Magnificent Maggi Muck!

In looking for some tasty and interesting treats for an extended road trip to Canada, I came across some sweet, no-cook porridge cups at an Asian market. The logical part of me screamed for me to stay away. The curious part of me was eager to discover whether it would taste just as bad as it looked and to subject my travelmates to this misadventure. As usual, my curiousity won the better of me. I chose two flavors: chocolate for my travelmate (you can't go tooo wrong with chocolate, right?) and coconut & corn flavour (ooh, sounds weird).

Fortunately for my travel companions, we never had the chance to try these out even though I brought along means to boil water. They were also lucky in that I was not successful at pawning it off on them either. See, they know better. I do too but I don't listen to myself. About a week after my return home, I had the munchies and decided to try one out. Let's go mundane and so chocolate it was.

But chocolate it wasn't. According to the ingredients, it was chocolate, but it was the most foul tasting, artificial chocolate wannabe flavour I've ever encountered. The overabundance of sugar (clearly, the source of energy as proclaimed on the packaging...just wait for that crash after the rush, right?) didn't help one bit. To top it all off, the texture of this fake rice porridge was chewy and just plain artificial. I had to do a doubletake to assure myself that I wasn't eating shredded styrofoam peanuts. I tossed it after forcing myself to eat 5 spoonfuls. I was hopeful that I merely had a bad first impression.

A few weeks later, I still haven't thrown out the other flavour and again, I have the munchies. I spy it out of the corner of my eye and decide to subject myself to more torture. This time, I didn't add as much water as the last version was incredibly watery. After the instructed 3 minutes had elapsed, I dug in! Ah, no better. That's not true. At least this coconut and corn flavor doesn't taste as disgusting as the chocolate. The artificiality of the coconut makes it taste like some coconut candies I've had. Unfortunately, due to the decreased amounts of liquid, this cup was at least twice as sweet. I only ate two bites. The second bite I just had to do in order to find the corn. I took a while of scooping around to get one kernel that looked as dehydrated as before the addition of boiling water.

When I subject myself to these instant meals/snacks in a cup, I wonder how it is possible that people would a) actually buy it b) buy it again and c) enjoy it. I've had some pretty awful (and not cheap!) ramen in a bowl that looked fancy and had many packets for the soup (more is better, right?) yet tasted worse than the 25 cent ones. Despite this, they remain on the supermarket shelves year after year here stateside. I can only imagine the shelves in Japan not only fully stocked, but stocked with other flavours and other brands that do an equally poor if not worse job. I shiver to think such horrid thoughts of malnutrition and tastebud torture.

To each his own, but this will be my last foray into Maggi's instant products...for now.