Weird International Flavors Of Your Favorite Snacks

When you sit down to enjoy your favorite snack, you expect them to taste a certain way. Then you travel abroad and realize the locals have very different views on what makes snacking so delicious and fun. You may enjoy some of these bizarre-sounding international flavors — or you might run straight for the toilet. 

Japanese ice cream company Akagi Nyugyo has bizarre tastes in popsicles. They've made corn chowder and cream stew-flavored treats, but since this is Japan, people kept buying and eating them. So they went even crazier, releasing a line of "Napolitan"-flavored popsicles. Napolitan, in case you were wondering, is a Japanese pasta dish made with onions (normal), green peppers (also normal), and ketchup (why). It's basically a weird toddler version of how spaghetti works, but conveniently frozen and on a stick.

Get past the nightmare-inducing mascot on the packaging — a hyped-up kid with a question mark for a left eye, gobbling up Napolitan with a mouth wider than a basketball — and you're left with a sucker that smells like tomato. The brave souls at Rocket News tried it, though they melted it down and drank a small bit of it like a shot. They didn't really enjoy it, certainly not enough to dig into another one. As they put it, "this is more spaghetti turned into candy than frozen pasta on a stick." If that sounds delectable to you, Japan is ready for your tourism dollars. Otherwise, just boil a pot of spaghetti like everyone else. Without ketchup.

Back to the culinary weirdness of Japan (half this article is about the Land of the Rising Sun's propensity to consume weird food...but you probably already assumed that). According to Kotaku, small shops in Japan have a thing for truly odd ice cream flavors. Depending on where you go, you could get anything from soy sauce, shark fin (yes, they use real shark fin), sea urchin, cow tongue, peppered eel, and octopus (with real octo-bits), among others. It's just like crumbled Oreos in your ice cream, only so much worse. 

Probably the strangest, most "how could this possibly be good" flavor of all would be horse meat. If bits of horse meat in your ice cream isn't skeevy enough, it's actually even worse than that...because it's raw horse meat. So not only are you mixing your dessert with the meat of an animal you probably haven't eaten and never wanted to, but the ice cream makers didn't even bother to cook it. Dig in! 

At least horsemeat's lean, so as long as you're not gagging the whole way though, you're snacking healthy. Kind of.

When you think of flavored chips, you probably think "nacho cheese," or "ranch," or even "chili" — you probably don't think "ham." But that's exactly what Spain has to offer: Sabor a Jamon Ruffles, which literally translates to "ham-flavored Ruffles." So basically, it's a salty snack food mixed with a salty meat. Please don't add extra salt. 

The people of Spain, according to the aptly-named jamon.com, love their ham, particularly from the Iberico pig. They particularly love Iberico de Bellota, which is when the pig dines on tons of acorns, giving its meat a succulent, nutty flavor. So it makes sense they would make their potato chips taste like that too. Kind of. 

According to both MunchiesBlog and JunkFoodGuy, they're not atrocious, but not too terrific. They look just like regular Ruffles, and have a hint of ham flavor to them. After that, it's mostly just a potato chip crunch and ... that's it. Pick up a bag when in Spain if you like, but you'll probably do just as well to eat a regular old ham sandwich with chips on top. And then go get some actual Iberico de Bellota because that sounds delicious.

You're not likely to find chips that taste like seafood in the US, but in Asia they're all over the place. Perhaps the strangest is Pringles' line of softshell crab-flavored chips, for those people who love the taste of fish, but not the act of eating them.

Made from crab extract, which is probably about as crabby as you could expect a potato chip to be, these chips apparently really do taste like crab. Whether this is a good or bad thing is left up to your taste buds. Though if you're fine eating chips that taste like dill pickles, why not go all the way and eat up a crunchy crab-chip?

If you're not from Japan, the craziest Kit-Kat flavor you've probably ever had is white chocolate. In Japan, meanwhile, they're so Kit-Kat crazy, they'll throw basically any flavor into the mix, sell it, and it will probably make money.

According to CNN, Kit-Kats became huge in Japan due to a combination of expert marketing and linguistic luck: "kitto katsu" means "you will surely win" in Japanese, so every time they break off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar, they feel like the champion of the world. 

There are currently over 300 flavors of Japanese Kit-Kats, and a lot of them sound like somebody made them up to troll the internet. You've got wasabi-flavored Kit-Kats, sake, pumpkin pudding, pear, soybeans, purple sweet potatoes, red bean sandwich, and roasted corn, among so, so many others. Most of these have no business being lumped together with chocolate and wafers. And yet, clearly people enjoy them, because Japan is still making them.

That said, they've also got some flavors that would probably rock America's world, like strawberry/blueberry cheesecake. That, mixed with chocolate? Yes, please.

