Forget ready-salted chips and vanilla cream biscuits. As huge foodies and reasonable connoisseurs of strange gastronomic experiences, we always pursue the locally-produced snacks that sometimes offer local flavours, or combinations that may not be common in the west.
While there are definitely a tonne of delicious Vietnamese snacks out there, of course we had to document the ones we found different! We hope not to offend anyone – simply, many of these flavours are just not something we’d ever find at home, and on occasion it means that we aren’t accustomed to it. Of course, in choosing the most outlandish snacks, there are bound to be a couple that may not agree with us, but we would still encourage people to give any of them a go.
From the Video
Cosy Bánh Quế Cheese Wafer Rolls
Fake cheese is its own unique flavour, one that is incomparable to any real cheese to speak of. Cosy is in a category on its own, with a different sort of fake cheese that was indescribable to say the least. We regret everything about this one. We need say nothing more.
Sweetcorn Milk
Ever come across one of those things that compels you so strongly to satiate your curiosity even if it means experiencing a little hardship? This was certainly one of those things. All throughout Vietnam we noticed that corn was as normal of a sweet flavour as red bean or mung bean, which unsurprisingly is a little unusual for people who have only considered it as a vegetable growing up.
To put simply, it tastes like the sweetcorn, or the water used to boil the corn, only much, much stronger. It’s unusual, to say the least. Some may find it strange, but it is a very popular drink. We didn’t regret trying it, but it wasn’t too much to our liking.
14,000
Vinamilk Aloe Vera Yoghurt (Nha Đam Sữa Chua)
Aloe Vera is such a big part of so many Asian children’s childhoods. The sweet, refreshing drink with a suspension of little morsels was a travesty to the supposed benefits when applied to skin and hair but it sure was a treat to younger Twinspeak. Nonetheless, as we grow older we feel obliged to wane ourselves off those childish sweets and enjoy more sophisticated desserts.
Cue aloe vera yoghurt. Lightly sweetened from cubes bursting with aloe accompanied by the slight tang of highly-processed fermented milk… this was a dessert we never knew we needed. We later found out that it’s a common dish in Vietnam and enjoyed throughout many dessert establishments, but at the very least, the supermarket version was plenty satisfying. No regrets there.
8,000
Coca Cola Coffee
Wow, what a wild concept. We bought this without having a clue what to expect, and it tasted exactly as you’d think. A mix of coffee and cola. Though not as distinctly as a half-half mixture of each than if you’d left a little coffee in your cup and poured some cola over it forgetting that it was coffee because the colours are essentially the same. Or if you’d taken the stirring teaspoon out of someone’s espresso to take a sip of someone’s cola. In either case, it is still very predominantly cola. This is very much a drink for people who can’t get enough caffeine drinking just one of the two.
8,200
Orange flavoured milk
Interestingly, flavourings such as strawberry added to foods have different chemical compositions for products with fat (such as milks) and for products without (such as boiled sweets or lollipops). Which is why it was such a strange concept to see orange-flavoured milks and yoghurts lining the shelves of Vietnamese grocers, even if lemon is such a normal flavour for creamy desserts. Orange just isn’t something we associated with milk, which was why we had to give it a go.
It was still strange when we drank it. The best description we could find was if you combined milk with an orange-flavoured cordial. It wasn’t bad, so to speak. We’d never get it again, though.
Green Pea flavoured milk
What compels us to buy things with flavours that no one would buy otherwise? Curiosity, that’s what. And literally nothing else. Also, we are a little weird, and I think that should be respected. Especially because we had three options for this brand, and green pea was by far the weirdest sounding.
The flavour was bizarre. There were aspects of non-dairy creamer and the typical legume-ish flavour that one might find in red bean or green bean-flavoured things, though it also came with such a strange and sudden surface bitterness that it became very unpleasant very fast. There were so many regrets with this one. But hey, at least now we all know.
15,500
Oishi Snack Bắp Ngọt Sweetcorn Flavoured Puffs
We suppose that this is meant to be a health snack, what with the corn and the claim that it isn’t fried (không chiên), but let’s be honest. It’s a processed snack. Much like your typical puffed corn snack this had a light, airy crisp. But again, not much flavour to speak of besides the generic MSG-salt-sugar-ambiguous-seasoning combination. Sure, there was corn. But if it’s sweetcorn flavour, we want it like Nabati’s Siip snacks: overtly processed the hell out of. Other than the lack of flavour, it was certainly a waste of calories.
