Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
I’m not sure when I became a dried fruit guy, but I’m assuming it happened somewhere around the time I got a Costco membership. Suddenly, an array of exotic trail mixes were laid before me. There was more to this world than wrinkled drupes. Bananas, cherries, papayas… CRAISINS??? They were all in play.
Thus, I was pretty excited to receive a sample pack from California’s Mariani Dried Fruit. Not only did this appear to be a cut above the cubed and smushed fiber I’d normally only find next to cashews and yogurt chips, but it came from a family-owned company with origins on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea once whence my own family once emigrated.
But then, a problem. I opened up my sample bag before review and ate, well, a bunch of berries. My daughter finished off the rest. So while I assure you the mixed berries are crushable and satisfying, I was left to craft a review beyond “my family raided two bags worth before I could write about it.”
Fortunately, I had some backup strawberries to review on top of the mix that worked so well. Welp, let’s talk about them.
Sweetened dried strawberries: B
You’re getting full strawberries dried down to about one-third their normal size. It’s a little unsettling to look at. The texture is a problem as well; the dried berries are dense. Not chewy, but just a little bit unappealing upon first bite. Think about how an organic gummy would feel in your mouth; kinda weird, right?
Once you get through that, you get sweet, full-bodied fruit flavor. It’s unmistakable strawberry, coated with just enough sugar to be a hit in any child’s cereal. I don’t think Mariani needs that extra sweetness, but I also understand there’s a whole wide spectrum of strawberry flavor from tart to almost savory, so this helps create a uniform taste across each bag.
I like these strawberries better as smaller chunks of a mix, but they’re fine on their own. Not something I’d seek out, but something I enjoy. While that extra sugar and 140 calories per serving ensure I won’t think of this as a healthy snack, I’m getting some fiber out of the deal. That’s apparently something you worry about when you’re 40.
Berries n’ Cherries: A
This was absolutely my jam and my daughter’s as well, apparently. When you’re able to create a moderately healthy snack a 40-year-old and a six-year-old can share, that’s a good sign. My only regret is not having more, so she could open a fresh bag, decide she no longer likes them and never touch them again.
This would not have been a problem for me. Dried cherries and blueberries are the best part of my default Costco trail mix; the snack I buy when I just killed off a family sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos on my own and want to eat “healthy.” With Mariani’s they’re even better, shriveled into tiny, chewy capsules that burst with flavor and a satisfying texture with each bite.
You’re paying a premium for that quality. As you can see in the screenshot above (because, again, we ate both sample bags before I could take a picture. I am a true professional), you’re looking at more than $1.25 per ounce. Which means by the time I’m done (because there’s no chance in hell I’m stopping at a single ounce of snack food) I’ve eaten what would otherwise be a 12-ounce bag of potato chips worth of food.
That makes it more of a luxury than I’d like, but I can’t say it’s not worth it. While I’d OK with skipping the full strawberries, the Berries n’ Cherries mix is exactly what I wanted it to be. Now I just need to figure out where to buy more so my daughter can get immediately sick of them.
Would I (eat) it instead of a Hamm’s?
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I eat Mariani Berries over a cold can of Hamm’s?
Well, a bit of a berries to beer comparison here, but if you made me the very weird one-or-the-other offer, I’d take you up on the nut-free trail mix. Probably not the strawberries, but those weren’t too bad either.