Trader Joe's Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

Imagine how good you think the world's best banana-chocolate-chip muffin can be. Get it firmly in mind--the flavors, the textures. Got it?

Bingo! Now you know what this product is.

Yeah, they're that good.

But let us not pretend that this is some sort of health food. Each muffin has 410 calories, 18 grams of fat, and 35 grams of sugar. They're perfect for a nation with the motto, "Make America Fat Again."


Will I buy it again? 

I wish I could. But in reality, if I do, it will only be because of a massive failure of every one of my self-control mechanisms.

Trader Joe's Banana Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting

Pros: Strong banana flavor. Moist.

Cons: Too much frosting. Dense. Occasional weird blobs of something (not banana) scattered here and there.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Banana Bonanza Bread

I love this! Admittedly, the reason is primarily that I'm a sucker for banana, and this is so loaded with banana flavor that I can actually start tasting it before a forkful is in my mouth. Nina thought the texture was too "gummy," but I didn't. I ate half of the loaf by myself in one evening.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes.

Trader Joe's Banana Bread Mix

On the plus side, this is easy to make: blend the mix, eggs, oil, and water, and let it bake 40 minutes. Also, it comes out with a nice, moist texture.

On the minus side--and here we get into the unforgivable territory--it barely tastes like bananas at all. It's more vanilla than banana. Maybe this is the inevitable result of using banana powder instead of mashed-up real bananas, as in traditional recipes, but I find it unacceptable. I felt like doing my best Clara Peller imitation and shouting at the box, "Where's the banana?"


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Gone Bananas!

I've occasionally seen folks on Twitter rave about this product, more than seems justifiable from its description. It has made me roll my eyes. I mean, come one--it's banana slices dipped in chocolate. Sure, it's probably good, but it cannot be a transformative life experience.

OK, so maybe it's not a transformative life experience, but I will confess that I seriously underestimated how good it is. I love these things. Eating them straight out of the freezer, as the package sternly commands, makes them pretty amazing. One doesn't often encounter chocolate and banana together outside the realm of banana splits at the ice cream shop. Add to that the unusual texture imposed by eating them frozen, and you've got a surprisingly delightful dessert experience in store--and with zero work of preparation!

After Nina and I had each eaten a couple, she looked up at me and asked, "Are these going on your Top Ten list?"

Yes they are, my love. Yes they are.


Will I buy them again? 

Oh my yes.

Trader Joe's Dried Baby Bananas

Yesterday I interrupted our impromptu series of reviews of new products to present the comparison test of Trader Joe's three different kinds of dried bananas. I pushed up the publication of that piece in anticipation of today's review of the fourth TJ's dried-banana product, which has just hit the shelves for a mere $1.99.

Without really giving it much thought, I imagined that what was inside would be tiny, yellow banana slices--pretty much like the freeze-dried ones discussed yesterday, only smaller.

Boy, was I wrong.

When you open the bag, this is what you get:

They look like something I sifted out of my cat's litter box. They're sticky and glommed together as shown. It might be the single most unappealing-looking foodstuff I have ever purchased from Trader Joe's. Nina said they looked like mummified fingers. She is not wrong. For the first time since we've been doing this blog, she refused to even taste them, based solely on the disgusting appearance.

But looks can be deceiving, right? Don't judge a book by its sticky, turd-like cover, right?

So after taking a moment to steel myself for the horror of biting into King Tut's severed digits, I took a bite. More than one, in fact. I actually choked down three of these little monstrosities. Oh, the things I do for you people!

They do taste like bananas, though sweeter than your average one. But the texture is just revolting: Dense, chewy, sticky, oily. I really thought at first that they must be fried, but the list of ingredients shows nothing but dried bananas--no oil--so I guess the oiliness is what the fruit naturally produces when you dehydrate the life out of it.

This is just an unbelievably bad product. I literally cannot imagine what kind of person would choose this over any of the three dried-banana-chip items you could pick up from TJ's instead of this. (Donald Trump voters, maybe?)

I put the rest of them back in the bag, and will be returning them to the store for a refund. I think I should ask for, like, triple my money back as compensation for having to ingest these nuggets of nastiness.

Dried Baby Bananas, I banish you to my Bottom Ten list.


Will I buy it again? 

Away with your foolish question.

Nina's View

I did not refuse to taste them because of their appearance, which is indeed horrific. I refused to taste them because of the hideous odor that wafted out of the bag the moment Bob opened it. A pungent, powerful reeking smell, as of banana-scented kerosene.

Je ne regrette rien. My tastebuds remain unbesmirched. 

Sometimes you just have to say no and mean it.

Trader Joe's dried banana slices

We've been presenting a bunch of brand-new Trader Joe's products in recent days, and there are more to come after this brief pause. But I needed to move this post up in the queue for reasons that will become apparent tomorrow.



Trader Joe's now sells three different varieties of dried bananas. The one pictured at the top I reviewed here. The other two were new to me.

The first two--regular and organic--are very similar. I had to go back and forth between them a few times before I started homing in on the differences.

The regular is a little sweeter and has more banana flavor. However, looking at the ingredients lists, I conclude that that extra banana flavor is added in processing, not intrinsic to the underlying fruit. I sufficiently confirmed this suspicion to myself by discovering that I could basically lick it off. It's a coating which, after being removed, leaves the chips tasting pretty much like the organic ones, which lack that treatment.

So I should prefer the organic, right? The thing is, I don't. I like that little extra flavor and sweetness, even when I know that it's something they've either sprayed on or dipped the chips in. I also found the organic slices to be harder and tougher, more difficult to bite into. If you think you'd like super-crunchy dried banana slices, go for the organic version. But I don't like that quality.

So for both taste and texture, I prefer the non-organic variety. It has the added advantage of being cheaper.

