Sunday, November 25, 2012

GB Glace Lakulätkä Lakrits Puck

It was Thanksgiving Weekend here in the states, and one thing that I'm thankful for is that I'm no longer in Sweden. You see, I've been traveling quite a bit these past several months and Sweden was unfortunately on my itinerary. It's not that I have a problem with Sweden, the Swedes, or even Swedish Meatballs, it's that Sweden is right next to the dreaded homeland of Salmiak: Finland.

Fortunately, I was as far away from Finland as possible (Malmö), but I could not escape the long arm of Finnish delicacies. On my way back to Denmark, I stopped at the grocery store at the train station to find an absurd amount/variety of yogurt, a strange obsession with condiments in metal tubes, and – as you probably guessed – plenty of salmiak.

One thing that caught my eye was in the freezer section. Amongst a bunch of seemingly good-tasting ice cream treats, I spotted this:

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My Swedish is a little rough, but "Lakulätkä Lakrits Puck" roughly translates to "ground-up hockey puck", and is apparently how they describe the flavor of salty licorice. After confirming that the ingredienser did indeed list salmiak, I opened up the package to find this appropriately hockey-puck shaped ice-cream bar.

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I figured that nothing could ruin ice cream, so I took a big bite of the Lakulätkä. I figured wrong. The ice cream portion of the bite melted pretty quickly, leaving a half-melted candy coating to chew on. It was a lot like those chocolate-covered icecream bars, except that it was covered in awful.

The candy coating had an impressively strong taste that came roaring in after a few seconds. I was a bit hungry, so I took another bite figuring that the taste couldn't get any worse. And once again, I figured wrong. The taste of cheap salmiak candy coating quickly overwhelmed me, and I threw the remainder of the puck in the nearest rubbish bin.

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The taste stayed with me halfway to Copenhagen, and took nearly half a pack of gum to finally rid myself of. Considering that the Lakulätkä Lakrits Puck was mostly ice cream, I'll rate it as almost edible.