The Jungle Stand June 2013 Review

The Jungle Stand Tasting Bar is a new box subscription for me. I had seen a few others blog about it and it looked really interesting. At $9.92/month, it’s a fairly reasonable price to try out new flavors and foods you might not normally come across. I got notification that my box shipped on June 19th, the day I went out of town this past weekend. I was hoping it would be a bit slow and not show up till Monday, the day after I got home, but it shipped quickly (which I would normally be super happy about!). I was a bit nervous about it not being safe to eat after sitting in my hot Texas mailbox for 2 1/2 days (and I didn’t know what was inside yet to really judge), so I emailed them to ask. I got a super quick response from Jackie, who let me know this box would be fine to eat. I thanked her for her quick response and got another response from Jackie minutes later. She was super nice. It’s great to see awesome customer service. Anyway, on to the box! June’s theme was “Welcome to Taiwan”. I was pretty excited to try it!

Opening the box

So, when you open the box, there’s 6 compartments with color coded “tastes”. It’s up to you whether you want to see what they are before or after you taste. I went with before for my first tasting bar. The box comes with an info card with descriptions and nutritional information on each “taste”:

Not pictured is the sheet with nutritional information

My first taste was the sachima. It was very sweet and caramelly tasting and had an odd airy yet squishy texture. I liked this one but didn’t love it. Next up was the rice cracker. I was a bit wary of this one because it reminded me of those rice sticks wrapped in seaweed, which I’m really not a fan of. To a degree it was somewhat similar, but it had a sweet coating that made it much tastier than the seaweed variety. It wasn’t bad, but probably my second least favorite of the bunch. Third, was the sesame pastry. This one was really interesting. Just as the card suggest, when I bit into it, it was really soft and airy with a harder outside. It was sweet and I really liked the taste – I’d put it even with the sachima.

The inside was really soft and airy and almost reminded me of cotton candy fibers.

Fourth – ugh, I was not looking forward to this one – was squid. Now, normally, I love squid. Cooked and in a pasta or with vegetables or something. This was sweet and just plain weird. I put a pinch of it in my mouth and it was just jarring. It smelled fishy but tasted sweet and had a jerky texture. Blech. Nope. There was a packet of saltines included, I guess to cleanse your palette, so I ate one of those and moved on. Next, was the pumpkin cake. There really was no cake texture to this one, it was crunchy like granola. And super tasty. This one was definitely my favorite. I’m not sure I tasted much pumpkin (or the seaweed that was in it, thankfully), but the flavor was just really good. Crunchy and salty/sweet. I’d definitely buy more of this! Finally, the last taste was peanut brittle. It was very hard. Really hard to bite into in fact. But it was tasty. A different look than I’m used to with peanut brittle, but a similar flavor. I’d probably put this even with the sachima and the sesame pastry.
So, overall, I really enjoyed this box. There was only one “taste” I didn’t like and the rest were awesome to try. I even found a snack I’d like to find more of! It was really fun to try these since I’m not sure where I’d find them without Jungle Stand. I kind of wish I had gotten my hubby in on the action to get another set of opinions (especially for this month since he likes a lot of Asian foods, whoops). A few of the tastes were kind of small, but there is some of a few of them left, so I’ll see if he wants to try. For sure next month, I’ll get his opinions too (because I’m absolutely continuing this subscription!).
If you want to sign up, go to The Jungle Stand’s website! If you already get Jungle Stand, what did you think of this month’s tastes?

(And just a disclaimer: I bought this box myself and was not compensated for this review in any way. All opinions are my own.)