Macheesmo

Welcome to the latest issue of Guess The Food! You know the deal. I give you the nutrition info and ingredient list and you try to guess what popular product this is!

This package caught my eye for two reasons: first, my family actually eats them somewhat regularly. Second, I find the huge trans fat note on the package to be strange. Mostly because I would’ve never thought that there was trans fats in this product. It’d be sort of like seeing a Gluten-Free label on a steak. Well, sure. DUH.

But, just because it doesn’t have trans fats, it doesn’t mean that this is particularly healthy. I don’t consider them unhealthy necessarily, but I think they are reaching a bit to find something healthy-ish to say about this food.

Let’s see if you can guess it!

Nutritional Info

The first thing that should definitely be noted here is that in no universe is this serving size equivalent to what people actually eat. I can tell you that my family of two adults and two tiny humans can easily eat a whole bag of these during one meal. Ain’t no thing.

So the idea that there are seven servings in this bag is pretty ridiculous. Multiply all the nutritional info by at least two.

There are a few things worth noting on the nutritional panel:

• While there isn’t any trans fats in the food, there is plenty of fat! This is no shocker if you look at the ingredients list (which has oil as the second ingredient).
• Sodium is the only double digit percentage if you go by their percentages, but like I said, nobody eats that few of these things.
• The sugar content in this is 75% from the natural sugar in the thing and 25% from added sugar.

If you could guess this just off the nutritional stuff then you would be a good guesser. Let’s give you some ingredients to work with as well!

Ingredients

Line ’em up! There’s not too many things on this list that I had to google, which I consider a good thing.

Sweet Potatoes – Good old sweet potatoes. These are sometimes marketed as yams in American supermarkets, which is very confusing.

Vegetable Oil – Plain vegetable oil. Nothing fancy.

Rice Flour – Interestingly, I think these may be gluten free but it didn’t say that on the package, so I’m not 100% sure. The product does have a lot of flour substitutes though, this being the main one.

Cane sugar – There’s that added sugar we talked about!

Tapioca Starch – Another flour substitute that is also a thickener. It’s used in dried form for this though.

Dextrin – Used as a thickener.

Corn Starch – Another flour substitute and thickener. Kind of surprised to see this many thickeners on this list.

Sea salt – Fancy salt!

Bblack pepper – Normal pepper.

Onion Powder – I like that this product lists the spices separately. Some packaged foods won’t do that, but I appreciate it so I can try to reproduce it if I ever get the energy to do so.

Garlic Powder – More standard spice.

Salad Mustard Powder – As far as I can tell this is twist on the standard dried mustard and not something I’ve seen in stores. I’m sure you could substitute normal dried mustard.

Natural Flavors – PHEW! I was thinking they would not have the generic natural flavors that is on every ingredient list ever. They still do!

Spice – You mean beyond the spices that are already listed above? I guess so!

Gluconic Acid – This is the only thing I had to google this time! Woohoo! This acid is an acidity regulator so it’s keeping the PH of the food at a consistent level. I have no idea why that’s important for this particular thing, but there ya go.

Xanthan Gum – More thickeners and emulsifiers. This one is the most powerful thickener on the list I think which is why there isn’t much of it I would imagine.

Guess the Food?

There ya have it! I’m not sure if this one will be hard or easy.

Can you guess the food? Leave a comment and GOOD LUCK!