A New Type of Experiment

My good friend Ping Zhang came home from China wih a new bride and a present for Natasha and I. It was a Shibajie Mahua manufactured by Guifaxiang in Ping's home town outside of Shanghai. It comes in four flavors as shown below:


Purple is traditional, Blue is Chinese Pepper, Yellow is Hard Nut, and Red is Haw. Yes. I said Haw. That is the only time I have seen that word used without being preceded by the words Hee or Yee.

So I had an idea to make a blog post out of it. Not so much copying, but rather paying homage to Steve Don't Eat It. And what's better is that Natasha agreed to join me.

The first we tried was Traditional. This makes sense because it was before they got "creative" with the recipe... Whatever the hell that might be. It's basically like dried spaghetti made with peanuts instead of flour wrapped around some stuff that resembles graham cracker crumbs mixed with syrup and dried. All of this combined looks like a piece of poo, as seen to the right.

I don't know if it was the look or the smell, but Natasha took approximately 3 molecules of it for our experiment. I have to say that the Traditional and the Chinese Pepper were pretty good but very different. Hard Nut lived up to the name and was outrageously hard to chew, but tasted pretty good. Haw tasted like it is basically the same as Traditional except that it has already been eaten and then regurgiatated.

I think I would eat them again, but I'm not sure they would actually be sold anywhere in the US. Natasha is safe.