Mexican soda

[Gray_Area]

Remembering this talked about recently, I snapped a shot of some I saw at Home Depot. No, I didn't buy any.

......but maybe I should have just one of each, to see whether it was truly that good......

[Dervacumen]

Taste is about as subjective as you can get, but it does have a better flavor IMO.  Luckily around here getting anything from Mexico is as easy as domestic stuff.  The Orange Crush is especially good.

[Paladin]

I believe it's sucrose from sugar beets.  I still prefer it over corn syrup.

[HaRuMaN]

I like it better than the corn syrup kind.  I don't drink much soda anymore, but the local Wal-Mart has a cooler with singles in it, occasionally I will pick one up.

[MaxVolume]

What I find to be even better than Mexican Coke (which for those of us who are old enough to remember the pre-HFCS days is basically "real" COKE) is Jarritos Cola.  I've always liked most of their flavors (I'll pass on Tamarind, though), but I've recently discovered that they have a cola as well.  The closest U.S. equivalent I can think of is RC, but even that's not nearly as good.

[Gray_Area]

I was always a Coke kid - even though I could get RC (and Hires rootbeer, Bubble-Up, etc in the early days) for free.

I always wanted to try some 50s coke....I mean Coke. Well, that, too. Right up there with LSD 25.

[Player 3]

Remembering this talked about recently, I snapped a shot of some I saw at Home Depot.

Obligatory "I see what you did there."

[Le Chuck]

I'm a huge fan of coke from UAE.  The stuff we'd get in iraq and afghanistan, it's different than both mex coke and us coke.  More jolt and less sweet maybe.  Almost a little mediciney but man it packed a punch.  It's not worth a trip back to the sandbox for more but if I ran across it in a specialty store or something I'd get some. 

In '07 I escorted some contractors through a Pepsi bottling plant in northern Iraq.  Kinda fun but holy jeebus you couldn't pay me to imbibe that product after seeing the conditions in which is was bottled.  My favorite part was the barefoot filthy 8 yr old kid in charge of picking the newly blown bottles up off the wet dirt floor where they were kept and putting them directly onto the filling line.  It's like they were intentionally filthying the bottles.

[koolmoecraig]

Mexican Coke really is that good.  Best price I have found is $17 for 24 bottles at Smart and Final.

Also, Pepsi has their "Throwback" Pepsi and Mountain Dew available which is made with real sugar.  It's widely available in cans at grocery stores and Target.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throwback_(drink)

[Hothman]

I'm a huge fan of coke from UAE.  The stuff we'd get in iraq and afghanistan, it's different than both mex coke and us coke.  More jolt and less sweet maybe.  Almost a little mediciney but man it packed a punch.  It's not worth a trip back to the sandbox for more but if I ran across it in a specialty store or something I'd get some. 

In '07 I escorted some contractors through a Pepsi bottling plant in northern Iraq.  Kinda fun but holy jeebus you couldn't pay me to imbibe that product after seeing the conditions in which is was bottled.  My favorite part was the barefoot filthy 8 yr old kid in charge of picking the newly blown bottles up off the wet dirt floor where they were kept and putting them directly onto the filling line.  It's like they were intentionally filthying the bottles.

A bit off topic, but then again we are talking about mexicoke...  Several beers produced in equatorial regions are made with formaldehyde.  I guess if it can preserve a corpse it can preserve a beer.  Makes for a wicked hangover in the morning.

[MaxVolume]

I've looked in three stores that carry Jarrito's and nobody has Jarrito's cola.

I have to admit that hearing an informed opinion on Jarrito's Tamarindo is something I thought I'd NEVER encounter on this message board.

 

Tamarind is just an obscure fruit that I haven't developed a taste for.  I remember when we had Vietnamese kids living next door and the kinds of flavors they thought were good together I found rather strange.

The cola is a new one on me, too.  My wife loves Toronja (grapefruit), but that's not very common either.  I'm finding the cola locally at some of the better Kroger stores around here (you know, the ones where the "International" section is more than just spaghetti, soy sauce and taco fixins).  I think they probably just started stocking it because they couldn't keep the "Mexican Coke" on the shelves.  I've always loved Trolli's "gummi cola bottles", and that's basically what Jarritos cola tastes like.  Nom! Nom! 

[Le Chuck]

Tamarind is nasty.  As is durian.  When I was in Thailand everybody was like, "here tastes this wonderful fruit that smells like old unwashed feet, smells like hell, tastes like heaven" and ya know what?  That shizzle tastes like it smells.  Old feet.  Gross.  Any concoction, no matter how watered down, that contains either I'm more than happy to steer clear of. 

[shmokes]

Best price I have found is $17 for 24 bottles at Smart and Final.

