Friday, March 6, 2015

Trader Joe's Rosemary Italian Style Crackers



These are very nice crackers. In basic taste and texture, they're rather like saltines, but infused with a subtle smell and taste of herbs. Lovely.

Where they differ from saltines is in size. I never knew crackers came this big. They're about the size of a brick--a very flat brick. (Actual measurement: 4 x 7 1/2 inches.) This presents a couple of problems. First, they get broken in the package. Nina and I have had these twice now, and both packages had several crackers broken in multiple places before even taking them out. In the store, several boxes had the front cracker badly broken. I avoided those, but found broken ones behind the intact front one when I opened the package at home.



The second problem is that they don't fracture cleanly or where you want them to. There are no perforations. You're kind of on your own to try to reduce them to more manageable chunks. Then, if you're using them as a vehicle for slices of cheese, as I have been, you have to cut those slices to match the cracker fragments. It's all much less than ideal.

If TJ's reformulated them as something like "Mini Rosemary Crackers," about the size of ordinary saltines, I would be enthusiastic about them. As they are, I'm not eager to buy more, just because of the hassles involved in getting them from box to mouth. I realize this is very deeply into the category of "first world problems," but it also seems to me one that could easily be solved by the manufacturer.

Will I buy it again? 

Yes, though not as often as I would if they fixed the problems of size and breakage.


Nina's View

I love these so much I don't care that they break in inconvenient places. I can easily eat an entire box in a single sitting.

I believe Bob to be entirely incorrect in his description of these as being like saltines in texture. They are nothing like saltines. Saltines have a sort of interior flakiness to them that these do not have at all. They much more closely resemble matzoh.

So good. Must run out and get more.


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