Sesame Snack

Sesame Snack

I've seen plenty of Asian sesame snacks like this, but there's apparently a very similar Greek one. Can you guess which of the above is from Greece and which is from Taiwan? Both are packaged in 100g bars of sweet sesame goodness, but there's one important difference: the Taiwanese version has a bit of salt in it. The ingredients listed for the Greek one are: sesame(67%), glucose syrup, sugar, and honey; the Taiwanese one contains sesame(66.7%), sugar(20.7%), maltose(7.5%), and salt(0.1%). It's funny to think that there's probably corn in the Greek one, given that glucose syrup is usually made from cornstarch.

The black and white ones of the same height are from Taiwan and the shorter white one is from Greece. The text on the package on the right is going in the right direction and literally says "white sesame candy". The black one says "black sesame candy", as you'd expect. I'm told that the Greek on the Greek one says it's Macedonian, but I don't know if it makes any difference.

The Greek version is slightly flatter and has molded grooves for breaking it apart going the other way. It doesn't break cleanly and it's hard to break a long bar like that off in one piece though, so the grooves appear to be mostly decorative. I used a large cleaver to cut these but they still broke into smaller chunks. The Taiwanese ones pop apart fairly easily and fairly cleanly, though.

Now that I've tried all three, I think I prefer the taste of the Taiwanese ones, but they're harder than the Greek version so they're a little harder to eat. It'd be great if someone made some using the Taiwanese recipe and the Greek molds. Then again, it's probably for the best that I don't eat too much :)