Trader Joe's Low Calorie Cranberry Juice Cocktail

Cranberry juice, all by itself, is pretty stern stuff. The tartness is more than most people like. So juice manufacturers rarely sell it straight; they make it into cran-apple, cran-grape, cran-raspberry, and other similar blends. Or, less overtly, they quietly mix in some blend of sugar or apple or grape juice as sweeteners, and sell it as "cranberry juice cocktail."

Trader Joe's here has an interesting twist on the latter formula. They've taken cranberry juice (from concentrate, reconstituted with water), and added fructose (the principal form of sugar found in most fruits) and stevia.

The result produces a somewhat unusual and unexpected mix of experiences. The cranberry flavor seems both full and natural. But it lacks almost all of the tartness usually expected with straight cranberry juice. The sweeteners have been added to a level that they dampen the tartness almost into oblivion, yet don't make the result taste flagrantly sweetened.

Part of the dampening effect is probably due to nothing more complicated than dilution. The label says that this blend is 34% juice. I don't think that means that the cranberry juice concentrate has been reconstituted with roughly 2:1 water. I think it means that nearly two-thirds of the contents is water above and beyond what was needed to reconstitute the concentrate.

I found the overall result a bit disconcerting and distracting. When I'm drinking a more typical cranberry blend, I understand that the cranberry tartness has been eradicated by either the sugar or the other fruit juices, so it makes sense. But here, it tastes like only cranberries, yet without the expected tartness AND without the obvious sugar to explain its absence. It's kind of as if you bit into a lemon, and found all the expected lemon flavor, but it was somehow magically not sour. Not unpleasant, but unfamiliar--maybe even disorienting.

I've finished off this large bottle of the stuff, and still remain kind of conflicted about it. It's nice to have cranberry juice all by itself instead of a cran-X blend, without having it sugared up to within an inch of its life. But at the same time, it felt like, I dunno, sort of cheating somehow, like something was missing--specifically the tartness. Without it, cranberry juice feels incomplete. I guess I'm an oddball in that I kind of like the put-hair-on-your-chest tartness of straight-up cranberry. If I'm going to have cranberry juice unmixed with some other fruit juice, well then, give it to me pure, raw, strong, and bold. I can handle it.

Will I buy it again? 

I'm not sure.

Nina's View

This is a perfectly good cranberry-ish juice. Bob's right, it is less tart that your typical cranberry juice cocktail. But it's also substantially less sweet and has a lower calorie load. To me, this is an acceptable trade-off. I consider this quite drinkable as is, but less useful as a mixer.

Trader Joe's Comte Cheese

This was another unplanned, nearly arbitrary cheese selection. The sign next to this said that it was the French equivalent of Gruyere, which I love, so it seemed an easy win.

And it was. I'd be happy to have this in my refrigerator anytime. However, its flavor is considerably less intense than what I remember of Gruyere.

This may be the most perfectly slicing cheese I've ever had. You can slice it as thin as the sharpness of your knife and your manual dexterity allow, and it will never crumble.

Oh, and the old copy editor in me nearly blew a fuse when I noticed the apostrophe usage on the label:

"Cow's" as a plural? Really, Trader Joe's? If you're going to do that, then why not at least be consistent, and make that bit in the center of the circle "from cow's not treated with rBST"?


Will I buy it again? 

It's ethically difficult for me to support with my purchasing power such an abomination of punctuation. But I liked the product inside the wrapper enough that I will pretend that it doesn't bother me.

Trader Joe's Mini Gingerbread Men Cookies

This item is not to be confused with one of a very similar name reviewed here. This is a bakery product, not boxed. Because of that, I expected these cookies to be better than the boxed ones. They're not. They're softer, but that's their only advantage. The boxed version is more intensely gingery and has a better proportion of icing. I also think these bakery cookies are too large to be called "mini."

They're certainly not terrible. I ate them all, and my worst thought was only that they were not as good as they could and should be.

Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Dried Berry Medley

I have mixed opinions about this mix. The dried cherries are excellent--sweet and flavorful. I could eat them all day. The dried whole strawberries are a novel thing to me. They're pretty good, though they seem to lose a lot of their natural sweetness in the drying process. The blueberries are a disappointment. They're little blebs of slightly bitter chewiness with little to no blueberry flavor.

Still, on several occasions I found myself eating a lot more of this than I set out to do. I kept thinking, just a little more. Then a little more. And a little more after that. It was mainly the super-yummy cherries that kept me willing to eat the so-so strawberries and the sad blueberries to get to them.

I see that Trader Joe's sells bags of dried Bing cherries. I guess I'm going to have to try that next.

