Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where we’re wrapping up our post from last week about our Universal Yum box from France, because no one said they didn’t want to hear about it, and I didn’t have time to watch 4 hours of cooking show over the weekend like I hoped I would.

For those of you who skipped last week but decided to keep reading…weird choice, but: I recently got involved in a monthly subscription of international snacks. The Box this month was France, my family and I ate (most of it), and last week we covered two types of chocolate truffles, a French Strawberry-flavored candy, some shortbread, a raspberry jelly roll, and some sour cola candy. The last of which took my mother 6 minutes to eat her tiny bar of, because she doesn’t like sour candies.

SO LET’S GET STARTED

CEMOI SeaSalt Chocolate Bar

You don’t know this, but this picture is setting up some dramatic irony.
Which is dramatically ironic for ME.

Mom: Wait, so you just had us eat something sour, and now we’re going back to Chocolate? What kind of dumb idea is that?

Jon: The Kind I STATED multiple times and no one objected to! You can’t not vote and then complain about the results!

Nate grunts in surprise

Mom: Is it bittersweet?

Nate: It is…something like that. It is DARK. Dark and Salty.

Mom: Oh, well you like dark chocolate, so that’s fine.

Jon: Guess what percent cacao this is.

Mom: (with surprising speed) 72%

Nate: Yeah, I can feel that. Low 70%.

Jon: Try 47%

There is much astonishment. For those lacking the context: Chocolate is measured by the percentage of cacao solids in the finished bar, with Milk Chocolate having around 10-20%, White chocolate having none, and Dark chocolate in general having at least 60%, and up to 100%. 47% is solidly in the “semi-sweet” category, aka “the go-to chocolate for chocolate chips”. This is an impressive dark flavor for such a low cacao percentage.

Nate: Hmm. I guess it smells a little lighter, but it tastes dark. And the sea salt is a nice touch.

I personally like it: it’s got a nice smooth mouthfeel, and it’s got a nice level of sweetness.  

Tête Brulées

Candy wrappers look much the same regardless of country.

Earlier, we had the the Tête Brulées sour cola bars, but they also have these flavored balls. There are three flavors available, split frustratingly into 4 candies: we have 1 tropical flavor, 1 peach, and 2 sour cola. I try to cut up the candies so I can try both the peach and the tropical, while Nate volunteers to take another sour cola, but I discover that the soft texture of the candy, already moderately difficult to cut, also is built around a gap filled with sour gel, so there’s reasonable way to cut them without making a mess. Thus, I take the Tropical, and my mother gets the Peach.

Mother, having already endured the Sour Cola, cautiously licks the candy in darting motions, as if afraid it will bite her.

I’ve already popped in my ball and started chewing. The flavor is nice, in a relatively generic “tropical” candy flavor way. A little like Tropical gushers. I think it works. The gel inside is definitely where most of the sour is, which I note out loud.

Nate: Yeah, the inside is much more intense than the bar was. The candy of this is delicious, but the goo is a little much for me.

After a couple more seconds of caution, mother starts chewing the candy, confident it is dead. She immediately regrets the decision.

Mom: (flinching from the sour) Oh my god. 

Sea Salt Butter Caramels

Editor’s Note: Apparently, Jon forgot to take a picture of the caramels, and ate them all before making this discovery. In his defense, they looked like normal caramels. We apologize for his foolishness.

Apparently, Salted Caramel was invented in France in the 1990’s, and these caramels are from the company that first made it. Also, apparently THIS is when my mother decided to ignore the backstory of the villain of the show she’s watching, instead skipping several minutes ahead, and becoming interested that he was wearing an red ascot with sweater-wearing-Scottie-Terriers as the design. From what I gathered, this was an episode about the Royal family of Korea being kidnapped to force the King to abdicate, and rather than learn WHY the villain did that, she was busy admiring his neckwear. My family may be part Magpie. (In her defense, we all thought it was a fine ascot.)

It’s a bold choice to wear while blackmailing a king to his face.

Nate: This Caramel is good.

It is. It’s more buttery than American caramels, but overall quite nice.

Mother had nothing to add because of the aforementioned ascot diversion.

Which marked the end of our Desserts! The company that makes the boxes has a system of grading the snacks of “first best, second best, weirdest, and worst”, so I put my family’s preferences to the test, with the acknowledgement that we still had 3 snacks to go.

Nate

The First best is the Blue Truffles. Hands down, no question.

Second best are…the Fraisoo Bool. Maybe the Sour Cola, but I’m going to put those in Weird.

And Worst, also no contest, the Almond Truffles.

Mom

I liked the blue truffle best too.  I liked the almond truffles second best, because I just like chocolate. Weirdest was the Cola Bar, and worst was the peach ball, because it was too sour.

Jon

I like sour things, so I liked the Tropical sour best, I think. I can’t explain why, but it was just like, the perfect “sour, but not too sour”. I’ll give the blue truffles the second best, because those were fantastic. Weirdest…I mean, it’s gotta be sour Cola. And I’m going to give worst to the Shortbread, but in a “B- in a room full of As” sense.

We all resolve to try and remember these opinions for when we eat the chips, which doesn’t happen until Sunday afternoon, thanks to my weekend being full of plays and helping someone move.

THE SAVORY CHIP SNACKS 

Jura Chips

There’s so much French to read on this French bag!

Nate grabs the bag, and attempts to read the French, to mixed results. Specifically, the bold text reads “with Cheese from…

Nate: I don’t know that name.

