DISCLAIMER: This article is the authors’ personal opinion on these snacks. We encourage you to try them and come up with your own.
So you wanted to start eating healthy, searched on the Trader Joe’s website “Peas and Carrots,” and came upon this monstrosity. Its sugar content, 18 grams per serving, its taste, Vitamin C gummies. This is Trader Joe’s Peas and Carrots sour gummy candies, and they are only one of many weird snack selections you can find at Trader Joes.
Peas and Carrots
No, these gummies are not actually vegetables, and their sugar content is, in fact, 18 grams per serving. They are sour in taste, and the carrots have a strong orange-flavored vitamin taste. The peas are more lemon/lime-flavored, and have a bitter aftertaste. These treats come in a snack-sized bag, and depending on your appetite, would be fairly easy to finish in one sitting, despite the bag saying the serving size is ⅓ of the package.
Ube Tea Cookies
For anyone unfamiliar with it, ube is purple yam, originating from the Philippines. These bite-sized shortbread cookies coated in powdered sugar with a purple interior are quite delicious, even though they do not taste much like ube at all. They are very light, with a satisfying crunch and a slight sweetness. Despite having an underwhelming taste, these tea cookies are overall enjoyable, and would pair well with a warm drink. Take caution, however, because these treats contain almost every common allergen known to man, including milk, wheat, egg, soy, sesame, peanut, almond, coconut, macadamia nut, pecan, and walnut.
Dark Chocolate Watermelon Sticks
These chocolate-coated watermelon jellies are about as weird a textured snack gets. As the name suggests, the inside is sort of like a clear, watermelon-flavored jelly. The taste is not pleasant to most, but the aftertaste is as expected and not inherently bad. Whether you like these or not, it really depends on your personal taste and tolerance for weird textures.
Onion Confit Swirls
These crouton-textured, garlic-smelling crackers from France have a weird onion taste and a bad aftertaste. According to seriouseats.com, “Traditionally, confit simply refers to any sort of preserved food, whether it’s meat, fruit, or vegetables. This preservation takes place by slowly cooking food in a liquid that is inhospitable to bacterial growth.” The inspiration for Onion Confit Swirls originally came from the French pastry, Palmier cookies. The mini crackers have a palmier texture and a tang of sweet onions. The liking of these crackers depends on your individualized taste for onion and garlic.
Trader Joe’s is home to many more absurd snacks, as you have probably seen. Take this article as a call to action to try new things, even if they seem like they could be unpleasant at first. And don’t just try weird foods, try everything.
