This is day three of four, bringing you quickie reviews of brand-new products from Trader Joe's. UPDATE: We had another brand-new product last night, so this series will now be extended to five days!
I had never heard of muhammara until last week when somebody spotted this new product at Trader Joe's and tweeted a picture of it, asking, "What is this?"
Wikipedia helpfully informs me that muhammara is
a hot pepper dip originally from Aleppo, Syria, found in Levantine and Turkish cuisines.... The principal ingredients are usually fresh or dried
peppers, usually Aleppo
pepper, ground walnuts, breadcrumbs, and olive oil. It may also contain garlic,
salt, lemon juice, pomegranate molasses, and sometimes spices (e.g. cumin). It
may be garnished with mint leaves.
You can read TJ's own introduction to the product, including a full list of ingredients and nutritional information,
here.
I'm not a fan of walnuts, so I was somewhat leery of trying this, but I hoped and suspected that the other ingredients would be strong enough in flavor to make it not taste too walnuty (walnutty?).
I was correct in that surmise. It's actually quite sweet, and the dominant flavor is red pepper. In texture, it's denser, more viscous, and much more granular than hummus, to use the obvious point of comparison.
I don't like it as much as hummus, but I was pleasantly surprised. When faced with something so utterly alien to my food experience, my natural inclination is to assume it will be awful--especially when its main ingredient is something I already know I don't like. So it was a great relief to find that I could actually enjoy this. I've had it twice now--first as a pre-dinner appetizer on crackers, then as a late-night snack on tortilla chips. It seems to work fine both ways.
Will I buy it again?
Probably not--not because it's bad, but because I think I would always reach for hummus over muhammara. But I'm happy to have faced another completely unknown kind of food and have it turn out to be not so bad as I feared.
Update: I wrote the above a few days ago. Since then, I finished off the tub of it, and found that I liked it more each time. I think maybe it has even tipped into the
would buy again category.
Nina's View
This stuff is boring. It tastes mostly of sweet roasted red peppers, but
more in a tomato-pastey kind of way than in a zippy, flavorful red pepper sort
of way. It seriously needs some pep in its pepper. The walnuts and purported
pomegranate flavors are undetectable to my palate.
Zzzzz. Wake me when you have a product with some complexity and zip to the
dip.
