Thursday, October 25, 2012

Review: Larabar Uber Apple Turnover Fruit & Nut Bar


Like I said in my last Larabar review, I've been hard on Larabar product in general in my reviews, but I found that I liked the first bar that I tried out of their Uber line of bars that I had the last time.  With that positive outcome, I was anxious to give this Larabar Uber Apple Turnover Fruit & Nut Bar a try as it was once again from their sweet and salty Uber bar line.  Like the last, I picked this up on sale at Kroger for $0.99 and it comes in at 1.42 ounces with 190 calories and has three grams of protein.  Like all bars in this line, Uber means awesome and while the last bar was not awesome, so to speak, it was quite could. Could Uber continue its winning streak?  I guess you'll just have to keep reading to find out!



One admirable thing about Larabar products is their simplicity and limited amount of ingredients.  In the sake of this bar, this was a bit above the norm in number of ingredients in the fact that it had nine of them.  Compared to some products, nine is very low number, but that's a lot for a Larabar product.  The ingredients in this bar included walnuts, dried apples, brown rice syrup, raisins, dates, pecans, honey, sea salt and cinnamon.  As you can see, a lot of those ingredients are clearly visible in the picture and are actually quite large.  While the honey and syrup were not visible, they did add a stickiness to the bar, so their presence was certainly felt as well.  The only ingredient that I really couldn't track down was the sea salt and the cinnamon, but since those are just granules, I didn't expect to find anything.  Anyway, once I took a whiff of this bar, it had a nice smell of apples with a slight hint of cinnamon.  I love that flavor combination and that made me even more anxious to dive in.

When I dove in, the first thing I tasted was the dried apples and being that this is an apple turnover bar, that is definitely a very big positive.  After that, the next thing I tasted was the walnuts and then the two other dried fruits (raisins and dates).  The apples, raisins and dates added a tangy sweetness to the bar, along with the honey, and the nuts added a slight heartiness to the bar.  One thing that was odd about the nuts was that they were not particularly crunch and where sort of soft, kind of like what happens to granola when it sits in milk for a while.  Not what I expected, but it was that softness of nuts that made this bar quite chewy as opposed to crunchy.  The dried fruits then added a gummy like chewy quality to the grainy quality of the nuts.  One taste that was initially missing as I made my way through each bite was the cinnamon.  It was missing so much that I was wondering if I got a defective bar.  After each bite though, I took a couple second break and it was during that break that the cinnamon heat came on and boy, oh boy, did it come on strong.  I wold say that it was almost too spicy and that's coming from someone that very much loves cinnamon.  Still, it wasn't so bad that it ruined the bar, but instead it just gave it a nice little kick.  The sea salt taste, while not prevalent, was also somewhat noticeable to provide the salty kick to counteract the strong sweetness of the dried fruits and honey.

Buy It or Fly By It?  This is my second Uber bar that I've tried and much like the last one, I have to give this a BUY IT rating because I thoroughly enjoyed it.  My one tiny complaint is that I wish the cinnamon flavor was toned down a bit, but all in all, this is an excellent apple flavored treat with a nice chewy and mild nut crunch.  I haven't gone wrong with these Uber products yet and I hope that continues, because that would be an accomplishment after the underwhelming success of the regular Larabar products on this blog.

BUY IT!!

1 comment:

  1. Yum, these are my favorite. The apple pie one is okay but the bananas foster is hands down the best one (in my opinion) :)

    ReplyDelete

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