Product: Sour Marbels
Brand: Fruit-tella
Ingredients: Sugar, etc.
Straying from our general theme of savoury bites, here we have a tiny 5 rupee (about 3 cents) package of sours. Small, hard-shelled cylinders, I can make a quick parallel to north america's Sour Starburst candies, to which my friend Adam was once addicted on such a scale that if I caught him napping on the couch, I had honest suspicions that he had developed diabetes during the week and was in a coma. Taste-wise, nothing shocking on the sour-scale. These are boring, but I'm not sure 5 rupees goes a long way. As you were. 6/10
Product: Kara Chew
Brand: M.C.M. Sweets
Ingredients: Gram flour, salt, vegetable oil, cumin seeds, omam, gingelly, chillies, curry leaf, curry powder.
Representing a new initiative to stick with local brands after the unmitigated crap-show imported processed snacks have been, here we have something called Kara Chew. Neither the title, appearance nor ingredients list (gingelly? are those like jello shooters?) gives any hint as to what these might be like. Orange, twisty, irregular worms spotted with black seeds. Let's have a try. Wow. These actually smell delicious. Like an Indian Nan bakery. I am eating one of the snakes. . . Ouch! Oh my god. Ok, after the Makanan Ringan, and now these, is there something about the fortitude of Sri Lankan teeth that I'm unaware? These are tantamount to eating raw pasta. I'm not sure you could even describe them as crunchy. When does "crunchy" become "molar-shatteringly dense?" * cut to Sri Lankan denture adhesive commercial* "Now, with maximum strength Mantoothident, you can again enjoy your favourite foods, like corn on the cob, deep fried horse beans, and now, even Kara Chew." After managing to masticate a couple of these, they're actually not half bad. There's a nice paprika heat that lingers on your lips. I recommend finding someone cute with strong teeth, sharing a bag of these, and then having a radical makeout session. 6.5/10
Product: Casava Crisps
Brand: Black & Gold
Ingredients: Manioc, Chillies, Salt fried in veg oil.
These look like some oily kindergarden project of tiny cellophane stained glass windows with red glitter on top. I am beginning to see the ingredient trends in snacks here. Smells like. . . oil. Lots of oil. And they taste liiiiiiiike. . . . . cut up business cards soaked in oil and chili. Failing grade! I'm not sure what advantages slicing a Casava has over using the humble potato, as they're not a rarity here. My hands are totally greasy from eating two of these. This bag is a total fire hazard. I wish I had these around when our hibachi wouldn't light and we ended up using wood scraps from the alley and a whole bottle of fire starter and our chicken tasted like it had been basted in lamp oil. Miserable. 3/10
Product: Peanuts
Brand: Some kids in Galle with a cart
Ingredients: Guessing peanuts, curry leaves, salt, chili powder
I bought these from a cadre of young ruffians manning a snack cart in the main intersection of Galle fort. The pygmy nuts came inside a carefully constructed bag, made, without question, from someone's algebra homework from 2006 and glue. The optional addition of salt and and a teaspoonful of orange chili powder were added at request. Now if we assume y in this case represents deliciousness, and the assumed factor of charming was >100, this snack deserved better than it's owner's bright red C-minus.Tastes like math, but not the kind you drop out of in grade 10 because your teacher Mrs Andrews was an asshole. Delicious math. 9/10
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