Osem Bamba: Peanut snack (hazelnut cream)

Product name: Osem Bamba: Peanut snack (hazelnut cream)
Purchase details: £0.85 for a 60g bag (Tesco)
Calories: 160 per 30g serving (320 per bag)
Country of origin: Israel

Do you ever randomly see something on the shop shelf that you’ve never seen before and then don’t see again? Well, this happened to me a little while ago with this bag of Osem Bamba: Peanut snack (hazelnut cream). It was the brown and yellow bag that caught my eye in the world foods section, and it may well still be available, but I’ve not been looking since and it hasn’t caught my attention either!

A few years ago, I tried Ellert Peanut Puffs: Roasted and this snack looked like it would be similar but with the added excitement of a Nutella-like centre. The bag wasn’t much bigger than a bag of crisps but it was heavier and contained a lot of calories...it turned out the product contained ‘about 45% cream’ – woah!

The snack’s dusty surface looked a bit like the Grupa BGK Flips: Chrupki Kukurydziane (czekolady) but the shape was pretty different. Each piece was a short, straight tube that was filled with a nutty and cocoa-containing centre. The hazelnut in these cores accounted for 6% of the overall product whilst, overall, the product also contained 27% peanuts.

 

This Peanut snack contained no food colouring or cholesterol and had a slightly salty peanut smell that was merged with a hint of Nutella. I couldn’t resist dissecting my first one and found that the outside was crispy, salty and, to be perfectly honest, not very nice at all. The remaining centre was comparatively hard – almost crunchy by itself – but did have a chocolate and hazelnut flavour.

The good news is, once I ate these properly, they were fantastic! The peanut flavour somehow came through more when it could contrast with the hazelnut, and it was just like the sweet and savoury goodness of eating peanut butter and chocolate spread together. This was helped by the fact that the cores were actually soft, when eaten in the intended way, and had a cooling and moistening effect which made them feel more like a spread.

Ignoring the filling, the texture was very much like Wotsits – the pieces even collapsed in the same way when sucking! The flavour wasn’t as nice when doing this, though, so it was definitely preferable to chew them.

I ended up being very pleased with this find and have great respect for anyone who manages to stop at half a bag!

Appearance: 7/10
Aroma: 7/10
Taste: 8/10
Texture: 8/10
Overall score: 7.5/10