EOG - Issue 4 - Keebler's "Harvest Bakery" Crackers

Product: Keebler Harvest Bakery Snack Crackers
Manufacturer: Keebler Company, Battle Creek, MI

The minds at Keebler just keep on brewing up new foodstuffs and ideas.

The makers of my number one ultimate fave snack cracker, the Club cracker,
have struck again. This time, they present the Harvest Bakery line of snack
crackers, which come in three varieties; Country Butter, Multigrain, and
Cornbread.

The claim by Keebler is that these HB crackers have all the good taste of bread,
in a cracker, a claim that is a hit or a miss depending on the variety of cracker.

We shall start with the Country Butter variety. And as we do start, I am asking
myself the question, does this taste like the country style butter-top bread
perfected by outfits such as Nissen and Home Pride? Kind of, I guess, but it
also tastes like an amalgam of some of the other snack crackers out there.
Imagine genetically splicing Keebler's Club cracker with a Ritz cracker. Well,
then you've got the flavor of the HB Country Butter snack cracker. Is this a
bad thing? Not at all. As I mentioned, the Club cracker is my personal favorite.
The Ritz is my number two favorite. So you see, this is a pretty good thing.

This brings us to the HB Multigrain variety. Once again, the cracker does not
taste that much like multi-grain bread, but rather like a similar culinary "Brundle-fly"* in which the DNA of the Club and Ritz cracker is mixed in with that of another Nabisco classic, the Sociables, along with a few other flavors. Once again, a fine cracker with a decent flavor, but
not the "just-like-bread" taste which is alluded to by Keebler.

And now, my favorite HB variant, Cornbread. It is on this cracker that Keebler really nails the whole "bread flavor" thing. These crackers, despite having the harder cracker texture, taste pretty damn close to cornbread. Hands down, this is my favorite of the three products in the HB line.
(In fact, here is an interesting note...the Cornbread variety cracker is the only one of the three that stands out on its own and is a great snack all by itself. The other two varieties are really better off with something on top of them, such as cheese. And if you look on the boxes, the Country Butter and Multigrain crackers are shown with some kind of topping on them, while the Multigrain is not. Apparently this taste fact didn't escape the elves in the tree over at Keebler.)

These are good crackers, even if Keebler's "tastes-like-bread" flavor claims are a bit overblown (with the exception of the Cornbread crackers). The texture and taste is generally good, and size and texture are great for entertaining, or just snacking. But I would have some cheese or tuna salad standing by to top off these things. Three chips up.

*-The term "Brundle-fly" refers to the 1980's David Cronenberg remake of the film "The Fly". In this film, the protagonist, scientist Seth Brundle, is working on a matter teleportation system akin to what we have seen on Star Trek over the years. When he tries to teleport himself using his apparatus, a stray fly gets caught in the matter stream and the DNA of the fly and the scientist merge, eventually creating a genetic amalgam of both entities, a creature known as "Brundle-fly".