Banana pudding, reviewed on video by people with way too much time on their hands. “People,” of course, meaning me.
If there were any place on earth I would rather live than sunny Los Angeles, it would the Kozy Shack. In this magical locale, the world’s most delicious dessert treats are made: they’re all-natural, always fresh and creamy, and available in at your friendly local grocery store.
The Kozy Shack company is based in Hicksville, Long Island, New York – just a few miles from where I grew up – and I’ve been eating gorging myself on their products since I was a kid. The company’s trio of rice puddings – original, cinnamon-raisin, and the richer, more vanilla-y European-style – are the supermarket category’s equivalent to Haagen Dazs ice cream. They put the crap that Jell-O foists on the American public to shame (the General Foods subsidiary recently dropped an ad circular in my mailbox that described its product as “contemporary.” Creepy.)
Kozy Shack has been expanding lately. Seasonal flavors like pumpkin and peach have been added. My vegan friends love the company’s soy-based products. On the other hand, I don’t know what to make of the “probiotic” SimplyWell brand extension, which features flavors like Green Tea and Lemon Chai.
I know this blog is supposed to be about bananas, but to my most-beloved dudes at Kozy: Probiotic? Why are you stooping to the level of yogurt? You’re better than that, and you know it. I’m also suspicious of some of the other products recently released under the Kozy Shack label – a line of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, and frozen desserts like tiramisu cups and eclairs. Here’s the problem: the rice pudding bar set by the original Kozy line reaches celestial heights. Unless those other products come close – very close – they’re going to be disappointing to consumers, and will make the whole Shack a less appealing piece of culinary real estate.
That applies even to other pudding varieties, which brings us to bananas. Kozy Shack’s earlier foray into the minefield of banana pudding – I call it that because the treat is so good when it is good, and so awful when it isn’t - was a disastrous recreation of a New Orleans staple called Bananas Foster. The real thing features about forty pounds of butter per serving, along with a pirate schooner’s worth of rum and sugar, mixed with bananas and banana liqueur, set on fire, and poured over vanilla ice cream. Trying to capture this in a hooch-and-fire free plastic supermarket cup was a singularly bad idea.
This time around, the pudding experts from Strong Island have kept it simpler. Good idea. But the results are still less-than-perfect. The ingredients list serves as the first warning: there are “natural flavors,” but bananas themselves are never mentioned. The product is all-natural, which is good, but the taste just isn’t right. See the attached video report, which includes my girlfriend’s off-camera opinion. She is a pudding expert and you can absolutely trust her.
Bummer. I was rooting for this one. But still, the company is doing incredible things with two of the world’s other staple foods: the sublime rice varieties, and the equally splendid tapioca (aka manioc, aka casava, aka yuca, and more than a dozen other names worldwide) rocks, as well. So all is forgiven – and I encourage a third try. Hint: real bananas, possibly in chunks (tough to do, I know, given the fruit’s perishability.) And it needs to be much, much creamier. The current version is way too gel-like.
Oh, and there’s definitely one Kozy marketing move that I absolutely buy into: the company’s sponsorship of the most lovable, awesome baseball team in human history.
UPDATE: A couple of readers have written in with their own Kozy Shack banana variants – which involve taking either the tapioca or one of the existing rice varieties, slicing bananas into it, and mixing it up with Nilla wafers (or this organic alternative.) Excellent idea.
One Response to Video Review: Pudding Dreams. Shattered.
Chris Charla on April 24, 2009 at 9:33 pm
This pudding can be rendered far better by slicing bananas into it and adding whipped cream. Then it tastes like something you could imagine your grandmother use to make in the 1950s!
By the way, awesome book! Ditto with the bird book, which I am almost done with and led me to the Internet (to see a picture of the Phillippine Eagle), and then to this site. I somehow didn’t realize you had written both books, but both are fantastic.
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This pudding can be rendered far better by slicing bananas into it and adding whipped cream. Then it tastes like something you could imagine your grandmother use to make in the 1950s!
By the way, awesome book! Ditto with the bird book, which I am almost done with and led me to the Internet (to see a picture of the Phillippine Eagle), and then to this site. I somehow didn’t realize you had written both books, but both are fantastic.