Continuing our foray into the world of hot & spicy snack food, we ran across this box of Ass Kickin’ Habanero Popcorn while doing some random grocery shopping the other day, and just couldn’t resist the chance to purchase it…especially since it was on sale.

We’ve only reviewed one other spicy popcorn, the Dave’s Insanity Corn, so we didn’t have many other products by which to measure this one. In fact, we’ve made some pretty good spicy popcorn just by using other spice mixes…but we wanted to give this one a go and will use Dave’s as a measuring stick for now. In many hot shops, you tend to be able to purchase bags of spicy popcorn one at a time rather than 3-in-a-box, so at least we’d get three separate tastings by which to judge this one by its merits.

OK, so here’s the bag…just like any other bag of microwave popcorn you might find. Of course, the other ones don’t have the word habanero printed on it, so this one had at least that much going for it. At least until it was popped, that is.

Taste: Seeing this mass of popcorn come out of the bag, I was pretty optimistic. The kernels were fairly evenly coated with habanero powder (the obvious in all this), and had a nice peppery smell. However, after a few handfuls were shoved into my mouth, I came to one inescapable fact.

It was just too salty. Like, really really salty.

Just imagine taking a huge salt lick and eating that…with a side of more salt that’s flavored with habanero powder. That about sums it up. I don’t know who at the factory went crazy with the salt when they were making these bags up, but they ought to be taken out, flogged, and then had some of the salt rubbed in their wounds. How could anyone ruin some perfectly good spicy popcorn by making it too salty to eat?

Overall recommendation: I hate writing anything bad about spicy food, even snack food, but this just isn’t all that good. On the offhand chance I might have had a bad bag, I waited until I had popped more than one before writing this review. Perhaps I got a bad box, who knows? Yes, it does taste really good and is very spicy. In fact, it may be a little spicier than Dave’s Insanity Popcorn. The problem is that Dave’s Popcorn has an overall taste profile which is better, and he doesn’t salt his to the gills like this. I guess you could get away with mixing it with plain popcorn to dilute the salt, but why bother? The bottom line is that I liked the taste, loved the heat level, and couldn’t stand the saltiness. ‘Nuff said.

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