Snack Review: Nish Nosh Mediterranean Herbs Crackers
This snack was actually embarrassing. It’s not often that I taste something and suddenly start jumping up and down going “Oh! Oooooo! Oh!”
I saw these on a trip to a local Giant supermarket which is bigger and nicer than my local Horrible Safeway. It has lots of ethnic food sections, including a section of geographically disparate Jewish cuisine including U-bet chocolate syrup and these crackers – a middle eastern flavor made by an Israeli company called Beigel & Beigel which was stated in Poland in 1880.
I admit that I was attracted to these mainly because “Nish Nosh” is a cute name. The front says the flavor is “Mediterranean herbs,” which didn’t seem all that fascinating – oregano and basil, maybe? – but when I picked it up and read the ingredients list, it said “zaatar flavored;” I popped them into my shopping cart without a second’s further thought.
Zaatar is a spice mixture used in much of the Middle East but, more important for my purposes, also in some Armenian or Lebanese bakery in a place where I don’t live anymore, which made a flatbread with zaatar topping. Where I live now, the only place I can find a decent version of this dish is a church festival that only happens once a year. So you can see why I grabbed these.
And why I moaned. They are really wonderful. They are very fragrant and strongly flavored of zaatar, which is not quite like any other herb or spice. They are greasy to the touch, so you can’t do much else while you eat them, but that’s OK. I just want to concentrate on how good they are.
Like the mochi ice cream, I want to tell everyone: please go buy these so they get popular. I want to be able to get them in more places. I want Americans to start putting zaatar flavor on all sorts of offensive culturally inappropriate things like pizza and potato chips. Help me out here and give them a try if you can find them at your local nicer, larger supermarket.
By the way, I always thought zaatar was mostly thyme, which is not one of my favorite things, so it was kind of mysterious that I am so crazy about it. But using that arduous research technique of reading the Wikipedia entry for zaatar, I learned that it’s more complicated than that, and that it’s mostly a kind of marjoram, a relative of oregano. But, whatever. Click on that link if you care about the details of the Latin names of herbs. I’m going to eat another handful, and I have to stop typing to do that so I don’t get the keyboard greasy.
2 Comments
wldwoglorrie on March 9th, 2009
I found these at Walmart last night. They ARE absolutely amazing!
Hazel on October 20th, 2008
ooh!!!!!! i found this at big lots a month or two months ago. it’s really delicious! try it with hummus