Party Snack

Tong Garden

I always get nervous when I see a bag of salty treats marked with something vague like "party snacks" or anything with the word "party" in it. These "party" themed treats are often a mishmash of random salty treats with no balance whatsoever. There are inherent problems with mixing random salty snacks together, and that more often leads to one crappy bag of snacks. These however might be one of the rare exceptions to the rule. I had my doubts opening up this bag, but frankly most of them went away.

The first problem with random party themed salty snacks is that the mixed bag of treats is only as good as its worst component. This problem often comes up when snack companies load up their "party snacks" with cheap filler. It's that one element that gets left behind if you pour a bowl of them out at a real party. These Party Snacks on the other hand didn't really have a weaker element. I can safely say that I enjoyed every single element separately or mixed together.

Which leads to the other problem this kind of snack often has, balance. Sometimes these kinds of snacks have stronger flavours in one element over another, a spicy dried pea might be much strong in flavour than a lightly salted peanut. Fortunately for these Party Snack did not have any imbalance at all. Each of the elements of this bag of snacks blended well together and no single ingredient dominated at all. Along with this comes the tendency to flavour this kind of snack blend with one overarching (often spicy) flavour. This is a sign that one snack's flavour dominated and needed to be balanced out. Seeing as this snack was from Thailand, I was really scared of the overly spicy potential, but it wasn't flavoured at all. The only added flavour was salt, and a little wasabi on some of the peas.

The one fault that this blend suffered from was separation. When you mix different snacks together, one element is often heavier than the other. This leads to some elements of the snack sinking to the bottom of the bag and others going to the top. You can fix this a bit, but it often settles back after a few handfuls. There were certain snacks that rose to the top, and some that sunk to the bottom. It wasn't the end of the world, but it was slightly annoying. I didn't even realise that this treat had dried beans in it until I got to my third handful.

This snack worked because someone thought about what they added to the mix. Size, flavour, and texture was all thought about when the blend was put together. It was nice to taste each of the elements both together and separately.