A few years ago, I went through a phase of being addicted to Mire biscuits. Mostly the plain ones - basic, sure, but far too easy to eat a whole pack of without really thinking about it.
To get over that biscuit-shaped bump in my eating habits, I had to put Mire out of my mind completely. For weeks, months... for several years, in fact. It's been so long since I even looked at a pack of Mire biscuits, I didn't even know how many flavours there are now.
Using the "hello yes please consume as many biscuits as possible thanks" marketing tactic, snack maker Nomura has expanded the flavour range to cover an entire day.
Note: I didn't eat every pack in one day. Not with 366 calories, 18g of fat and 47g of carbs in each one! These days, I save my daily recommended amounts for the most deserving things, like cake slices and all-you-can-eat meat buffets. So these biscuits were eaten over a span of several weeks.
Morning Mire biscuits (corn potage)
I don't normally eat breakfast. Even if I did, corn soup wouldn't be my first choice.
Lucky for me, these don't smell or taste like soup. Both the scent and the flavour are pure sweetcorn. Fresh, recently washed, sweet and juicy corn. Which is much weirder when I'm talking about biscuits.
They taste the same - like eating freshly cooked sweetcorn in biscuit form. I don't know how that makes any sense, but the 'weird food' experience isn't always easy to describe.
As I was chewing my way through this pack, I started to notice something: the flavour powder distribution on the biscuits was seriously uneven.
You definitely don't have this problem with the plain ones.
I left the most powdery biscuits for last, in case they made me want to bin the rest of the pack. Now, those taste like salted biscuits with a fresh sweetcorn topping. How would I even know what that combo's meant to taste like? Again, the snack world works in mysterious ways.
I didn't mind the sweetcorn taste, weak or strong. It isn't something you normally get with packs of biscuits, but it didn't feel like a complete mismatch.
The only flavour biscuits should ever be from now on? Definitely not. An inspired combo made in heaven? Sadly no. An unusual but weirdly effective pairing? I guess so.
Verdict: 6/10. Not just corny, but even more corny in some places than others.
Lunchtime Mire biscuits (ginger)
I ate these as an afternoon snack. I wasn't sure if I was getting sweet ginger or tangy, sharp ginger, so I played it safe.
No overwhelming scent, and no flavour powder at all this time around. Without the info on the pack, it'd be hard to tell what flavour they were before eating one.
These are more like gingerbread biscuits (the sweet kind). And I like those, so it was a good development. Getting a mouthful of raw ginger would've been sad.
Even so, the taste is weak overall. The corn biscuits had an unbalanced flavour distribution in places, but with the ginger biscuits the flavour never gets anywhere near as strong. It also doesn't have the other usual gingerbread spices in the mix to back it up.
Nice enough. Probably better with a cup of tea.
Verdict: 5/10. Ginger included so gingerly that you can hardly taste it.
Afternoon Mire biscuits (black pepper)
To stay on the theme of 'not paying any attention to serving suggestions', I ate these as a pre-dinner snack. You could argue that's technically still afternoon.
Didn't sneeze when I opened the pack, at least. The black pepper is visible - and baked into the biscuits, not just sprinkled on top. Not much of it, but you can see that they've made a bit of effort.
It doesn't come through in the taste. It's all salt, the same plain savoury biscuit that I used to eat by the handful, half a kilo at a time. Not just more salt than pepper, far more salt than anything else.
I clearly didn't hate this taste, or I wouldn't have eaten so many of them. What I understand, now that I'm not mindlessly devouring plain biscuits, is that these aren't all that addictive on flavour alone.
Verdict: 5/10. What it lacks in black pepper, it makes up for in fond, face-stuffing memories.
Midnight Mire biscuits (garlic)
Alright, we've skipped dinner this time. Jolly good.
I did cheat yet again and eat in the early evening. I wasn't about to set an alarm for the middle of the night so I could get up for biscuits. (And honestly, I'm glad that I didn't.)
As with the gingerbread biscuits, no real smell on opening the pack. No flavour powder announcing the presence of honking great amounts of garlic.
That's always a disappointment, and a bad sign.
I've eaten a lot of very garlicky, weird but yummy foods over the years, as you'll see from my posting history. If the punch isn't there from the first big sniff, the taste probably isn't going to compensate.
Sure enough, it doesn't in this case. In fact, it gets worse.
The initial flavour is very mild garlic. Enough for someone to guess the flavour correctly if they didn't already know. Probably.
But then we hit the aftertaste. The aftertaste... is sweet. Sweet.
The garlic is weak enough that plain sugar biscuit flavour makes it through. This version isn't even salted enough to be savoury!
I was so mad, I threw these away. It was the only pack I didn't finish.
Verdict: 3/10. I think someone mixed the garlic powder and the sugar together by accident.