Korean Snacks (With Love from Korea)

Having a pen pal to learn a new language is a convenient way of practising it in use, as well as a means to make friends. Diligent Sis#2, endeavouring to master the Korean language, took this to heart, and, through a mutual friend, got in touch with a student in Korea online, and began to exchange texts and emails - and, after some months of correspondence and gradually learning not only the language but also the culture, came to an agreement to mail each other local treats and snacks from their country.

Any food exchange, in my opinion, is fantastic. I consider food and meals to be the best way to learn of other cultures and how they live, perhaps less so in the way of snacks, but even cheap, processed food can give insight to pop culture and ideals of convenience. So following a gathering of various Kiwi snackfoods, she shipped the box over, and in return, received a box larger than anticipated.

I was excited. Asian snacks have always appealed to me as they are often not too sweet and vary more in flavours and ingredients to suit the palate of locals and make use of their resources (leading to a few interesting products). Clearly, I'm a big fan of Japanese snacks, and perhaps even more so, Filipino snackfoods for some of their strange ideas and surprisingly good variety - but perhaps we'll save that for another time.

With regards to the Korean carepackage, we were not disappointed. A majority of the snacks sent over were chips, though some sweets, cup noodles, and a curry mix, were included in the selection. These we worked through slowly over the next couple of weeks, and gave us a newfound love of Korean snacks, including their flavours and their cute itty bitty little individual packs.

CHIPS

 

100% Sliced Real Potato
Original and Onion
As a person who doesn't frequently eat chips, these were pleasantly delicate in flavour, and not too salty as expected from many brands in New Zealand. Though not incredibly impressive, they were nice.

Crazy for Nacho flavour

Mexican flavour

Original flavour

Nacho Chips
These were a little saltier than the potato chips, and tasted generally of corn chips with nacho cheese flavour. The Crazy for Nacho flavour also had a strange hint of wasabi or horseradish, and the Mexican flavour had distinct hints of Mexican seasoning but with no other particularly interesting qualities.

Wacky Potatoes (Gratin flavour)
Perhaps the name of this product was lost in translation, but with limited knowledge and Google Translate, we can only get so far. This was one of the most interesting products of the bunch, because the chips themselves were shaped like French fries, only they were hollow in the middle! Presumably unseasoned, they tasted very strongly of potato, like the fluffy interior of hot chips, but with the crispy texture of chips. They were great!

Fried Peppers Potato Chips
The packaging was very misleading when it came to the flavour. We had expected notorious, Korean-level, hair-raising, tongue-burning spice, but it turned out sweet, like a capsicum or red bell pepper relish. This was by far the best chip product, and I only wish we'd gotten more.

SWEETS

Red Bean Jelly

This was the first sweet product that we tried, making use of a typical East-Asian product. I personally love red beans, and while I was keen to eat it I couldn't help laughing at the description sent over to us that our sender "didn't really like it", but wanted us to try it anyway. I ended up greatly enjoying it, despite it being quite sweet.

Strawberry Yoghurt Chocolate

These were so good! The chocolate tasted pretty high-quality, with the strawberry interior being typical strawberry-snack-frosting flavour. These were savoured by the both of us.

Milk Chewing Candy
Written on the package is "I love it!", indicative of our sender's fondness of the products. A great milky texture, they were similar to New Zealand's milk bottle candies, only a bit more fluffy in texture like a marshmallow as compared to the denseness of milk bottles.

Sour and Sweet chewing candies
Not a huge fan of candies, I was surprised that I enjoyed these, possibly as they aren't as sweet as typical chewy lollies found in NZ. My sister was not so fond, due to a dislike of the sour flavour. The sourness was not overwhelming, however, which was pleasant.

NOODLES

Cupagetti (Chapagetti in a cup)
Chapagetti is an instant-noodle take on Korean chajang myun, noodles with a thick soybean sauce. I've always loved this noodle and the variations from other countries. Cupagetti was good in the sense of portion, but while the flavour was alright it did not do chajang myun justice enough. Nonetheless it was enjoyable as a convenient cup-noodle form.

Overall we were not disappointed. I hope to try more Korean snacks soon!