I buy it at Costco in 24 packs. It lasts forever since it's used exclusively for Rum & Coke's and that drink tastes sweeter to me every time I have it. At any rate, it seems like I pay a bit less than that, but I could be wrong.

[Gray_Area]

Remembering this talked about recently, I snapped a shot of some I saw at Home Depot.

Obligatory "I see what you did there."

Huh?? What'd I do?


@Le Chuck: I had Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies from that region that felt like they had dirt in them!

[Le Chuck]

@Le Chuck: I had Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies from that region that felt like they had dirt in them!

When I got back from 'stan the first time I kept asking if everything I ate tasted funny.  Wife thought I was bonkers.  She wasn't wrong, I finally figured it out.  No grit.  I was so used to eating food with sand in it that when I got stateside and had a burger I couldn't figure out why it wasn't crunchy. 

[SNAAKE]

that jarrito stuff is pretty cheap around here. $2 for 1.5 litter bottle I think. I like the strawberry flavor

[SNAAKE]

Huh?? What'd I do?

because mexicans are always in front of home depot looking for random construction jobs and they'll do it for cheap cheap.

but I never hired anyone like or know if they really doing it less than other contractors. just a random guess.

[Dervacumen]

I have to admit that hearing an informed opinion on Jarrito's Tamarindo is something I thought I'd NEVER encounter on this message board.

 

True that, especially since it's horrid enough that most people block it out of their memory after the first few swigs.

[Dervacumen]

Oddly enough I was at Target right after my post above and picked up a bottle of Jarritos Mexican Cola.  It's stocked with quite a few other flavors, and runs $0.89.

[MaxVolume]

Tamarind is nasty.  As is durian.  When I was in Thailand everybody was like, "here tastes this wonderful fruit that smells like old unwashed feet, smells like hell, tastes like heaven" and ya know what?  That shizzle tastes like it smells.  Old feet.  Gross.  Any concoction, no matter how watered down, that contains either I'm more than happy to steer clear of.

LOL... I'm not gonna ask how you know what "old feet" tastes like, but I get what you're saying.

[danny_galaga]

Plenny cane sugar in Australia, so these threads are always amusing (",)

[MaxVolume]

Plenny cane sugar in Australia, so these threads are always amusing (",)

Yeah, rub it in. 

Actually, cane sugar used to be cheap and readily available in the U.S. too, until Archer Daniels Midland made a major push to increase import duties on cane sugar to push the cost up over their originally-more-expensive high-fructose corn syrup so they could dominate the sweetener market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Daniels_Midland#Agricultural_subsidies

[MaxVolume]

Not everything is a corn syrup conspiracy.   

Perhaps... but this IS.  I'd expect a self-confessed "curmudgeon" like yourself to remember how this all went down, and why.

[SNAAKE]

"brooklyn" cane suger cream soda is godlike.

too bad you can only find it in....brooklyn

[Mysterioii]

Tamarind is nasty.  As is durian.  When I was in Thailand everybody was like, "here tastes this wonderful fruit that smells like old unwashed feet, smells like hell, tastes like heaven" and ya know what?  That shizzle tastes like it smells.  Old feet.  Gross.  Any concoction, no matter how watered down, that contains either I'm more than happy to steer clear of.

Agree on the durian, but I'm ok with tamarind in certain forms.  Don't want to drink it as a soda though.  My wife is Thai, we've visited her home twice, and I've eaten it right off the tree in their backyard.  In it's freshest form it's not bad, just a bit tart but still sweet.  A lot of Indian restaurants around here serve tamarind sauce as a dipping sauce with their naan and that's fine too.  Now, look around at asian and indian markets and you'll see squashed bricks of it, outer casing and all, wrapped in plastic, and yeah that's not too appealing.

Durian though.... yeah I agree.  And, my wife loves it.  Luckily it's not in the house that often.  She actually had me try some durian ice cream which wasn't TOO revolting, but even that tasted off...  and I'm a big fat bastard so if I won't eat the ice cream that's saying a lot...   

I don't recall eating a single thing there that I would consider "gritty" though, and we spent 5 weeks there total across 2 trips, but I was eating mostly home cooking so that probably made a big difference.

[Mysterioii]

Durian looks an awful lot like sour sop but wiki doesn't indicate they're related.  Loves me some sour sop ice cream though.

Haven't heard of sour sop before.... I checked it out, it does physically resemble durian.  According to wikipedia it tastes something like:

...a combination of strawberry and pineapple with sour citrus flavor notes contrasting with an underlying creamy flavor reminiscent of coconut or banana.

Where as from what I understand the general consensus about durian is that it tastes like:

ass.

All kidding aside it's usually described as smelling like dirty diapers, but since I've got a two-year-old generating fresh examples daily I've got to honestly say that I wouldn't go THAT far.  It doesn't remotely smell good though.  A lot of hotels forbid people from bringing it into the lobby to prevent people from offending other guests.  Hard to describe the taste... it pretty much tastes like how it smells.  Kind of like Satan's ear wax.  Creamy, though.

