The A.V. Club - Taste Test

TV: Taste Test:Tru Blood

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0500

It was meant to be—a product tie-in so perfect that there was really no way they couldn’t make it: HBO’s Tru Blood carbonated drink. For those who haven’t watched the series (or read the books), let me catch you up: There are lots of vampires. They live openly alongside mankind, thanks to the invention of Tru Blood, a synthetic that allows them to survive without feasting on the actual blood of humans or other animals. In the show, most vampires don’t seem to really like how Tru Blood tastes. They choke it down—most like ...

Features: Taste Test:Taste Test: Vio carbonated milk and Sprite Green

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Here at Taste Test Labs, the first question that often springs to mind when we’re faced with a new product is “Who is this being marketed toward?” In the case of Coca-Cola’s new Vio, a better question might be “Why did someone combine these ingredients?” Vio (the “I” on the bottle is upside-down, for extra quirk) is basically fizzy milk infused with tropical-inspired flavors. Thankfully, the fine people of Vio make their complicated case right on the side of their expensive ($2.25!) 8-ounce aluminum bottles. Apparently Vio seeks to “give your mind and body a fresh sensation ...

Features: Taste Test:Curry peanut butter, Chocolate-Chip Cookie peanut butter, and more

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com. “It’s hard to fuck up peanut butter.” That was one of the first things the Taste Test Lab technicians told us when we offered them a table covered with peanut-butter flavors from P.B.Loco. And they had a point. There are enough minor variations in peanut butters (how grainy, oily, or sugary they are ...

Features: Taste Test:KFC's Double Down Sandwich

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com. When I first heard about the oily monstrosity known as KFC’s Double Down sandwich, it seemed like a practical joke, or an Onion story that made it into the pop-culture bloodstream and was mistaken for fact. Surely even the sick fucks at Kentucky Fried Chicken, the mad scientists of fried poultry behind occasional A.V ...

Features: Taste Test:Gamer Grub and Mtn Dew Game Fuel

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The future, as you may have heard at my recent seminar, is all about niche marketing. There is no longer a single product that can reach every demographic—the chance of a new Coca-Cola coming along and gaining a market share of 40 percent or better is basically nil. We are Americans, and we want choice, even if that means choosing between two vitamins manufactured in the same facility and sold under different names at vastly different prices. “The illusion of choice,” wrote George Orwell, “eventually becomes actual choice.” (I actually just made that up.) So the smart money is ...

Features: Taste Test:Kool-Aid Pickles

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com. Ever since the earliest days of Taste Test, The A.V. Club Taste Test labs have been fielding the occasional e-mail from readers saying things like “I’ve heard pickles marinated in Kool-Aid are a popular regional treat in the South. You should Taste Test those!” Naturally, we here at the labs were far too clever ...

Features: Taste Test:Giant gummi bear race, pickled bologna, and the return/retirement of Chang

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

You wanted the Chang, you got the Chang. This week’s very special Taste Test offers three doses of the Internet Eating Sensation, and he has confirmed that it will be his last hurrah. Will he go out on top? (Or on the toilet?) We’ll find out with three very special videos. First up, we challenged Chang and ad-ops heartthrob Brett to a gummi bear eating contest. But these aren’t just any gummi bears—they’re giant gummi bears, supposedly the equivalent of 90 or so regular ones. That might not sound like a lot, but when you ...

Features: Taste Test:QBs crispy ice cream treats (also: Snickers Fudge)

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“There is nothing new under the sun.” That’s from the Bible! But what that good book fails to acknowledge is that there are a near-infinite number of combinations under the sun, so we don’t even need any new shit. You could safely argue that pretty much every combination worth a damn—especially in the food world—has already been done. Peanut butter and chocolate? Dozens of times, and done well. Ice-cream sandwich? So many ways, and so far, so good. The list goes on forever. It’s a wonder people even try anymore—they have to imagine that ...

Features: Taste Test:Strawberry And Creme Twinkies and Ho-Hos, plus dark chocolate wine-gels

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:00:00 -0500

When entertaining, you have to make certain choices. Low-end or gourmet? Brie or Cheez Whiz? Grey Goose or Smirnoff? Hand-dipped chocolate-covered strawberries, or Oreos still in the package? One way wins your friends’ respect and admiration; the other way leaves a lot more beer money lying around at the end of the party. Which is why we decided to do a Taste Test face-off of two possible desserts, at the far ends of the quality-vs.-economy spectrum. After all, cost isn’t the only decision metric involved. Maybe strawberry-crème Twinkies are far more delicious than anyone would expect. (The ...

Features: Taste Test:Plush Puffs flavored marshmallows

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s the problem with taste-testing marshmallows: They don’t really taste like anything. Essentially sugar and gelatin in fluffy pillow form, they’re more a textural experience than a taste experience. Which seems like a situation ripe for exploiting, perhaps by an ambitious California company called To Your Heart’s Content, which is manufacturing flavored marshmallows. And not just any flavored marshmallows: Plush Puffs are gourmet, organic, gluten-free marshmallows, sweetened with honey rather than corn syrup, and kinda pricey, at $6 for a four-ounce box. In other words, these aren’t marshmallows you should use to play competitive cram-marshmallows-into-your-mouth- ...