6,000 dong
Salted Egg Pork Floss Cake
This is a cake that we found rampant in many bakeries and supermarkets throughout Vietnam, which surprised us as it’s not a common pairing with sweet foods, or at least that we’d experienced, in Malaysia, Singapore, or Indonesia. As a fan of cake, salted egg, and pork floss, we jumped on the chance to try a little cupcake from a roadside bakery.
Predominantly sweet in flavour, it was missing the savoury that we’d expected from two normally meaty products. It had the fluffy consistency of a steamed cake with a faint coconut flavour, but the lacking salted egg and pork floss made it a little dissatisfactory. Nonetheless, delicious.
Laughing Cow Cheez Dippers Pizza Flavoured Breadsticks
One of Noms’s guilty pleasures is Laughing Cow cheese, so seeing it in breadstick-and-dip form was basically a no-brainer. We went for pizza-flavoured assuming it was the cheese that was flavoured, because who reads fine print, right? Alas, it was the breadsticks which had a slight tomato taste, but who’s all that bothered when you’ve got good old Laughing Cow cheese? It’s cheese and crackers for our simple souls. If we conveniently forget that Jos is lactose intolerant, the only thing we can weep over is that there was no pizza flavour to speak of. Noms licked that packet clean to get every morsel of that delicious, delicious cheese.
13,000
Mộc Châu Milk Coconut Flavoured Milk
Rather than coconut milk, it’s cow’s milk with coconut flavouring. Thankfully, it’s sweetened. The coconut flavour also seemed to be boosted a little artificially, which definitely aided with the flavour. This one is not bad at all.
9,000
TH True Nut Milk Hạt và Gấc (Oat and Gấc Fruit) Flavour
Gấc is a fruit found in Southeast Asia as well as Northern Australia. It wasn’t anything we’d tried before, which meant it was something we definitely had to try. But, we found as we sipped it that maybe an unsweetened health drink was perhaps not the best way to go – it had a thick consistency which did not match well with the blandness of the milk. Maybe it’s something we need to get used to, like unsweetened almond milk, but we couldn’t stomach it all that well.
14,000
The Ones That Didn’t Make It to Filming
JOJO Khoai Lang Tím Sweet Potato Chips
These were light and crispy, the sort of texture that you’d find in a puffed corn or rice snack, though in a flatter netted structure. While it did have a whiff of sweet potato flavour, it was then overridden by the familiar taste of MSG and other generic seasonings. We regret that it didn’t taste as much of sweet potato as we expected.
6,000 dong
TaYO X Salted Egg Chips
There’s something about Vietnam and not quite nailing the flavouring thing on the head. Despite a solid selection of snacks, we’ve found them all, including the obscurely-flavoured, to be so mild that it’s pretty much acceptable even if you have the blandest of palates. TaYO was another case of this: much like any other flute-shaped, puffed-flour snacks, this had some sweetness and some saltiness, though absolutely no salted egg flavour. In fact, this would have been better described as honey. It didn’t taste bad, per se, but it was disappointing in terms of the supposed flavour.
5,300 dong
YenViet Bird’s Nest Rock Sugar Aloe Vera
Bird’s nest drinks can be expensive, and maybe having it combined with rock sugar and aloe was not the best way to identify the bird’s nest flavour if you’ve never had it before. We hadn’t. In either case, it was a sweet drink that had a vague indescribable flavour that we put to the rock sugar. The aloe was delicious. It wasn’t a bad drink, though perhaps a little spendy.
13,000
Sweetened fresh milk
Ever bought something to eat expecting nothing out of the ordinary and being punched in the face because you’d accidently grabbed the wrong flavour? This was exactly that. Noms wanted milk. We saw a white box coloured with a little blue and green, and a nice little cow. We bought it, and took a sip – and found out it was sweetened.
This might sound okay to some, but milk is most definitely not that flavour if you pour it straight from your usual UHT cartons. This one tasted a little of vanilla too, like the dregs left after you’ve consumed a bowl of sugary cereal, or if someone had dunked a good few biscuits in there before putting the glass back in the fridge for us to happen across. It wasn’t bad. But maybe we should have read the English on the package before.
8,000
Vietnam’s normal snack selection is significantly more delicious than the weirdest flavours we dredged up, but we did learn a lesson. You can never tell which one will taste good just by the packaging. Don’t be afraid to try new flavours, because we had loads of fun eating them!
