BeanBoozled Assortment Directly From Jelly Belly.com!The Good: Interesting tastes, Good regular flavors, Novelty appeal.
The Bad: Absolutely disgusting flavors, Ridiculously expensive.
The Basics: Despite having some vile flavors that are very accurate to their disgusting promised potential, the Jelly Belly BeanBoozled Bean Assortment is not worth buying.
If you have not followed my regular food reviews, I have been on a health kick lately. As a result, I am much more likely to have things like Peeled Organics' Much-Ado-About-Mango (reviewed here!) around the house than Jelly Belly jelly beans. But, my wife got me the last few flavors of Jelly Belly jelly beans I needed for review for the recent holiday and the final one is the BeanBoozled Assortment. The health kick opening is not at all irrelevant; in trying the BeanBoozled Assortment with my wife, we might well have discovered the ultimate appetite suppressant. These flavors are so very vile that after my wife and I did a night of sampling them, we were nauseous well into the next morning.
The things I do for reviewing.
For those who might never have had Jelly Belly jelly beans, these are easily the best jelly beans on the planet, packing a lot of flavor into a very small size. Unlike most jelly beans which are only vaguely flavored and are more based on colors, Jelly Belly jelly beans have a wide variety of actual flavors, like the perfect Candy Cane Limited Edition, Apple Pie A La Mode, Our Strawberry Blonde or their signature flavor Buttered Popcorn.
Who might like the BeanBoozled Assortment of Jelly Bellys? I'm going with only people who want to manage their weight. These are truly that gross.
Basics
The BeanBoozled Assortment of Jelly Belly Jelly beans is a mix of twenty flavors of Jelly Bellys, half of which are unique to the assortment. The full assortment includes the unique flavors: Booger, Barf, Rotten Egg, Skunk Spray, Canned Dog Food, Baby Wipes, Pencil Shavings, Toothpaste, Moldy Cheese, and Centipede. Also, from the regular Jelly Belly assortment, the boxes of BeanBoozled Beans include:
Licorice
Chocolate Pudding
Juicy Pear
Coconut
Top Banana
Berry Blue
Peach
Caramel Corn
Strawberry Jam
Buttered Popcorn
The BeanBoozled Assortment of Jelly Bellys is a mix specifically designed around the game that comes within the box. BeanBoozled beans look like one another, so Skunk Spray and Licorice are cosmetically identical, as are Strawberry Jam and Centipede. The box comes with a spinner and the game is essentially one where you spin the spinner and whatever bean it lands on, you have to reach into the mix to pull out, hoping it is the traditional flavor, when it could be one of the gut-wrenchingly bad flavors.
This assortment is a collection of duds which, to be fair, is filled with beans that taste remarkably accurate for most of the flavor they intend to be. Jelly Belly jelly beans are approximately one half inch long by one quarter inch wide and they are roughly bean-shaped. The BeanBoozled Assortment of Jelly Bellys are only available, that I can find, in the 3.5 oz. box. That box comes with shockingly few beans relative to the box size. The plastic tray inside makes the approximately 100 beans in the box look small. And it is compared to the size of the packaging.
Ease Of Preparation
These are jelly beans, and the Beanboozled flavors is a very limited assortment. The number of beans varies wildly. Our assortment had only two bright yellow ones that could have been Top Banana or Pencil Shavings, while there were almost twenty of the Strawberry Jam/Centipede ones. As jelly beans, these are very simple to prepare; simply open the box and consume one by one. If you are playing the game, follow the directions and have something to spit the beans into. Half of the flavors truly are that vile.
Taste
I was eager to begin the experiment, so when my wife spun first and ended up not being able to keep the Centipede flavor in her mouth, I eagerly finished it for her. The Centipede flavor is earthy and tastes exactly like a centipede smells when you lift a rock on a wet day. There is a slightly sweet flavor before the taste turns to peat moss.
On my first spin, I felt "lucky" enough to get Licorice. The sweet flavor of the jelly bean washed over my tongue and after three seconds, I realized, I had made a horrible mistake. I had gotten the Skunk Spray Jelly Belly. After about four seconds, I was gagging because the scent and taste were identical to the smell of poor Mitzie when she was sprayed with a skunk. I blew my breath into Myah's face and she cringed back!
I had a similar experience with the Moldy Cheese flavor. Jelly Belly very cunningly retained a sweet scent for the outer shell, but when that shell is breached, the scent and taste are penetratingly that of putrid cheese. That flavor is distinctive and nauseating.
Then came Barf. Barf is a flavor my wife is absolutely convinced has been recently reworked because of customer complaints (including hers). As a result, it does not taste quite like vomit (which my wife was quite glad for - apparently the original runs of these beans did and would induce vomiting). Instead, this bean is sour and salty on the tongue. When broken open, this is deceptively sweet.
