Lemon Rings

Brand: Obachan’s

Cost: $3.59

Found at: Foodland

These are … a lot. 

Texture-wise there is nothing to criticize. The lemon slices are perfectly dried and pleasingly chewy. Flavor-wise, however, it’s hard to know where to start. 

Frankly, my tongue could barely make sense of the experience. On first popping one into my mouth, my brain just shorted out. Instead of a clear, familiar taste impression, my mouth sent a jumble of intense and disorganized flavor signals that my brain was totally unable to unpack. It took several tries to come close to understanding exactly what was happening, and I’m still not totally confident. 

At first, the salt hits you, and it hits hard. There is a lot of salt happening and it just keeps happening. As you chew (and wonder how much salt is too much salt) you also start to taste some tartness from the lemon which gives the whole experience a distinctly pickley. Just when you feel like giving up and spitting it out, you’re confronted with the first flavor which is definitively pleasant: the sweet taste of a lemondrop. It’s a lovely, refreshing flavor, balanced nicely with the salt, that just keeps getting more and more pleasant until you forget all about the initial sodium storm. You convince yourself that these snacks are actually delightful and delicious and that your initial experience was just your brain adjusting to a new flavor. Then you eat another one and feel like you’ve just stuck your tongue in the ocean. 

Honestly, it’s masochistic.

The whole experience is a lot like that of the Japanese dried, salted plums: somewhere between “dried fruit for adults” and “fruit leather that has issues with authority.” I’m not saying that it’s bad, per se… I just wouldn’t mind if this particular brand was just a little less generous on the salt. Island living may have lowered my blood pressure… but not that much.