This is going to be a shorter one.
The duck and I have a deep appreciation for food in many flavors, shapes and textures. What we really love though (= the star of our pretty specific regular food cravings) are snacks, especially pretzels(!), chocolate and anything matcha flavored. 
When, during one of our earlier grocery shopping trips, we discovered Green Tea Chocolate Pretzels that were on sale, we could not resist. I mean, this combination of three of our most favorite things in the world already looked like a match(a) made in heaven!
After unpacking and neatly storing away all our more or less healthy food, we just had to try some of those pretzels – of course after taking the obligatory photo with the duck!
And, what can I say… well, actually I’m going to write it – in this not so brief, very subjective snack review:
♥+♥+♥=…meh.
To explain this pretty unimpressed review, let me explain our love for the three main components that make those matcha-chocolate covered pretzel sticks sound so appealing to us.
Pretzels: What we love about pretzels is their crunchiness paired with a salty flavor. We’re those kind of people that like their bread really well toasted and prefer cookies to cake (I was involved in a heated discussion about that last week). We especially like the crunchy knot of large pretzels and think that soft pretzels (the really soft kind that has the same texture throughout) are the jealous, evil witch-turned stepmother who is obsessed with external beauty (the pretzel shape) while completely disregarding what’s on the inside (for ‘big pretzels’ it’s that soft dough wrapped with a crunchy oven-tanned crust), of the pretzel family. Anyway, I’m digressing. Since this pretzel treat obviously belongs to the compact, crunchy pretzel group, we were expecting crunchiness, saltiness and… well, a tan, for making our pretzel senses happy.
However, the pretzel part of our grocery store treat only fulfilled the crunchiness, partly. The color looked as if the pretzels had spent Antarctic winter at the South Pole (which, to be fair, is normal among most of those chocolate-covered pretzel stick varieties – but that doesn’t change our personal taste) and there was pretty much no saltiness to them. So, for the pretzel part: 2/5 Ducks.
Chocolate: Okay, the duck and my chocolate taste is pretty specific – so we did not have high expectations for the chocolate part of those pretzel sticks. We love very dark chocolate (anything from about 80% cocoa upwards); we don’t care much for regular dark chocolate (around 50%) because our taste buds don’t like how the sweetness interferes with the bitterness. Regular milk chocolate, however, we like if it has at least 35% cocoa. We can even tolerate white chocolate occasionally (well, looking at this written out I am questioning our sanity a bit, but, well, nothing a big serving of chocolate can’t solve, right?).
Matcha-chocolate would, of course, consist of white chocolate with matcha mixed in so we knew that this part would not hit 5/5 Ducks on our taste scale. When we tasted the pretzel sticks we thought that the chocolate was a bit too sweet and, weirdly, lacking some of that specific white chocolate taste… which could be due to the matcha flavor: 2/5 Ducks.
Matcha: Our appreciation for matcha is probably as developed as our love for chocolate, though not as complicated and confusing. Most of the time it comes down to this simple rule: the stronger the matcha flavor, the happier the duck. We even occasionally order our Matcha Lattes with an espresso shot to deepen the taste (haha, those one to two times a year – we’re super stingy!). Therefore, when something has just a hint of matcha, we feel betrayed.
This snack, fortunately, had a bit more than a hint of matcha. However, the sweetness of the chocolate took away from the green tea taste and not having the salty pretzel element present, either, failed to make us happy (which, in our opinion, is the main purpose of chocolate). The matcha gets 3/5 Ducks.
2/5 Ducks. This is our final snack rating. Of course our snack standards are pretty high so a 2/5 Ducks is still pretty good and not necessarily comparable to a 2/5 Ducks in soy milk – we would have those pretzel sticks over soy milk any time! If anyone were to give us a snack with that rating we would not say ‘no’ to that. Ever.
If our taste is anywhere near yours, this review might be helpful. But I doubt it. So, maybe, at least by knowing what particular elements and tastes we based our matcha chocolate pretzel stick rating on you might be able to figure out whether they’re worth a purchase – if you indeed like light-colored unsalted pretzels, sweet white chocolate and a rather subtle matcha flavor, they would be perfect for you! Give them a try!
Thank you very munch for reading (I just had to)!
The Duck in... side 