Will I buy it again? 

It depends. If the dried cherries alone are as good as the ones in this bag, then I think I would always choose that over this. But maybe they're different and not as good, in which case I may well come back for more of this medley.


Addendum 

This wasn't supposed to publish when it did. I meant to move it out of the queue to make room for the post about the gingerbread cookies, but apparently I forgot that step in the process. I didn't even notice that two posts went up at the same time until a couple of days later. Oh well. Might as well leave it now. I just add this note in case anybody wonders why a random day had two reviews instead of the usual one.

Trader Joe's Chocolate Lava Cakes

I've had a few lava cakes in restaurants, and have loved them. I was alerted to the fact that TJ's sold their own version by this enthusiastic review at the "Eat at Joe's" blog, and eagerly bought a box on my next shopping trip.

My experience, however, was markedly different from his. They are as chocolaty as the EAJ blog promises. But I just didn't much care for them. The chocolate tasted generic, commercial, mass-produced. The whole thing reminded me of a microwaved Hostess Ding Dong with a squirt of Hershey's syrup in the middle.

I could not bring myself to use words like "delicate" or "creamy," as the box does, nor "rich and intense," as EAJ does. The words that spring to my mind are more like "adequate," "tolerable," and "disappointing." I have no cogent explanation for why I found them so much less rewarding than EAJ did.

Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Asian pears

I don't think I had ever heard of "Asian pears" before coming across this promotion in TJ's "Fearless Flyer." It uses words like "enticing," "perfect," and "flavorful."

Those are not the words I would choose. I'd go with "hard," "dry," "tasteless," and even "inedible."

I'm generally reluctant to review produce items here, because there is so much variability that no sample may be representative--and I repeat that caveat here. In fact, I'm willing to grant that the two I bought probably are not representative, because if they were, nobody would ever buy them.

I peeled and cut into the first one just a couple of days after bringing them home. It was dry as a bone--like slicing into, I dunno, a tennis ball or something. Absolutely juiceless. And hard, maybe about the firmness of a raw carrot. I can't remember now whether I spat out the first bite, or gritted my teeth and swallowed it, but the rest of the fruit went straight into Nina's composting.

OK, I thought--I just had not allowed it to ripen sufficiently. My bad.

So I let the other one sit for another ten days or so. I was checking it for ripeness every day or two, using the same criteria I have learned for other pears. But when I told Nina that it seemed to be making no progress, she informed me that they don't ripen the same way. So I decided to go at it.

It peeled easily and at least showed some leakage of moisture while being peeled--a good sign. The firmness had gone down, too, but was still kind of like an apple, rather than the usual softness of other pear varieties. Unlike the first one, I had no difficulty chewing and swallowing the first bite, but like the first one, I had no reason to take a second. It completely lacked any sweetness or any fruitiness. If you took an apple and somehow removed its sugar and all taste of apple, this is what you'd be left with. I have no desire to eat such things, so the second Asian pear got tossed, too.

Will I buy it again? 

Maybe I screwed up. Maybe I bought two bad examples. Maybe I'm too uneducated in how to determine peak ripeness and in how to prepare the fruit. So maybe it's all my fault. But my first two experiences were so terrible that I'm not tempted to repeat them, unless somebody presents me with some powerfully persuasive reason to believe that my next experience would be one helluva lot better.

Nina's View

In my opinion, Asian pears are and always have been a waste of cellulose and water. They are basically just sugar water with some texture and a vague hint of flavor. I have never understood why anyone prizes them—even in Asian cuisines where texture plays as big or bigger a part in food than flavor.

While I think these were probably sub-par samples, even the most exquisite Asian Pear holds no appeal for me. Begone, misbegotten "fruit," I will have none of you!

Roundup

My weekly compilation of news and other links related to Trader Joe's.


Navigating the crowds in New York City's Trader Joe's 

10 things I love about Trader Joe's 

Best and worst pumpkin products at Trader Joe's 

Trouble at Trader Joe's 

What is it about Trader Joe's? 

The Mad Bear goes to Trader Joe's (30-second video)



Another blog dedicated to reviewing Trader Joe's products has recently emerged: http://traderjoes411.weebly.com/. Plus, I stumbled across yet another Trader Joe's review blog that publishes regularly, and has for over a year: http://www.mantoujoe.blogspot.com. I wonder how many more are out there that have still somehow escaped my attention.


Best tweets of the week:

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Here's this week's YouTube video from "Trader Joe":





And finally, here's this week's cute cat in a Trader Joe's grocery bag. (Note that this was posted late on October 31.)