorn kind of works. Like the banana, the vanilla doesn’t just add a flavour, but it seems to bring up the original flavour of the popcorn. I’ve said it before, but I believe vanilla is the most important flavour in all of snacks and candy. This latest experiment is only proving it more true.

The Caramel Cinnamon was fine. I would not be disappointed if I was given a bowl of this popcorn, but I’m not sure I’d ever order it myself. The biggest problem is one that’s been happening this entire time, and that’s the lack of caramel. My popcorn was a little sweeter with a hint of cinnamon. Tasty enough, but nothing worth shouting about.

Melon is the last hope.

I’m pretty sure that you can guess that I decided to try using a melon in hopes that it might merge or even improve the real melon. Unfortunately it does not. It also disproves a theory I had about why I don’t like most fake melon flavoured treats. I used to believe that the key to a melon flavour working the refreshing texture you get with a real melon. However after tasting this I don’t believe that to be true anymore. The fake melon flavour is not improved with a real melon texture.

Vanilla is continuing to be the super hero of this taste test. I thought that it might be fine, but it’s actually blowing away the competition. I’m starting to think that I might start keeping a jar of vanilla flavoured sugar on hand, just to improve all kinds of snacks. While the melon wasn’t my favourite treat, it was improved with a little vanilla.

Cinnamon just doesn’t really work with melon. I don’t think I was expecting it to, but I might have been hoping to be pleasantly surprised. While it wasn’t gross, it also wasn’t great.

Travel With Fruit

I have a theory that's probably very unpopular. I believe that fruit is more often than not, bad for road trips and hiking. Don't get me wrong, I really like fruit, but it often gets a reputation for being the perfect road trip or travel snack, and frankly I disagree. I've decided to make a collection of common fruits, and give it a score based on how well I think it travels. I'll also give a short write up and justification about why I think it doesn't travel well.

Each fruit will get a score out of 10 1 being horrible for travel 10 being slightly inconvenient for travel. Keep in mind that this is an argument that all fruit is hard to travel either hiking or road trip, and no fruit is going to "win". The thing that I'm most excited about writing this is the fact that I get to eat all this fruit... for science.

Watermelon - 2 out of 10 - This is probably one of the worst fruits for traveling. If you want to keep watermelon in good shape, the best thing one can do is not cut it. I've kept watermelons in my fridge for over a month uncut and it still tastes great. However, after I cut into a watermelon it feels like you have at most a week before it starts to go. It's even more so if it's out of the fridge. 

Let's also not forget about the trash left behind with a watermelon. This includes the rind and all the seeds. The seeds also create a problem as picking them out can make a mess. Even if you're some kind of watermelon seed ninja, in general watermelon is a fruit that requires a shower after eating it. This is not only a horrible road trip fruit, it's like the worst road trip fruit with one exception (see below).

Orange 5 out of 10 - The peel is the first and most obvious problem with bringing an orange on a road trip. If you happen to be driving the car, you'll have to pull over and peel the orange before you can even think about eating it. Even if we assume that you've pulled over and thrown away the peel, even if you're willing to lose that much time to get a little extra vitamin C. Then you have the stickiness. 

Orange stickiness is no joke. There's two dose of sticky to contend with too. There's the obvious juice that you'll have to deal with when eating the orange, sure sometimes it's contained in the wedges, but that's pretty rare. Even if you have a lucky orange, you'll probably already be sticky because the peel releases a stealthy sticking liquid that I contend is worse than the juice on the inside. This ninja spray that comes off the peel is even a pain to wash off your hands, so you're probably looking at more wasted time scrubbing your hands at the next truck stop.

Banana - 6 out of 10 - Bananas are deceptive, because they may at first appear to be a great road trip or hiking snack. They're self contained in single serving packages and they taste great. But let's start off by looking at this self contained package. Banana peels have the ability to go brown and rot faster than any other fruit by-product. I feel like the banana peel starts to rot before you even finish the banana. If you're on a road trip your trash bag is going to smell like rotting banana very quickly. This is even worse if you're hiking and have no place to dispose of the peel. And don't go throwing that peel on the ground either, I've seen enough black and white comedy movies to know that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The other thing about bananas is the fact that they go bad really quickly too. Even if you leave the peel on, I feel like bananas have the ability to go from just ripe to a sock full of mush in minutes. And god forbid you happen to bump it in any kind of way. A bruised banana will be a sack full of liquid in no time.

Apple - 6 out of 10 - I think we can agree that the core of the apple is the worst thing about eating any fruit. Even in the perfect environment when you have a cutting board and knife, the core is going to be the biggest challenge you'll have with an apple. You have to make one of two choices when eating an apple, either go in deep and try to clean the core off running the risk of eating a seed or those sharp seed pods, or agree to waste some apple and leave a little extra room. No matter which you choose, you'll still have a core to deal with, and similar to the banana peel, the core of an apple rots at breakneck speeds.

There's also the juice problem. Some apples are very juicy and you'll find beads of juice running down your fingers for sure. Other types of apples may not bleed juice, but all apples will likely give you a light misting of sticky juice. Maybe a baby wipe or a stop at a roadside rest stop might help you, but I feel like that spray of stickiness will likely find a way to stick around.

Grapes - 7 out of 10 - I'm going to be honest, I think grapes might be the best fruit to bring on a road trip or hiking. They're not perfect, but I think they're as good as it gets. The thing is, there are very particular stipulations to make these an acceptable road trip fruit. First of all you have to get rid of the stems. This means that you have to break them into a bunch of very round and easy to lose pieces. If you have a container than you might be okay (but then you're carrying around an empty container all day). 

If your grapes have seeds than consider the advise above null and void. I understand that seeds are the key to life when it comes to plants, but if there could be some way of outlawing seeds in grapes that are sold to the public as food I would not disagree. Seeds in grapes have been something that has made me sad many times.

Honorable Mentions - I just want to mention a few other of my favourite fruits that are also not great for travel. Dragon fruit is a terrifying looking fruit that actually might be one of the better road trip fruits. I've peeled a dragon fruit by hand and feel like you might be able to enjoy it while on a road trip. It'll likely be kind of messy, but not nearly as messy as the last fruit I want to mention, the mango.

Fresh mango is probably one of the most amazing fruits one can buy. If you live in a colder climate you might not understand what I'm talking about, but a quick visit to Pakistan or India will teach you how great this fruit can be. The problem is getting into it, particularly on the road or hiking trail. We once decided to pick up a mango while on a road trip in India. It was an amazing looking mango, super soft and ready to eat. The problem is we did not have a knife or cutting board to deal with it. We did some research and only came across warnings about how intensely messy it is to peel and eat a mango by hand. We ended up in the shower, in our underwear, covered in juice enjoying one of the tastiest fruits we'd ever eaten. In a car this would have been disastrous. Having said that, there are two fruits I can think of that are just no goes at all...

Pineapple and durian.

CC

It's A New Episdoe of Junk Fud On The Road!!!

In the latest episode of Junk Fud On The Raod, Allison and Chris talk about their trip to the Canary Islands. It was a remote island with the best bananas ever.

CC