Thursday, November 27, 2008

236:365 up to 20% free

Anna: The girls and I were at the Italian grocery store again today, and we stumbled upon these.


Transilvania Puffs.

up to 20% free, it says. Free of what, it doesn't say at all...

Lightly Salted
No Preservatives

Not Fried. Low Fat.

And no flavour. LOL

They look like packing foam. When my elder daughter was about 3 years old, a company we dealt with switched to "environmentally friendly" packing foam made of wheat. Just wheat. No other ingredients. They looked kinda like this, except pale golden brown instead of yellow. When I opened the box with our order, the wheat smell wafted out, making the whole house smell like bread.

This stuff has no smell that I can determine.

The box with the wheat packing foam came with a slip of paper explaining the change and going on about how this stuff was so much better for the environment, and that it was even edible. Which was good, since I soon found my 3 yr old daughter sitting in the middle of it, gleefully eating them by the handful. They actually tasted quite good.

This stuff ... doesn't. Taste, that is. It has no taste. It's like eating air.

The ingredients are: degerminated corn meal, canola oil, and salt.

"This product is made under very high pressure, from degerminated (fatless) yellow corn meal. Not fried. No preservatives or additives." That part is repeated in French, Polish, what might be Italian, Russian, and something that looks similar to Polish, but isn't.

The funny thing is, on the nutritional facts label, the highest percentage is for sodium (18%).

But with a name like Transilvania Puffs, I had to get it at least once! Transylvania, by the way, is supposed to be spelled with a y. Or maybe that's just in English?

No where on the package does it say where they are actually made. There's a website. I have no idea what language it's in.

Well... we can at least say that we tried it...

3 comments:

AphotoAday said...

Yeah, that "up to 20% free" would bother me too...

Anonymous said...

Given that Transilvania is in Romania, the flag on the bottom of the website is a Romanian flag, I would guess that the language is Romanian, and they come from there.

FYI, I type this as I'm eating a Transilvania puff. They're pretty good, actually, though a little bland. They come in BBQ, Sweet, and Organic too.

Anonymous said...

Is the Romanian spelling for Transylvania and the mysterious language is Romanian, not Italian. The product is very popular in Romania and we call them 'pufuleti'.