Trader Joe's Reduced Fat Cheese Puffs

Shortest possible review: Ick.

Slightly longer review: They taste like stale cardboard coated with vaguely cheese-flavored sawdust.

Will I buy it again? 

Only if I'm lobotomized and therefore lose both my sense of taste and the memory of how nasty these things are. Gimme back my Cheetos Puffs!

Nina's View

This was a surprise. I expected to dislike these.

1. I am not a huge fan of cheese puffs to begin with. They are basically cheesy, salty, styrofoam-textured squiggles. I'm down with the cheesy and salty portions of the program, but the styrofoam texture has always left me kind of cold. The official brand name version of these additionally has a kind of rancidy cheese flavor which tends to pile up at the back of my throat.

2. I tend to approach any product labeled "reduced fat" with skepticism. Especially one whose whole livelihood (as it were) depends on mouthfeel. Mouthfeel is 97.3% carried by fat (that's a scientific fact I just made up). Reduce the fat, enfeeble the mouthfeel. (Another aphorism I just invented.)

The key to liking these—or at least not hating them—I found, was to not eat them in temporal proximity to anything else. Ok, maybe a glass of water, but that's it. Because their flavor is modest. They are demurely cheesy, and humbly salty. They have the classic styrofoam crunch. While I did not find them compulsively, addictively edible as I do some other snack items (*cough*CapeCodpotatochips*cough*), I did find them palatable, especially as they did not have the rancid, chemical, back-of-the-tongue paste thing going on.

Would I actually buy them myself? Nope.

Would I eat them if I were in the mood for a snack item and nothing I liked better were available? Mebbe.