And well he shouldn’t: Jura is a DEPARTMENT in France, which, for context, basically puts it on the same level of a County in America: it’s not like, a specific town, but it’s not as big as a state. In fact, Jura is about as big as the county my college was in. Meanwhile, Nate has eaten his first chips.

Nate: Whoa. That’s a trip.

Mom eyes the chip bag suspiciously.

Nate: It has a very strong initial cheese flavor that falls off very quickly.

Mom: What Cheese flavor is this?

Jon: Comte.

Mom: What’s that?

Jon: …A cheese? How do you want me to answer that?

Mom: Smart ass.

Jon: I mean, I’m pretty sure we have some in the fridge, right now.

Nate: it tastes like a mild Parmesan.

It does. Comte in its full form tastes a lot like Gruyere. There’s some kind of floral herb thing going on in the back end.

Mom: I could eat a whole bag of these while watching TV. Nothing wrong with them.

Grignoter

Could I have held the bag better? Maybe.
But I needed to protect you all from the Hulk-Mouse.

According to the info packet, the name of these “chips” literally translates to “Nibble Tubes”, and in France it would be eaten as part of aperitif, a pre-dinner time to hang out with your friends/guests, have a glass or two of wine or light cocktails, and eat some salty no-cook snacks. Things like chips, cheese, charcuterie (sliced meats like salami, prosciutto, etc). It’s basically the French equivalent of the Cocktail Hour in America, or like a more informal appetizer course. (ie, you wouldn’t eat it at the dinner table, but off the kitchen island/coffee table, or grabbing it from the table and walking around)

I put chips in quotes earlier, because these are ridged corn-flour tubes, meaning they are most comprehensible to Americans as …

Nate: Oh, these are basically Bugles.

Jon: They don’t smell as strongly as the first chips.

Nate: Yeah, they don’t taste like real cheese. Like, a semi-refined fake cheese. (According to the packaging, it’s made with real cheese, as part of a “cheese powder”.)

Mom and Nate spent a little while debating the KIND of fake cheese they felt it tasted like (“like Nacho cheese, or like Cheddar Sour Cream chips?”) And…honestly, they’re fine? Like, Nate’s not wrong, the cheese powder is fairly faint and doesn’t really come across as ‘real’, which might be because it’s a variety of cheese we’re not familiar with, or because it’s a blend of cheeses, I don’t know. They aren’t bad, but they’re also not very impressive.  

Vinegar Chips

All of these bags are super crinkly. Is that a France thing, or an international shipping thing?

As a note: I do not like straight-up Salt and Vinegar chips, so I am not expecting to like these.

Nate: I like Salt and Vinegar chips, so I am expecting to like these.

We try them. The vinegar flavor is MUCH less sharp than in American vinegar chips. Like, there’s a tang, but it’s not as “high” as normal. I like these more than most American vinegar chips.

Nate: I like our vinegar more.

Jon: Maybe it’s a different vinegar?

Mom: Is it a malt vinegar?

Nate: Absolutely not.

Jon: Maybe it’s red wine vinegar?

We then had a large argument about vinegars, and which we think it was. Looking at other country’s packaging of the chips, I think I’m right, but I could be wrong.

And those are all the snacks we had in our box.Our grades did not change at all after including the chips. The Jura chips almost pushed into my second best slot, but in general, the chips were all solid, but not spectacular, so they didn’t displace our favorites, or take the worst slot.

The Wrap Up

And that’s a look at a Universal Yums box. You can get smaller boxes with fewer things, or If you get the largest box, you’d have gotten a couple more things that sound really interesting to me, like Mustard and Honey chips and Mango Sichuan-Pepper Chocolate. Interestingly, our numbers are not lined up with the general populace: Universal Yums is saying that The “worst” thing in the box for most people were the Sea-Salt Caramels, the Weirdest was the Sea-Salt Chocolate (do people just not like Salt??), and the second best was the Raspberry Jelly Bar, with first place being the Fraisoo Bool.

And the meta-discussion of the boxes is very interesting to me, seeing how people respond to different ingredients. I also really like the booklet, which has about 14 pages, 5 of which (in our box) are dedicated to breaking down the snacks in the box, and the other 9 are full of trivia about France, and some little activities, identifying famous French novels, painters, etc. It’s a really fun little summary of French details, and could be a fun tool for helping kids or teens get some baseline cultural info about various countries.

As an adult, while I wasn’t super into the various little puzzles, they weren’t bad, and I really felt that there was a lot of interesting things conveyed through accident/implication from the boxes. For instance, the Jura chips have a Nutriscore, which is apparently a new-ish French system giving consumers a quick way to get a snapshot of a snack’s nutritional value, with a simple A to E grade. Or how the Cemoi Chocolate had a page explaining their Transparence system, which is an interesting take on a Fair Trade kind of system.

Though I think it says something funny about French priorities that “maintaining good flavor” was listed first, and “Ensuring quality of life for the growers” came last.

So, as we indicated in the first post, I’m personally pretty excited and happy with the first box, and we’ll see how I feel about the second, though I’ll probably mostly just talk about it on the Patreon, rather than eat up so much blog space, unless you all say you want to hear more. If you want to see those, you can back us on Patreon for $1 a month. The next box, covering Brazil, is scheduled to arrive next week on Wednesday, so we should get into that fairly soon.  

MONDAY:  NATE AND A FRIEND VOLUNTEERED TO MAKE IRISH STEW. DID IT GO WELL? TUNE IN TO FIND OUT.

THURSDAY: I REALLY HOPE I’LL HAVE FINISHED ONE OF THE COOKING SHOWS I’M TRYING TO WATCH.