Jimmy O. Yang Breaks Down Chinese Snacks | Snacked

Which of Jimmy's favorites are you most interested in trying?

Saw a few folks who are complaining about lack of description. Here's the best I can do on short notice before heading off to work: 0:26 White rabbit candy tastes like condensed milk but has a texture like a tootsie roll, Starburst, mambas, sugas, now&later, airhead, taffy. It softens as it warms up. It is wrapped in a very thin rice paper that helps to keep it from sticking. It is edible rice paper, but doesn't add anything to the flavor. Still, kinda fun to play with before getting to the actual candy. 1:06 Haw flakes are compressed ground up hawthorn fruit and sugar. It is dry little disks that crumble in your mouth. Used to get it with Chinese medicine since the medicinal soups are very bitter. I'd say they taste sort of like cranberry. Sticks to the crevices of your teeth after you chew it. They are thin coin like disks, stacked and packaged. The top and bottom haw flake disk used to always be glued to the inner sleeve of thin white paper (For Westerners: it's like gift wrapping tissue paper. For asians: it's like the old school daily tear-away calendar paper with the Chinese fortune telling stuff that I'm sure most of us grew up with.) I'm not sure if they upgraded their packaging, but if you see a hawflake glued to thin white paper, unlike the white rabbit candy, this white paper IS NOT edible. We end up gnawing around the glued paper anyways when we've eaten the rest of the roll and want more... 1:42 Vita lemon tea is ... lemon flavored black tea. Not too different from Snapple or other brands. That straw sound has to do with a vacuum seal on the straw, so it pulls air back in, which gurgle. Not related to the tea, more to do with the tetrapack design. I should add that he mentions trying Vitasoy. Chinese soy milk is very different from western soy milk, which tends to be a lot thicker, sweeter, and often flavored with vanilla. Chinese soy milk is really delicate and lite in comparison, and tastes like... soybeans. As opposed to vanilla. Vita makes a whole line of beverages. Off the top of my head.. they have VLT, soymilk, malted soymilk, chocolate soymilk, chrysanthemum tea, coconut, honeydew, hk milk tea, black sesame. I like them all, but a particularly big fan of the coconut soymilk, and the chrysanthemum tea. 2:19 Lychee jelly used to be made with konjac, but kids and old people choked on them if they didn't chew well, so konrad versions are banned in the United States and many other countries. I think part of the issue was that they didn't dissolve readily if accidentally swallowed, so folks literally choked to death on the original version of these snacks. They changed the recipe, and the ones out now have a jello like texture with chewy chunks inside; the new version dissolve readily. While they come in other fruit flavors like mango and grape, these are Lychee flavor, which is sort of floral and sweet. They come in other flavors too. The konjac ones were waaaaaay better. If they still made them, I'd buy a bucket a week. Since the change to the new, safer recipe, I don't eat them very often. They are refreshing if refrigerated. In the summer, we used to freeze them and suck on them. 3:16 Sachima is a Chinese rice crispy treat. It tastes like a funnel cake squished into a square with sticky sweet syrup. That's what holds it together instead of marshmallows. Similar to rice krispies, but the texture is more airy and it's a lot stickier from the sugar syrup. Some add raisins, some sprinkle sesame on it. Basically oily fried puffy dough held with a sweet sugar syrup. Probably the first thing you notice is the higher taste of oil, and if you pinch the dough, oil will come out too. Which is why I compare it to funnel cakes more than rice krispies. It's like a rice krispie treat on steroids. I should clarify that it is not made from rice, but from fried wheat based noodles soaked in a sweet sticky syrup to hold it together. Most Americans will thing that is functionally similar to a Rice Krispies treat - which is why I use it for comparison. 4:11 Animal crackers come in different flavors, like seaweed, or butter. There's at least one other one, but I forget. Texture similar to animal crackers, but flavored, which makes em better. 5:04 Want want rice crackers, crispy and airy, with a sugar glaze sprinkled on em. They are toasty rice cracker taste, and the glaze is similar to icing / glazed donut taste. The rice crackers also come in savory or spicy flavors. 5:53 As for the moon cakes, they come in different varieties. The one he showed has lotus seed paste filling with a salted egg. The paste is very soft, dense, and sweet, similar to white bean paste in mochi. The egg yolk is firm but crumbly, and is a bit salty. The crust itself isn't very crust like, more like a thin layer of brownie skin, if you know what I mean when it comes to texture. For flavor.. sweet, maybe a little egg from the egg wash used to make it glossy. The egg yolk supposedly represents the full moon. It's a nice hit of salt as a counterpoint to the lotus seed paste. They can be pricy, but you can probably find tins of 4 around 20 to 25 bucks at your local Chinatown bakery during autumn moon festivals. The ones with multiple yolks or other fillings cost more. You can always go to a Chinese bakery year round and just buy 1 for a few bucks if you are curious. They also come in mini sizes. Old school Chinese bakeries will have these. The fancy upscale bakeries focus more on cakes and buns and might not have these year round, so go to the bakery that's been there a few decades instead of the fancy new ones for a higher chance of finding them. Hope that helped.

Holy shit ive had every single one of those growing up as an asian australian, this is probably the most nostalgic thing ive ever seen

We need jimmy on hot ones

Mooncake was so sacred he couldnt bring himself to open it

Oh man, Jimmy ate through my entire childhood. I can still hear my aunt scolding my little sister for eating half the container of jellies but it was actually me.

For those who don’t get the passion from other people talking about these snacks. These are all so nostalgic for so many people because they are so unique from a lot of the stuff you get in other regions. To anyone who hasn’t tried these, I couldn’t recommend them enough. Go to a small local asian store and you will probably find most of these. Alternatively you can find them online but they can be a bit more expensive.

Not Chinese but the coconut lychee jelly was the stuff I got when I did good at tutoring. Jimmy's right in that it's gold.

"Taiwan - Another Place in Asia" nice move.

The white rabbits are so addictive

It's so impressive that he can read Chinese soooooo well in Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghai dialect lol

But we all know the REAL Chinese snack here is Jimmy🔥.

These snacks are my childhood in a nutshell. And now that I earn my own paychecks, I've gotta go out and buy a ton of those lychee jellies to make up for all the ones my mom didn't let me eat as a kid.

about time Jimmy made it onto First we feast lmfao

Protect Jimmy O. Yang at all costs

the lychee jelly one is so relatable and on point, like we ALWAYS do that (leave them for like years, and then use it to put little sutff) 😂😂

So nostalgic, I've had all of these as a kid. Side note, I've never heard of this guy but he's funny af

Had them all as a kid in Hong Kong. They’re all delicious!

Hearing Jimmy pronounce it as LAI-CHEE is breathtaking. FINALLY.

I've eaten ALL of these in my childhood in Hong Kong and I continue to eat some of these to this day even after I've moved to the UK. There's nothing better than enjoying childhood snacks, reminiscing about how things were more simple back then.