Junk Food Nation, a good friend of mine, L— and her husband T—– moved away from DC earlier this year. I miss them both a lot – and we’ve kept in sporadic contact.  The last time I heard from them was probably at the very beginning of the summer.

So imagine my surprise last Friday night, when I got a text from L— out of the blue. It was close to midnight, and I was having some brews with some friends on a windy rooftop here in DC, when the following exchange occurred:

Miss you too, L

The Konami Code was a series of movements you did on a Nintendo controller –  most notably for the game Contra – in order to get full power ups and a slew of extra lives.  I grew up cheating my way through Konami video games using the Konami Code, just as every male my age who played on the original Nintendo did.  It was the only way to play old school Nintendo.

If there is a male out there who doesn’t know the Konami Code, its because (1) you’re younger than 25 years old, (2) you actually had a life and didn’t play video games all day.  Whatever – I played video games all the time and look how I turned out!  I write a blog about junk food.  Cough.

Miss you guys, L— and T—–!  Glad that Konami was able to bring us back together electronically, even for just a moment 😉  Today’s junk food: Barbeque Chex Mix!

The Money Shot

I really enjoy barbeque in real life.  BBQed meats are my FAVORITE.  But to be honest, my family didn’t eat a ton of barbeque growing up. Instead, for many years, my only exposure to barbeque flavor was standard barbeque potato chips. For the longest time, my only barbeque sauce knowledge consisted of McDonald’s BBQ sauce that McNuggets were dipped into.

Point being, while I love barbequed meats, I now know that BBQ sauce is more than just that ketchup-y sickly sweet stuff that was squeezed out of tiny packets.  Yet chip companies all across the board, for the most part, adhere to that flavor profile when flavoring their products. So when I saw Barbeque Chex Mix (new to me), I wanted to see how it held up.

Saucy!

The brush in the BBQ sauce is such a familiar barbeque image – I picture a large rack of ribs over a grill, and the grillmaster painting the ribs over and over again with beautifully mixed BBQ sauce.  Upon seeing this image, however, my stomach already began to turn. I’d had BBQ potato chips, so I knew what to expect there. And I knew what BBQ sauce tasted like on meat. But Chex Mix is essentially all wheat – and I’d never had just plain ol’ bread dipped in BBQ sauce.  That sounds foul. Skeeves me out just imagining it now.

More useless stuff included with the Chex

The usual suspects

Standard mixture of contents in this version of Chex Mix: pretzels, bagel chips, breadsticks, and of course Chex. At first glance, you can see some crystalline flavor embedded on the bagel chips, and the Chex have a fair bit of powder on them. The breadsticks and pretzels look pristinely clean, don’t they? That means they probably taste like dirt.

Bagel chips

I do like a good bagel chip, as usually it carries a good crunch and lots of flavor – after all, the surface of a bagel chip is covered in little cracks and pores, allowing the taste to bleed in and out.  Here, however, the bagel chip failed to deliver – it crunched well and had a slightly sweet flavor, but it did not taste distinctly barbeque at all.  Blech.

Breadstix and Pretzels: Flavor Haters

Um, are the breadsticks and pretzels even worth discussing?  They are clean as a whistle as if they actually REPEL flavor powder.  I crunched on both of them separately, and if you could believe it, they tasted even LESS like barbeque than the bagel chips.  In fact they tasted like nothing at all.  Double blech – this is what I like to call “filler.”  Otherwise known as “waste.”

Flavor-encrusted

Ah, the Chex – the only saving grace of this snack. Each hole and square millimeter of these Chex pieces was bursting with flavor. You can see how the flavor powder fills every crevice possible.

Still, what’s up with the general formula of this snack, General Mills?  A lot of flavorful Chex and then a bunch of other sh*t? I don’t like filler, GM, and if you’re going to put extra snacks in my Chex Mix, at least test out their ability to blend with the flavors.  Adding carbs for carbs sake is annoying.

And we haven’t even GOTTEN to the taste yet.  The Chex by themselves, when eaten, had that exact same sickly sweet taste that typical BBQ chips had…BBQ flavor, for sure, but more in the ketchup-y style. Almost sugary sweet.  The other snacks in the mix obviously tasted like nothing, so when I put it all together in a big mouthful, it was just a barbeque-y, sweet mess. I didn’t mind it initially, but after a while, I really didn’t enjoy the snack.

If you like the standard sweet BBQ taste that is common amongst chips, you’ll like this mix. I didn’t find anything great about it, unfortunately. Back to the drawing board, General Mills.

Sincerely, Junk Food Guy