Thursday, September 6, 2012

Review: Balance Bar Gold Lemon Meringue Crunch Bar


It's no secret that I eat a lot of protein/health bars for this blog.  In fact, reviewing protein/health bars was the primary reason I started this blog because I decided I was going to start eating them as a way to add weight/bulk to my frame.  Now that I've been doing this for many months, I've eaten a ton of these things and I'm starting to get used to them (I don't want to say tired of them).  Anyway, when a manufacturer like Balance Bar sends me a box of bars to try out, I feel obligated to do a review of every flavor, so here we go with this Lemon Meringue Crunch bar from their Gold line of bars.  This one is the Balance Bar standard of 1.76 ounces and has 200 calories.  It also has fourteen grams of protein and what makes it a "Gold" bar is that it is based on the premise of "Three Indulgent Layers".  Let's see how indulgent this one really is...



Since this bar is named Lemon Meringue Crunch, it's obviously intended to emulate a Lemon Meringue pie, except in a crunchy form.  So, with "Three Indulgent Layers", this bar consists of a base layer of the standard rice crisp layer that you'll find in the majority of these protein/health bars.  The second layer is that of what I would call a lemon cookie,.  Clearly, that layer is meant to add the additional crunch to the bar to make it worthy of its name and is meant to emulate the pie crust.  Finally, the third layer is made up of a slightly yellow yogurt icing, which is clearly meant to emulate the meringue from a lemon meringue pie.  In terms of smell, I could definitely tell this was lemon as it had that tart and strong, but not overpowering, lemon smell as soon as I took it out of the packaging.

Biting into this bar, I admit that I was a little fearful.  When these bars focus on fruit or minty type flavors, they can tend to be overpowering in their taste.  Fortunately, that was not the case with this bar.  The lemon flavor, while definitely noticeable, was mild in its taste and not something that was going to overcome you as you made your way through the bar.  In fact, this was an "easy" eat as the lemon flavor was mild and tart enough that it kept the bar interesting, but didn't make me grow sick of it by the end of the bar or make my teeth rattle by being too tart.  The rice crisp and lemon cracker/cookie/pie crust made for a nice crunch and certainly wasn't of the tooth breaking quality, which was also nice.  Finally the icing, or meringue, added a nice cooling compliment to the mild tartness of the bar to make it slightly more tame and tolerable.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Like I said, I was fearful before I bit into this bar but it turned out to be a pretty decent product and for that reason, I give it a BUY IT rating.  It's just the right amount of lemon to not cross the line from being tolerable to being unbearable and that's what makes this bar worth anyone's time if they are looking for a bar that is outside the typical chocolate or peanut butter flavors of a lot of these protein/health bars.  Still, you may want to eat this in moderation though because too many of these could cause you to over-lemon yourself.

BUY IT!!
Buy Balance Bar Gold Lemon Meringue Crunch Bars at Amazon.com

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...