The Good: Tastes good, Not unhealthy
The Bad: A lot of “filler” pieces, Not strongly flavored, Comparatively expensive.
The Basics: The bags of General Mills Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix I picked up were disappointing, but not really unhealthy.
I am ninety-nine percent sure that my wife does not worry seriously about me cheating on her. The reason I can be such an erratic spouse but be convinced that she does not worry (other than the fact that our love for one another precludes me cheating) about me having an affair is that it is virtually impossible for me to experience something without reviewing it. So, my wife knows that were I to have an affair, I would promptly blog about the hotel I had the affair in, the food we ate, the contraception we used and any movies we watched. Whenever I stray, it comes out in my blog pretty quickly. So, knowing that my wife might well be reading this, I confess first to my loyal readers that I slipped a little from my healthy diet the other day when I went out to the grocery store without my wife. There, I picked up Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix because it was on clearance at an irresistibly low price.
Ironically, my cheating turned out not to be much of a cheat. The Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix package boasts how the salty snack has 60% less fat than potato chips and it is, objectively, not the worst snack in the world. The real cheating came from the fact that I have not regularly kept to the recommending serving size and the truth is I have eaten all eight servings over the course of three days. Ahh . . .I was doing so well there for a while! Actually, the fact that the Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix is hardly the most robust Chex Mix as far as flavor goes is why the bag even lasted the full three days. With a good flavor, I’d eat all eight servings in a day!
Basics
Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix, for those who are not familiar with the idea of Chex Mix, is a blend of salty snacks with a flavored powder coating (in this case one that mimics sour cream and onion flavoring). General Mills has marketed their Chex Mix chip line as an alternative to potato chips and they have an extensive line or Chex Mixes both salty and sweet. The Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix definitely falls into the “salty” category. The Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix features a dusting of sour cream-flavored powder on some of the components. This particular Chex Mix contains corn, wheat and rice Chex cereal pieces, mini breadsticks, ring and grid mini-pretzels and pumpernickel bagel chips. Given that the pretzel pieces have no coating on them at all, they feel like filler and the fact that the bag I purchased has about a quarter of the mix filled with pretzels, that was a serious detraction to the mix.
Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix come in various sizes, but always in a bag. The size bag that I found was 8.75 oz. At a regular price in the $3.60 range, that seemed very overpriced to me.
Ease Of Preparation
Chex Mix Sour Cream & Onion are simple to enjoy; all you need do it open the bag and remove the pieces from it! There is no trick to eating Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix; they are a snack that is ready to go from the bag to the mouth.
Taste
Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix smell like a delightful mix of warm corn and tangy sour cream. The fact that it tastes like two different things sets one up for the taste exceptionally well.
The real issue with the Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix is that it is erratic in its execution. The pretzel pieces taste exactly like what they are, pretzels. They have minimal salt on them, which I actually like for my lower-sodium dieting attempts. However, General Mills did not add any of the Sour Cream & Onion powder to them. Given that a quarter of the bag was these pieces, that felt and tasted a lot like filler.
The pumpernickel chips were under-represented and underflavored. The pumpernickel chips are delightfully salty, but most of the ones I found in my bags had only one side treated with the sour cream and onion powder. That meant most of their flavor was their own.
That leaves the three types of Chex and the mini breadsticks. These are incredibly erratic on the tongue; about half were unflavored. That means, over half the bag’s worth of this snack does not taste like the promised flavor.
But the portion that does have flavor . . . mmmmmm! What Sour Cream & Onion flavoring there is tastes very much like a sour cream and onion potato chip. The flavor is tangy and what impressed me most is that the flavor lacks the overwhelmingly salty taste of potato chips. Instead, the consumer gets a slightly sour, mildly sweet treat that actually tastes like sour cream. Judging from the reactions after I ate these, they flavored my breath with sweet onion as well! I usually like things salty, but because this lacked an excessive salt flavor, the full range of the sweet and tangy sour cream flavor developed on my tastebuds for the portions that actually had the flavoring.
Nutrition
Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix are a fairly natural snack, though the ingredient list degenerates into a chemistry equation by the end of the listing. However, the primary ingredients are enriched flour, whole wheat and degermed yellow corn meal, most of which makes up the actual Chex pieces. This has a shelf life of at least half a year, so it's not a bad snack to stock up on . . . if you insist on stocking up on it despite it not being the most flavorful or interesting snack.
Each half-cup serving of Chex Mix Sour Cream & Onion has 120 calories, thirty-five of which come from fat. There is a single gram of dietary fiber. While there are only 4 grams of fat and 2 grams of protein, there is a significant 190 mg of sodium, which represents 8% of one's RDA of sodium. There is a smattering of Calcium and Iron, but no other vitamins or minerals. This is not a health snack. There is a dietary note that the Sour Cream & Onion includes wheat and milk ingredients, which prevents them from being Vegan compliant or considered Gluten-free.
Storage/Clean-up
Kept in their bag, Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix will remain fresh for about a year and as long as the bag is resealed, one suspects they will last for a few weeks before getting stale. I've never had to deal with issues of freshness for my Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix.
Cleanup is simple as well. Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix are a dry food and thus leave no mess behind. Because they are barely flavored, though, it is entirely probable that they will not even leave flavor powder on one’s hands. Regardless, when you finish with a serving, simply wash your hands, throw out the bag and cleanup is done!
Overall
Sour Cream & Onion Chex Mix are an insufficiently engaging salty snack for me to devote my attention or dollars to again. What was good was good (not extraordinary), but what was unflavored was mundane at best.
For other snack foods, check out my reviews of:
Special K Southwest Ranch Cracker Chips
Tostitos Hint Of Lime chips
Planters Flavor Grove Cocoa And Cinnamon Almonds
3/10
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© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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