"Copan" brand toasted bread snacks have been around for ages, but they haven't really lured me in. Part of the reason for this may be that I'm not sure where they fall on the snack continuum. They seem more like a form of a bread stick than a snack. It was just hard to get excited about something that looked like a flat crouton.
Today, I saw the 42 gram bag of Italian pizza flavor Copan and decided to finally dive in. It was only 98 yen (about a dollar), and the flavor sounded appealing enough. Maybe I was misplacing a craving for pizza.
The bag contains a lot of little 5 cm (2 in.) pieces of what look like slivers of French bread sliced from a tiny loaf. They smell like those jars of "pizza seasoning" you sometimes find in greasy pizza joints. The scent includes tomato, Parmesan cheese, oregano, and a hint of the distinctive yeastiness of bread.
These don't taste like pizza, but that's no surprise. It's unrealistic to expect a little dry bit of bread to be like pizza. What they do taste like is really nicely toasted French bread with a lot of good seasoning. The tomato and cheese flavor are especially present and fairly "real" tasting. There's a nice tanginess to them and a deep savory flavor that comes from adding in some chicken and shrimp flavors. The texture is perfectly crunchy and they are neither too dry nor too oily. Someone definitely did a good job with the toasting process.
Much to my surprise, I loved these. I ate the whole bag (all 230 calories of them) at once. Once you get started, it's really hard to stop eating them. I'd definitely buy these again, provided that I didn't mind consuming all those calories at once.
I buy these quite often.
ReplyDeleteMy favourite is the plain "butter toast" which really tastes good, and the "garlic bread", which was also very real tasting.