Iced Dunkin' Dark: Where's the heat?

Good morning foodies! I'm ready to start the weekend off right with a Van Winkle-waking review of Dunkin' Donuts Dark iced coffee. What say you?

If you're saying, "Pour me a nice hot cup," you're going to be disappointed. My bid to secure a steaming mug of dark java was flat-out denied by a local Dunkin' last week. They only had the dark roast on ice.

I appreciate iced coffee, and even prefer Dunkin's regular brew chilled to its less-than-ideal hot counterpart. But it's simply not acceptable to have a variety of iced coffee and not offer it hot. Don't you first brew hot coffee to make iced coffee? Would it be that hard to set half of the destined-for-ice pot on a heater and keep it warm?

So negative sporks for that development. I'll move on and review the iced dark coffee for what it was, rather than what it should have been. You know. Hot.

As a cool beverage the dark roast does pretty well. The flavor contains light bitter tones that are pleasant rather than off-putting, and the taste is fairly rich. We're talking Ken Jennings-rich, not Mikhail Prokhorov-rich, mind you. But plenty rich, nonethesame.

My advice is to forgo Dunkin's offer of sugar and cream and season the coffee yourself, if you must. While I prefer mine black, even those who like to load up on sweeteners can be blown away by the amount of C12H22O11 the stores will pack in a cup. It doesn't dissolve fully, leaving you crunching your drink rather than sipping it.

Of course, if you're looking for a wake-me-up the iced coffee is inferior to a hot brethren. There's nothing like a slightly scalded tongue and warm belly to snap you out of a morning funk. A cool mouth and throat certainly don't come close.

Overall, I would say Iced Dunkin' Dark is tasty but not outstanding -- three sporks out of five. I'd love to know what it's like hot, when flavors shine fully and aren't muted by the chill of ice. Shockingly, I wasn't afforded that chance.

Do Facebook friends connect to make good vitaminwater?

I've spent my fair share of words on this blog criticizing food product planners. Time and time again I'm at a loss to understand what they were thinking when they picked misfit ingredients and settled for strange seasonings. I envision product planners as bald-headed men in starchy lab coats who work in secret food silos and return home each night so out of touch with the world that they have to ask their kids to explain this newfangled Hannah Montana.

Tonight we have the unique opportunity to pit the product planners against normal people. Well, that's provided you consider Facebook users normal people. I'm a little doubtful, what with the prevalence of FarmVille and its ilk, but we'll pretend it's normal to care whether your friends fertilized some random imaginary field or found a lonely cow wandering through cyberspace.

Getting back to the point, vitaminwater recently released some new flavors. One of them, dubbed "connect" in the industry-standard all-lowercase letters, features black-cherry lime flavors and packaging claiming it was made "by fans, for fans on Facebook." The other one, "spark," with grape-blueberry flavor, seems to have flowed out of your typical product pipeline. So which one is more successful?

The black cherry-lime combination trends heavily toward the lime end of the equation. It's not as puckerworthy as the citrus flavors of vitaminwater's "energy,"  but it's surprisingly sour. It also falls a little flat on my tongue and could very much use some more black cherry notes for richness.

Spark, on the other hand, has a pleasant but not-overpowering sweetness that successfully wraps beginning and end tones of grape juice around a sweet burst of blueberry in the middle. As a result it's tastefully sweet without slapping you with an immediate avalanche of sugar. It also doesn't leave you with that annoying just-drank-too-much-corn-syrup thirsty tongue.

Throw in the fact that connect contains caffeine, and the crowd-sourced beverage comes in a distant second. Its flavors are merely OK, and if I wanted caffeine I would have picked up some coffee. Sorry, Facebookers. Connect earns just two sporks out of five.

It just isn't as good as spark, to which I award four sporks. Those balding men must get it right once in a blue moon.

Of course, this experiment has a severe lack of double blinds, control groups and scientific methods. In other words, I'm not ready to anoint product planners a better alternative to crowd-sourcing.

After all, even a blind cow finds her way out of the digital forest every once in a while.

Lunch-sized picklePak

Good evening, foodies.

Unfortunately I don't have a full review ready for you tonight -- I'm sorting through my thoughts on two new beverages: the new Dunkin' Donuts "Iced Dunkin' Dark Roast" iced coffee and the latest flavor from vitaminwater, a black cherry variety called Connect. Full posts on those will come later this week.

Tonight I'm writing to let you know that my girlfriend Deb is currently eating a lunch-sized picklePak filled with petite kosher dill pickles. Yes, you read that right. Picture the elementary-school-ubiquitous 7 oz. plastic cups of apple sauce, but filled with tiny pickles and brine. That sums up the picklePak, produced by Mt. Olive.

Deb won't let me take her picture eating the pickles, but I wanted to note the pack's existence somehow. Not being a pickle person myself, I don't feel able to review a picklePak objectively. For now I'll just tilt my head to the side and marvel at the fact that there are enough pickle lovers in the world to justify the existence of such a product.

Cow Tales still tell a good story

Those of you who follow my Twitter account know that last week while meandering through a gas station I stumbled upon nostalgia in a long, thin wrapper: Cow Tales.

I don't know how long it had been since I ate one of the caramel tubes wrapped around a cream center, but my guess is it was when Taco Bell still advertised with a Chihuahua and KFC was still Kentucky Fried Chicken. Just seeing the box of cylindrical candy on the shelf brought me back at least ten years to a day when Hershey bars were still wrapped in real foil and Milky Ways weren't available in dark chocolate or all-caramel varieties. For a few moments the world of sweets became innocent, simple and unhindered by worries about cavities and calories.

And I'm barely an adult. I'm sure if I were out of my 20s the sight of a Cow Tale could bring back a bigger drawer full of repressed memories. Even so, I grabbed a taste of the classic candy while the moment was right.

I almost opted for the Strawberry Cow Tales that sat next to the traditional variety, but something stopped me. While I can't claim to know the history of the bovine derriere, I don't remember a strawberry version gracing the shelves of the candy barn while I was a kid. Maybe I'll review one of those in a few weeks, I thought. This was about a trip down memory lane.


As a brief aside, the intertubes tell me Cow Tales are actually available in a number of varieties including chocolate and caramel apple. The world, it seems, is always spinning, and companies are constantly looking for a way to milk a successful product for new triumphs. Hopefully I'll be able to track down some of these newfangled versions and tell you whether they're successful.


For now I can tell you the classic Cow Tale is still successful. Chewy caramel spoons with the sugary cream center for a treat that's equal parts sinful indulgence and necessary soul food. I felt years younger after my mouth listened to the tastes of the Cow Tale. For a few precious moments I was a bite-sized person experiencing the pure bliss of a sugary childhood snack.


Since it's such a classic, I feel no need to give this candy a traditional rating. Instead, let this post serve as a special tribute to a candy that has done so much to lift so many people's spirits. Cow Tales, Rick's Food Critique salutes you!