My wife kept getting Toothpaste next and that troubled me because there were so few of the bright blue beans in the assortment. I forewent the game to select from the remainders and was thrilled when I pulled Toothpaste! This bean tastes precisely like Colgate's Mint Gel toothpaste and this is a delightful flavor that ought to be mass produced as a regular part of the assortment when the gross-out fad ends and the BeanBoozled Assortment is put to rest.
We tried Rotten Egg next. This was arguably one of the most diverse tastes for a Jelly Belly as it is almost flavorless initially. It then becomes sickly sweet and at the height of the sweet portion, it becomes almost like vinegar before transforming horribly into a salty, dry taste that is more analogous to ginger root.
Canned Dog Food was another one that I leapt out of the game to try when we got down into very few brown beans left situation. On the last try, after four Chocolate Pudding beans, I pulled the doppleganger, which was very salty and meaty flavored. This, like Toothpaste, was not as terrible as the others in the assortment. This, however, is a good example of how erratic the assortment could be; we had twelve brown beans, only two of which were the gag flavor Canned Dog Food!
Baby Wipes, fortunately clean Baby Wipes, are - oddly enough - one of the worst of the assortment. After a deceptively neutral beginning, the flavor of baby wipes washes over the tongue and down the throat, staying there long, long after the rest of the bean is gone. This one is a huge appetite suppressant and in combination with skunk spray (which I would taste again when I burped) was enough to keep me off food for the better part of a night.
Finally, there was Booger, the disgusting finale to this assortment. Booger smelled like sinus infected mucus and I gagged at the thought of putting it in my mouth. Still, I did. This was the only bean in the assortment with a "tell." Unlike the Juicy Pear, which is entirely opaque, the Booger beans are the same color scheme, but are slightly translucent! The shell is sweet and almost becomes lemon-flavored when it is broken open. Unfortunately, it then becomes grossly chewy and becomes salty before losing all taste. When it becomes tasteless, it has a consistency like dehydrated rubber cement and this creates the booger sensation even more than the taste.
As for Pencil Shavings, that flavor remains a mystery to me; our box had two yellow beans, both of which were Top Banana!
Nutrition
Again, these are jelly beans and the BeanBoozled Assortment jelly beans are primarily made of sugar, corn syrup, and modified food starch. Jelly beans, even Jelly Belly jelly beans, are not a legitimate source of nutrition. These are a snack food, a dessert, and are in no way an adequate substitute for a real meal. A serving is listed at thirty-five beans, with each Jelly Belly jelly bean having approximately four calories. This means that in a single serving, there are 140 calories, which is 12% of your daily recommended intake.
The thing is, Jelly Belly jelly beans are not as bad as they could be in the nutrition area. They have no fat and no protein, but for those who have ever dated a Vegan, these are Vegan compliant because they contain no gelatin! Some Vegans consider the wax in the coating in the Jelly Belly jelly beans to be not Vegan compliant. I suppose it depends on just how strict a Vegan your Vegan is, if this matters at all. Generally, they are animal free! Jelly Belly jelly beans have only one percent of the daily sodium with 15 mg and they are gluten free!
Storage/Clean-up
Jelly Belly jelly beans have a shelf life of approximately one year and I have yet to run across a stale Jelly Belly, though some of the ones in the BeanBoozled Assortment will make it there if I don't unload them on some unsuspecting enemy before the end of the year. They remain freshest when they are kept in an airtight container (the cardboard box is sufficient if it is kept closed) and they ought to be kept in a cool environment. Storing them in hot places is likely to make the beans stick together and be gross. Kept in a cool, dry place, the beans retain their flavor perfectly.
As for cleanup, unless one allows the Jelly Belly to get hot to the point that the waxy coating on the bean melts, the dyes on these do not bleed or denature, so there is usually no cleanup necessary, not even washing one's hands after eating them (though several of these flavors are likely to make one want to wash their mouth out continually or brush their teeth several times after consuming them). I've never had BeanBoozled Jelly Bellys stain anything.
Overall
Ultimately, the BeanBoozled Assortment is a novelty assortment and it is only popular because of the hype. These are gross and not truly fit for extended human consumption. Outside one taste, these ought to be avoided at all costs. And given how expensive they are for such a small serving, that may be easily avoided by most.
For other Jelly Belly flavors reviewed by me, please check out:
Raspberry Jelly Bean Dips
Strawberry Jelly Bean Dips
Coconut Jelly Bean Dips
Objectively - 8/10
Practically - 0/10
For other food and drink reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!
© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
Case Of BeanBoozled Jelly Bellys from Jelly Belly.com!
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