China has some very interesting culinary habits some of which folks from the west will find just outright whacky. One slightly normal but definitely strange habit is the Chinese love for pork products, and in particular the ham sausage (火腿肠). Now Rovio and Chinese pork products producer, JoyCome, have partnered together to bring Angry Birds and ham sausages together to create Angry Birds meat snacks.
Originally the partnership between Rovio and Joycome was only promotional, where if you bought some bacon you would get some Angry Birds sausage. Now it appears that they’ve taken the partnership further with an assorted meat pack.
Sold at nearly every convenience store in Beijing (I bought mine at my local 7-11), the Angry Birds snack packs go for about two dollars. What you get in each bag is three packs of what looks like a condom but really is just fatty ham, three packs of fatty ham with a jalapeno, two packs of breakfast sausages, two regular flavored sausages and two packs of black pepper sausages.
Each meat product is individually packaged, once opened it feels like the meat has a thing film of grease covering it. Conventional wisdom tells me that if meat smells weird don’t put it in my mouth, but there is something special about the way the Angry Birds meat smells, a tangy peppery pungent smell of pork, that oddly entices me to consume it.
The “red bird”, jalapeno ham slices, probably is the best tasting of the five. Like a slice of bacon where the fat is on the outside the “red bird” was particularly chewy. Getting past the fatty gelatinous ring and actually hitting the meat, it begins to feel like eating a slice of thick pepperoni. The only downside is how ridiculously spicy the jalapeno is. The “yellow bird”, regular ham slices, on the other hand were just plain old disgusting. Unlike the “red bird” the “yellow bird” slices wasn’t flavored. Without the jalapeno flavoring the gelatinous fat taste gives the meat an oily taste that just tastes sick.
While the ham slices were interesting, the sausages were the star of the whole bag. The “black bird” black pepper sausages were an instant winner. Unlike the bland tasteless original flavour “pig” sausages, the black pepper adds a different dimension, it makes it more like something I would actually eat. It tasted like a good Slim Jim. The “white bird” breakfast links were good too. In fact if the packaging didn’t read pork, I could have sworn it was biting into a chicken/turkey sausage. Eating the sausages gave me a big hankering of eggs.
Now if I only had some eggs, I could finish the rest of the bag.
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