Some people have apparently been killed by them falling out of trees.... the trees are high, the fruit are large and heavy, with that hard spiky exterior. 

[Gray_Area]

Corn syrup....margarine......all these things are almost a hundred years old. Just took them a while to get dug in.

Where as from what I understand the general consensus about durian is that it tastes like:

ass.

Hahahahah. Only a third-world up-bringing could infuse a taste for some things, eh?

And there isn't sand in India and the far east to get into the food.


@SNAAKE: Oh. No mexicanos hanging round the HD here. Half the staff are hispanic, though.

[SNAAKE]

then you live in a mexican-free zone lol

every morning on my way to work I see about 30 of them ready to work. they are standing around the dunkin donunts and grocery store. idea is, someone may have some kind of construction gig and they'd just pick random people for the job. thats gotta be terrible. waiting hours then have like nothing to do. one has to wonder...do they make any money at all

[Gray_Area]

then you live in a mexican-free zone lol

every morning on my way to work I see about 30 of them ready to work. they are standing around the dunkin donunts and grocery store. idea is, someone may have some kind of construction gig and they'd just pick random people for the job. thats gotta be terrible. waiting hours then have like nothing to do. one has to wonder...do they make any money at all

Actually, no, not at all. But most of them are at the mall (all day) and Walmart (all night) shopping. Then you have the anti-loitering codes that keep even the bums from selling papers. (Which is fine, because I don't read the paper.)

[MaxVolume]

Corn syrup....margarine......all these things are almost a hundred years old. Just took them a while to get dug in.

Educate yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hfcs

It's not simple "almost a hundred years old" corn syrup, as ADM would have you believe.  It's specifically modified, and was MORE expensive than importing cane sugar until ADM lobbied to raise tariffs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hfcs#Use_as_a_replacement_for_sugar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Daniels_Midland#Agricultural_subsidies

Clear enough?

[Le Chuck]

I don't recall eating a single thing there that I would consider "gritty" though, and we spent 5 weeks there total across 2 trips, but I was eating mostly home cooking so that probably made a big difference.

Never got gritty food in Thailand.  Lovely country and have considered moving there.  All my grit came for spending years in barren wasteland countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. 

[Mysterioii]

I don't recall eating a single thing there that I would consider "gritty" though, and we spent 5 weeks there total across 2 trips, but I was eating mostly home cooking so that probably made a big difference.

Never got gritty food in Thailand.  Lovely country and have considered moving there.  All my grit came for spending years in barren wasteland countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

We're planning on going back for another 3 weeks in January (their cool season).  It's going to be an interesting trip with a 2 and a half year old.... with flight time, layovers, getting to the airport early for check-in and the long drive from Bangkok to her parents' house out in the country it's about a 36 hour trip door-to-door....  If it were entirely up to me I'd wait until the kiddo was a little older...  but it's not entirely up to me...   

I'm sure the wife would love to move back there full time as we get older but I'm not a hot-weather person, I could see maybe travelling there for the cool season if retirement funds allow for the back-and-forth travel....  but I don't think I could stay there full time.

[Le Chuck]

I don't recall eating a single thing there that I would consider "gritty" though, and we spent 5 weeks there total across 2 trips, but I was eating mostly home cooking so that probably made a big difference.

Never got gritty food in Thailand.  Lovely country and have considered moving there.  All my grit came for spending years in barren wasteland countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

We're planning on going back for another 3 weeks in January (their cool season).  It's going to be an interesting trip with a 2 and a half year old.... with flight time, layovers, getting to the airport early for check-in and the long drive from Bangkok to her parents' house out in the country it's about a 36 hour trip door-to-door....  If it were entirely up to me I'd wait until the kiddo was a little older...  but it's not entirely up to me...   

I'm sure the wife would love to move back there full time as we get older but I'm not a hot-weather person, I could see maybe travelling there for the cool season if retirement funds allow for the back-and-forth travel....  but I don't think I could stay there full time.

I made the trip with a 2 year old and a 3 year old.  We went all the way up to Chiang Rai and down to Koh Chang as well.  Wasn't that bad.  Just have the Ipad stocked with spongebob. 

[shmokes]

I'd love to vacation there and have four or five custom suits made while I'm there.

[Vigo]

Picked up a case at Sam's club today. I've had a few different foreign cokes, but to be honest the part I love best is having it straight out of a glass bottle. (And not those overpriced baby bottles they normally sell around here) 

[Gray_Area]

It's not simple "almost a hundred years old" corn syrup, as ADM would have you believe.  It's specifically modified, and was MORE expensive than importing cane sugar until ADM lobbied to raise tariffs.

It's all always a conspiracy, though. Capitalism does that.