(Review) Minecraft’s “Suspicious Stew” Pringles
I have a confession to make about Minecraft: despite playing an accumulative few hundred hours of the game since it first came to Xbox 360, I’m very bad at the game. I’ve never given the deeper mechanics a proper shot. I don’t know how to enchant things, I don’t know most of the food recipes, and I couldn’t tell you how to beat the Ender Dragon. I’m one of those players who binges the game about once or twice a year, creating an odd village in the process…before complete abandonment some 96 hours later. Despite my odd play habits, I’d still consider myself a fan of the game, albeit from a casual approach.
Being that I’ve been a long time fan of the franchise, you can imagine my combined excitement and confusion that occurred when I found Minecraft branded “suspicious stew” flavored Pringles while browsing my local snack aisle. I have no idea what suspicious stew is, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even aware that you can make stew in Minecraft. My approach to food in Minecraft is usually “punching cows until it’s burger time”. Despite my confusion, I knew two things as soon as I saw these Pringles: I like stew, and I have to try these Pringles. After buying them, some regret and apprehension began to creep in. My thoughts were racing with all of the things that could possibly be wrong with these Pringles. “Most stews have meat, suspicious meat means bad meat…are these supposed to be rotten flesh flavored? Rotten flesh is a prominent item in the game” I had to reassure myself that nobody in their right mind would make rotten meat flavored Pringles, but then again, there are some really weird snack foods out there so who knows?
When I got home, it was time to quench my hunger and curiosity by peeling off the lid of Pringles’ tubular packaging. Immediately I was greeted with a familiar odor “Oh, I know this smell, I know this very well” I thought as the typical sour cream and onion flavor profile hit my nose. This was reassuring, as I was pretty worried that I’d made a bad purchase. The smell of these particular Pringles are of sour cream and onion, mixed with something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. There’s almost an odor of barbecue flavoring in the mix, but very faintly.
After I got done sticking my nose in a tube of chips like a true weirdo, there was only one thing left to do: dig in. I was expecting just sour cream and onion, but the flavor that met my tongue was really just onion without the sour cream part. There’s this odd undercurrent of peppered spice that presents before quickly fading away. It’s more of a ground black pepper taste than a spicy green pepper type of taste. Onion quickly takes over as the star of the show, and I’m ok with that. After a few chips, I decided to take a breather and let the aftertaste develop. As the onion faded away from my palette, the black pepper taste came back with a vengeance. Contradictory to what I initially thought, the pepper sensation was more like that of a mild jalapeno sensation. This was very welcome to me, as I’ve had a growing love for spicy food lately. This lingering black pepper and jalapeno type of spice combined with the faint onion remnants really clicked in my head “Oh this tastes like the stuff you’d find in a beef stew, minus the beef and carrot” I’m fine with a chip tasting almost like beef stew, despite having to fight my way through an initial attack of “just onion” These chips aren’t bad, but they’re sort of a guessing game. I think that it’s unique for a chip to have an aftertaste that develops behind the scenes, and that was certainly a point in favor of these chips. Most chips will assault you with flavor upfront, and that flavor will remain throughout your snack session. These chips, however, develop as the tongue settles.
One question was still on my mind: “What the hell is suspicious stew?” According to the game, the recipe for suspicious stew is: (combined in a bowl) Red Mushroom, Brown Mushroom, and any flower that you can find. Pringle’s really missed the mark on this one! I would’ve much preferred a mushroom flavored chip, or even something vaguely flowery as long as it didn’t taste like a mouthful of perfume. What we got instead was some kind of bootleg sour cream and onion with a very interesting aftertaste that sort of reminds you of beef stew fixings. There was no reason for this to be a Minecraft tie-in if they weren’t going to even try to base the flavor on its namesake.
Crafting Suspicious Stew in Minecraft
These chips were odd but they weren’t necessarily bad, either. I’d give the product as a whole a “C” as they didn’t taste bad but they completely missed the mark on what they were going for.
This is a chip that can’t make its mind up on what it is: is it a sour cream and onion? Not quite. Is it a salt and pepper flavor? Not quite. The oddest result to me is that the after-taste is far more desirable than the initial taste, which was probably not the goal over at Pringle’s HQ when they were concocting this strange potato product. I would only recommend these to a friend if they really loved onion flavored things, but I wouldn’t recommend them to someone otherwise.