As for the freeze-dried, well, that's a whole different animal. You really have to try them to appreciate how radically different they are from the other two items. There's zero oiliness, zero moisture. (The others have a bit of both.) They are dry like Death Valley. But as soon as you pop one into your mouth, it transforms.

Upon first trying them, Nina exclaimed, "They reconstitute in your mouth!" My experience is not that, exactly. Sometimes they do--but I found that with just a little pressure between the tongue and roof of the mouth, they don't so much reconstitute as disintegrate.

But either way, you definitely get a powerful burst of banana flavor unlocked basically all at once, in a fireworks-like burst. There's no chewing of these; they're fragile and they fall apart.

Do I like them? Yes and no. I find myself going back and forth. As I said, they release a more intense banana flavor than the others, hands down. But it's not quite the banana flavor I expect after a lifetime of eating bananas. This is probably because we're used to what is essentially a monoculture of commercially available bananas, with one varietal having been selected decades ago for American consumption, and all the others neglected. Trader Joe's says on the package that they're using an uncommon variety for the freeze-dried product, selected for its super-sweetness.

I also find the reconstitution/disintegration mouthfeel a little off-putting. It's just odd, and I haven't gotten used to it, even after eating nearly an entire bag of these things--all except for the few that Nina had. It limits how many I want to eat, whereas with the more conventional chips I'll munch happily until I'm full.

The freeze-dried ones are, then, for me both better and worse than the more conventional products. Unless you absolutely hate bananas, you should probably try them once, just for the novelty of the experience. But ultimately I think I would choose the plainest, cheapest of the three for my snacking.

And what I said about that product when I originally reviewed it remains true: None of them are as good as simply eating a banana (which TJ's will sell you, famously, for just 19 cents apiece).


Will I buy it again? 

The original, occasionally. The organic and freeze-dried, probably not.

Nina's View

The freeze-dried bananas are a freakin' revelation. As Bob has so thunder-stealingly revealed, I did describe this as reconstituting themselves in your mouth. It is a very surprising and, to my mind, quite awesome experience.

I will really never bother with the other dried bananas, because they are exceedingly meh—stale, overly sweet, mealy, and not very bananalike, like every other banana chip I've ever had. I like regular bananas. And with the freeze-dried chips you get regular bananas minus the water. All the flavor, none of the spoilage: great for on-the-go portability.

Give them a try.

Trader Joe's Apple Banana Fruit Sauce Crushers

This is hands-down the worst applesauce I have ever eaten. It is mushed so fine that its mouth-feel is that of baby food--no longer a puree, but a thickened liquid. The banana part tastes as if synthetic chemicals, rather than actual banana, have been added for flavoring. (That isn't actually so, but that's how artificial it tastes.) The pouches are an absurd way to deliver applesauce, besides being ridiculously unecologically sound.

I get that it's meant for kids, not adults. But this is not what you should be teaching your children to expect from applesauce.

It's one of the most appallingly bad products I've bought from Trader Joe's. It's a shoo-in to the Bottom Ten list.

Will I buy it again? 

No--nor any of the other three (I think) similar versions with different fruit combinations. If they were even mediocre, I might try the others just for the sake of broadening the scope of these blog reviews. But that's not sufficient motivation to get me to spend more money on something this wretched.

Trader Joe's Organic Orange Strawberry Banana Juice

Here's a quick quiz to help you figure out whether you're ready to make it as a purveyor of specialty grocery items.

You have decided to introduce a product called "Organic Orange Strawberry Banana Juice." What should its ingredients be? Choose as many as you think appropriate.

A. Orange.

B. Apple.

C. Grape.

D. Pineapple.

E. Strawberry.

F. Banana.

Did you select A, E, and F? Ha! You fool! You'll never make it in the business. At least you won't get a job as a product developer at Trader Joe's.

You see, at Trader Joe's, they understand that orange-strawberry-banana juice should actually contain more apple, grape, and pineapple juice than strawberry or banana. That's why the ingredients are listed, from most to least, in the order shown above. Why? Probably because apple, grape, and pineapple are cheaper than strawberry and banana, and as long as the resulting blend is vaguely fruity, the stupid American consumer will never notice the difference.

Well, this stupid American consumer did. There is no difficulty tasting orange and banana here, but I defy anybody to drink a glass of this--without knowing its name--and identify strawberry as a principal ingredient.

Worse, the ingredients that one does taste are generic, to the point of being uncertain whether they're real. Sure, there's something orangey here, but I was left furrowing my brow and wondering whether I was tasting actual orange juice or some unknown liquid that had been chemically enhanced to resemble orange juice. Same with the banana. They are about as far from tasting like fresh-squeezed fruit as they can get and still be identifiable as orange and banana.

The result is not undrinkably horrid. But stop for a minute, close your eyes, call to mind what a really good orange tastes like to eat.

Now a strawberry.

Now a banana.

Got it?

OK, now imagine those three being released on your taste buds all at once.

Do you have that sensory experience firmly in your imagination?

Great. Now take a swig of this TJ's blend, and see how it compares. I promise you, there is no emotional state possible from this experiment other than grave disappointment.

Will I buy it again? 

No. I would buy in a heartbeat a carton of actual high-quality juices from these three fruits. But that is so not what this stuff is.

Nina's View

Yet another TJ's juice blend FAIL. It certainly seems like a triumph of hope over experience that Bob keeps buying and bringing these concoctions home.

The worst thing about this juice, even worse than the incredible vanishing strawberry, is the nasty, almost chemical taste of the banana contribution.

I took three sips of this juice—each time but one saying to myself "Ick. It can't actually be this bad, can it? Let me try again." I then turned the remainder of my glass over to Bob. I see no reason to ever insult my tastebuds with this stuff again.