LesserEvil Black and White Kettle Corn

I had a million and one jokes for this popcorn. I had sex jokes, lines about diversity in snack foods, and overall cracks at healthy foods. But when the time came to sit down and write, I just found it awfully hard to poke fun at this concept.

The LesserEvil product line is rather noble. It has salty and sweet snacks with an obscenely large serving size for only 100 calories. Today, Keepitcoming and I tried their black and white kettle corn, which combined savory kettle corn with chocolate popcorn to create a healthy and tasty treat.Well, they got the healthy right. But how difficult is that for popcorn? It's not fried and if prepared with no salt and butter, yields a lot of product for very few calories. The coatings on each were liberal, with a slightly heavier, albeit sticky, layer on the white kettle corn.

The kettle corn was sweet and caramely, but really favored the sweet side of popcorn, like a caramel corn, and certainly did not have the same depth of flavors that kettle corn typically has. I prefer a lot more salt, or at least an even balance of salt and sugar on mine. This had more of a buttery flavor and less of a savory aspect. Interestingly enough, all the popcorn in this bag was the durable mushroom popcorn, and had none of the butterfly variety. This made for a very puffy, light texture with a few mushy kernels logged down with coating.Deal with it.

The chocolate popcorn was even less exciting than the kettle corn. I thought it tasted like hot chocolate powder, and Keepitcoming swore it was a distant cousin of Cocoa Puffs. In any case, it didn't taste like real chocolate and was applied in a glaze form. It was spotty in places and we could see the white popcorn showing through, and really didn't give us a chocolatey flavor at all.

This was a shame, because I could see this succeeding in many ways that would have kept it healthy without compromising flavor. We wanted to love this, and tried it both dry and with milk, hoping it would succeed as a breakfast cereal. I drool over salted chocolate desserts, and I think that if the chocolate coating was a little more accurate and the kettle corn was regulated to a more balanced flavor, this could be a delicious and addictive treat, but for now, it's relegated to our snack cabinet.