Snack #45- Rumba Maní Japonés Picante (Spicy Japanese Peanuts)

Rumba Maní Japonés Picante (Spicy Japanese Peanuts)

So these snacks are peanuts with a hard coating of something brown and presumably Japanese flavored. Upon first eating them, they tasted like peanut coated peanuts, and it was hard to distinguish any real flavoring in the coating. But, as one astute rater discovered, when they are sucked on before being chewed, it is possible to find the spicy flavor. It is spiciness without much flavor, though. And the heat starts coming in and seems as if it will continue to get very hot, but then fades back out after a few seconds. The ingredients say they have soy sauce in them, so maybe they are just coated in some crispy, somewhat sugary coating and then dipped in soy sauce at the very end. They are sweet and salty at the same time, it may even be that the coating is a mixture of sugar and soy sauce as they are both in the ingredients. These snacks were made in Costa Rica, which provides more support for the lack of true spicy snacks in Central America. Overall I have been fairly disappointed by most snacks’ claims to be hot, it is still fun to test them but they don’t compete with the caliber of snacks I am used to testing. Hopefully if I do some traveling around Costa Rica I can search for spicier snacks.

Rating on the Spice-O-Meter: 0/10 (1/10 if sucked on)
Bottom Line: Sugar and soy sauce covered peanuts. Subtle flavors.