Glico Wasabi Pretz

Today, the "s" key on my keyboard stopped functioning. As I looked at my puny buffer of posts on this blog, I pondered how things have changed since I started it. When I first started this reviews blog, I often had a buffer of nearly 2 months. In fact, it was so large that I was worried that, by the time the posts appeared, some of the food would be off the market. Now, I'm lucky to have the next week covered. That means that having a keyboard that is out of commission actually might mean an interruption in posting.

To combat this dire turn of events, I fished around in the closet for an old PC keyboard that might work on my Mac Mini. Lo and behold, I found a Japanese USB keyboard which was insufferably awful but worked on a Mac. When I say it's "awful", I mean because the keys are oriented differently and there are extra keys. Also, it's like typing on an old typewriter in terms of the feedback and touch. So, if I make more mistakes in my blog posts than usual (quite a feat in and of itself), blame the fact that I'm working with a keyboard handicap.

It's my intense dedication to bringing you, my wonderful readers, a post every weekday that has me slaving away at substandard equipment. Fortunately, I have the kick of wasabi to fuel my fingers as they are forced to hammer extra hard at the chunky keys I am working with. That makes me think that there should be a product out there with a mascot called "super wasabi monkey" that eats horseradish snacks and becomes charged up. I guess that sounds too much like Popeye with his spinach, but, hey, monkey! He should wield a wasabi root, and wear an eyepatch.

Getting to the pretzels I'm here to review, I picked these up at Okashi no Marche super discount snack shop for a mere 50 yen (62 cents), marked down to about half of their usual price. This gets you two foil packets of about one ounce (27.5 grams) of green pretzels. If you snarf down a whole packet, you're putting away 137 calories.

The pretzels smell a bit funky, but they taste very good. They have just enough of a grassy, chlorophyll taste to add a savory depth, but not enough to make you feel like your chewing on a leaf stem. They burn the lips a bit, and build up a little  heat on the back of the tongue and nasal passages, but it's a little flare of heat that dissipates rather than builds up. That being said, the "kick" grows with every bite, but it never does the searing burn that chili peppers or jalepenos manage with prolonged consumption.

These are nice, flavorful pretzels with much more complexity than most. The thing which is rather neat about it is that they get that depth without resorting to piling on a ton of flavor powder. The pretzels themselves are crispy, but just a delivery mechanism for the flavor. They're lightly salted, but that works well with the wasabi. If you're a fan of wasabi otherwise, I think these will be a delight. I think they'd make a great movie viewing snack, but would recommend a beverage along with them to slow down the heat build-up.