Features: Taste Test:Special: new fast-food roundup

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Veteran consumers of fast food have certain expectations—certain low expectations. At the start of every month, we expect fast-food chains to introduce new “limited time only” products, and by and large, we expect those products to re-combine ingredients that the restaurants already have on hand. We don’t expect that any new item will change our perception of fast food as cheap, inferior, and bad for our health—though we do appreciate the effort that the good people at the restaurants’ corporate offices put forth to foster the illusion of novelty. Few fast-food places have been more brazen about ...

Features: Taste Test:Bacon: the final frontier

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I was going to begin this piece by saying that yes, we know, you’re sick of bacon, and we’re sick of it, too. But that would be total bullshit, and I don’t think Taste Test readers want to be lied to. If you’re anything like us, you could eat bacon every day, and in almost any sort of configuration. By itself. With some eggs. On a BLT. Club sandwich. Crispy, chewy bacon adds wonderment to almost anything it touches, and we will eat it until we fall down, grasping our chests, sucking wind, and smiling. That ...

Features: Taste Test:Trying too hard: potato-chip edition

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:36:00 -0500

When did the simple, classic potato chip stop being enough for us? How long after George Crum deep-fried some thin potatoes for the first time to appease a pissy customer, way back in 1853, did someone think, “You know what’d be good on these? A bunch of powders approximating the taste of Mexican layer dip.” The food industry has spent the past 150 years, in particular the past 30 or so, basically reducing all manner of food into chip form. What would George Crum think, staring at the vast array of Pringles varieties? (Not to mention what he’d ...

Features: Taste Test:Banana ketchup, apple ketchup, and Goose Island sodas

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Ever wonder why Heinz carefully labels its ketchup bottles as “tomato ketchup”? Doesn’t that seem vaguely redundant, like mustard labeled as “mustard-seed mustard”? Well, apparently it isn’t. For one thing, ketchup made with tomatoes was a relatively late American innovation, a cheap new local-ingredients-based twist on a traditional sauce made primarily with mushrooms, or oysters, or (ugh) walnuts and anchovies. (At least one British manufacturer still makes and markets mushroom ketchup.) And for another thing, a friendly A.V. Club reader from the Philippines named Nicole recently informed us that a non-tomato ketchup is big in the Philippines ...

Features: Taste Test:Mega Chang Vs. Giant Toblerone

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:25:00 -0500

At this year's All Candy Expo, Kyle Ryan dropped his business card (hell yes, we have business cards!) in the fishbowl at the Toblerone booth, where they were offering a melted version of the segmented, triangular chocolate bar. A few weeks later, he received a big-ass box in the mail. It contained a 4.5kg Toblerone, the largest we'd ever seen. What would you do in this situation? We called Internet Eating Sensation Dave Chang out of semi-retirement and tasked him with eating the entire thing in one sitting. He insisted on the kamikaze headband. Some things to ...

Features: Taste Test:Bacon challengers

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:29:00 -0500

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com. Long ago, in the Precambrian Era of The A.V. Club, back in 2007 when Josh Modell hadn’t finished evolving from a giant ground sloth and the comment boards were slate blocks upon which readers carved “First!” with sharpened trilobite shells, we launched this Taste Test feature as a blog entry about Vosges’ “Mo’s ...

Features: Taste Test:Kettle Chips Challenge: “make your own flavor” kit

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

If I know anything about Americans, it’s that we’re fat, lazy assholes who want everything as quickly as possible, and in quantities larger than we should reasonably consume. (Do you know you can now buy pre-sliced frozen pizza? It’s true.) Even when we’re after gourmet chips, we want to be offered an entire store aisle filled with bright colors and flavor combinations our feeble brains would never come up with on their own. Kettle Chips, the Oregon natural-chip company, not only wants your help, it’s offering you a glimpse behind the potato-chip curtain. That’s ...

Features: Taste Test:Coconut & “strawberried peanut butter” M&M’s

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

When it comes down to it, there may be no more perfect candy than Mars’ M&M’s. Pile on all the caramel, nougat, toffee pieces, and flavor crystals you want to fancy up your candy, but nothing can beat the simple elegance of the M&M: chocolate, thin candy shell, the end. Legend has it that Forrest Mars Sr. got the idea for M&M’s watching soldiers eat pieces of melting chocolate during the Spanish Civil War. The candy shell helped prevent melting, hence the “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” tagline that arrived in 1954 ...

Features: Taste Test:Hibiscus tequila, Danny DeVito’s limoncello, and Japanese sperm liqueur

Tue, 26 May 2009 16:06:00 -0500

It isn’t often that a national joke becomes a commercial product. Usually, when celebrities get drunk or high and piss people off in public, they deny the incident—their publicists blame exhaustion, dehydration, or pain medication. (It’s pretty hard to market those as luxury items for starfuckers.) Failing that, they generally don’t release enthusiastic recommendations for the vice-of-choice that put them before the public’s condemning eye: Imagine Mel Gibson hawking Cazadores Tequila after his “What are you looking at, sugartits?” drunken tirade, or Shia LaBeouf doing ads for whatever he was drinking/smoking when he got ...

Features: Taste Test:Chelada

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:07:00 -0500

Over the past year or so, Budweiser Chelada has become the white whale of The A.V. Club’s weekly Taste Test. The clam-juice-and-beer concoction has been on our radar for some time now, and many of you have posted comments or sent e-mail demanding that we try it. But for some reason, we could never seem to find this mythical beer in the wild. (Granted, we weren’t looking that hard.) Two separate trips to Binny’s, a Chicago-area booze emporium, yielded no Chelada, though they did result in two other taste test subjects, Pizza Beer and Pomegranate-Raspberry Michelob ...