If you can't make it to Japan to partake in Kit-Kat weirdness, try hopping over to the UK and making your way to the nearest Taco Bell. Yes, that Taco Bell, whose UK branches have decided, for whatever reason, to add melted Kit-Kat bars to their quesadillas. Even the residents of the Land of Chocolate deserve to think outside the bun, apparently.

Officially called the Kit Kat Chocodilla, Brand Eating reports that it's basically a branded version of the regular Chocodilla. That's another of the Bell's non-US creations, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a quesadilla with melted chocolate chips in place of cheese and meat. Ever have Nutella on toast? It's like that, only you pay Taco Bell for it. The Kit-Kat Chocodilla adds Kit-Kat bars to the mix. It even comes inside a Kit-Kat wrapper — well, if Taco Bell UK's Facebook is to be believed, that is.

Is it any good? Probably — it's chocolate and a tortilla. Still, best hope the Bell doesn't skimp on the good stuff. Teen Vogue highlighted an unsatisfied customer whose Chocodilla had just the thinnest layer of chocolate you can imagine. Seriously, Taco Bell — if you're going to make your fake Mexican food even faker with chocolate of all things, you might as well go full-throttle.

Outside of Scotland, haggis is perhaps the ultimate dare food. If you can eat a sheep's heart, liver, and lungs — all wrapped up inside the sheep's own stomach — then you are truly the adventurous type. But good luck having haggis in the States, as anything with sheep's lung in it has been banned in the US since 1971, according to the BBC. But that doesn't mean you can't have things that taste like haggis, though we can't guarantee you'll enjoy it. 

These chips, by Mackie's of Scotland, are flavored like peppered haggis, so if actual haggis too much for you, perhaps this is a great starting point. After all, once you remove all the weird organs wrapped inside another weird organ, you're basically left with the taste of lamb. If you can handle the taste of lamb in your potato chip, you might do just fine with these.

Perhaps you want an even weirder flavor of chip? Mackie's has you covered with prawn cocktail, venison and cranberry, roast ham, and even whiskey and haggis, for when you need a bigger kick than what mere pepper can give you.

Most people see Tang as an orange-flavored drink, because that's the most popular kind. But there's Tang for just about any fruit out there — though good luck finding it in the States. What's that you say? You want lemon and pepper-flavored Tang? Well, if you must, it's off to Pakistan you go.

The above commercial tries to sell viewers on the wonders of lemon-pepper Tang, by showing various hot and sweaty people gawking at cool and dry people walking around with lemons inexplicably floating over their heads. The voiceover guy then says ... something. But we do understand "Tang lemon and pepper," as if the image of a shaker sprinkling pepper over a lemon didn't make that clear. The image of little black specks in what's basically lemonade seems positively anti-appetizing, but if Pakistan likes it, more power to Pakistan. 

The country also has lemon and mint Tang, because confusing your tongue with a mix of fruit and toothpaste sounds like good, good fun.

Cheetos that taste like Mountain Dew is that perfect combination of "weird" and "absolutely perfect." It might actually be the nerdiest snack of all time. Instead of settling down for a round of Skyrim with a bag of Cheetos and a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, just grab a big bag of Mountain Dew Cheetos. It's the best of both worlds, and you don't risk spilling sticky Dew all over the controller. 

And apparently, they taste like Mountain Dew — one person on Reddit who tried it said it tasted like "sweet lemon lime chips." Sadly, these miraculous snacks were available as a limited-time offer back in 2014, so for now, all you can do is hope Frito-Lay brings it back some day, so you can order it from JBOX.com (a site where you can order all sorts of cool Japanese things). There are soy sauce Cheetos though, so if you want something weird to tide you over until the company does the Dew again, have at it.

You put cream in coffee. You put milk in coffee. But do you put jelly in coffee? Probably not...unless you're in Japan, hitting up a Starbucks, and have a really, really strange palate. 

As reported by Rocket News 24, over summer 2016, Japanese Starbucks introduced the Coffee-Jelly Frappuccino. This thing wasn't just flavored like jelly: there was actual jelly at the bottom, complete with an extra-large straw so you could more easily drink up the chunks. 

But this wasn't grape jelly — even Japan's not that weird. Well, not yet anyway. Instead, the jelly was made from Starbucks' own roast espresso blend, coupled with a custard vanilla sauce, some actual (frozen) liquid coffee, and whipped cream on top. This is indisputable proof that the Unicorn Frap wasn't even close to the weirdest thing Starbucks could dream up.

Perhaps Starbucks will bring this drink back some day. Either that, or they'll just think of something even goofier. After all, the jelly frap's predecessor was a baked cheesecake frap. 

If there's one thing we've learned from all of this it's that, clearly, Japan will try anything.