What is it?
Walmart’s store brand Great Value brings some excitement to your morning by releasing a Frosted Mystery Flavored Toaster Pastry. It comes in a fun multicolored box complete with question marks and a magnifying glass. The pastries themselves have white frosting and crunchy white bits but most intriguing is its clear filling that doesn’t give off any clues to its real flavor.
How is it?
As mentioned above, the mystery aspect is well executed throughout both the product and packaging. So well done in that regard. These also had a nice doughy taste that was pleasantly surprising.
However, if we go back to the mystery flavor aspect of it, it might’ve been taken a little too far as I can’t figure out for the life of me what it could be. I enjoyed eating them as the mixtures of textures between the crunchy bits, frosting, dough, and sticky filling were all very satisfying. The flavor, though? I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE.
I ate an entire box, dissected one to isolate the filling, and even asked friends for help, but all to no avail. They have a sweet, definitely fruity taste but not enough flavor to lead my taste buds to anything more specific. I couldn’t even narrow it down to some potentials.
Is there anything else I need to know?
The ingredients list does offer up a morsel of info in that white grape juice concentrate is one of the things listed. However, upon further thought, this is likely how they executed the clear filling because it also does say natural flavors too.
Since toaster pastries are meant to be, well, toasted, I thought this action would help me out and unearth its true flavor. Did it work? Absolutely not. I was still stumped eating the warmed-up concoction.
Conclusion:
This is a decent store brand Pop-Tart that’s kind of tasty and fun with its white/clear elements that beg you to investigate the mystery! However, anticipation and excitement soon leads to frustration as you realize the flavor isn’t nearly intense enough to guide you anywhere. What a bummer.
Purchased Price: $1.00
Size: 6-pack
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 6 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2 pastries) 390 calories, 9 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 250 milligrams of sodium, 74 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 40 grams of sugar and 3 grams of protein.
I was similarly stumped by the fruity flavor…anyone know if/when the true flavor will be revealed? If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say it’s apple pie.
I ate one without looking at the filling, because I felt it would impact my perception. A lot of guesses going around based on the clear filling, which I think was intentional to mislead. I tasted a bit of blueberry flavor. Great Value already has a blueberry pastry, so I guessed blueberry muffin. Pop-Tarts has a blueberry muffin flavor and Great Value seems to copy most Pop-Tarts flavors.
To me it tasted like lemon, like a lemon square
Mystery candy: Good
Mystery pastry: Bad
These look totally unappetizing
If anything, you’ve given more weight to the argument we eat with our eyes, and, how much appearance and colors contribute to our perception of “taste.” There was a taste-test video on YouTube which has a woman testing a single bite of frosted cake — 5 or 6 varieties. Every single one of them is the same vanilla sheet cake, with vanilla frosting, but each slice had a different food coloring added. She said the red was “way too sweet” but the yellow was “fresh and more tart.” They were identical in every way.
It’s likely if the filling was pink or red, you’d say “oh yeah, that’s strawberry” or if it was purple “oh yeah, that’s grape.” Etc.
It’s possible there really IS a mystery flavor going on here… but it’s also likely that this fruit filling isn’t terribly different than the filling on MANY commercial products like these toaster pastries, and while they may well be apple flavoring, or cherry flavoring, or lime, etc., really the base is just going to be a sweet gel with sugar, perhaps a bit of citric acid, and a lot of color. Lots of color. And that’s why you can’t distinguish them much when blindfolded or color blind.
My guess is between one of three things Apple , pineapple, and lemon