Review: Misternosh Apple and Rhubarb Crumble

[fred_mouse]

This was bought in Western Australia, at my local IGA (supermarket), and the short review is: don't buy this.

The longer notes:

It was on the discount shelf, so it was $7.50 rather than $15, which is a thing that tempts me to try something new. It was labelled "Apple and Rhubarb Crumble, gluten free" and "400g" on the top (note: the company name is not there. I had to look in the fine print to find it). It was in an aluminium tray with a plastic lid, about the same size as a standard takeaway container. It looked like a reasonable size for two people to have generous portions, and three to have reasonable sized portions.

As there were no cooking instructions, I assumed it was ready to eat. I chose not to heat it up, because the oven would have been too hard, and the metal tray meant not in the microwave. This wasn't a dreadful mistake, but it was some amount of mistake, because the topping wasn't actually cooked. For people who like biscuit (cookie) dough raw, that would be fine, but I wasn't that enthused.

I reckon it was 80% topping. The fruit was almost entirely large chunks of apple. Neither the apple nor the rhubarb were cooked enough, so every now and then there was a crunchy bit. The rhubarb was also obviously stringy. The topping was at least felt to be more butter than it was sugar, so it wasn't horrendously sweet (although, given the ingredients list, this may have been wrong).

To add to all of these failures, I've just looked at the ingredients list: gluten-free flour, brown sugar, rhubarb, butter, cooked apple, baking powder. Obviously, the 'gluten-free flour' is a problem. But 'brown sugar' has to be a lie, no way that beautifully yellow topping had brown sugar in it. There was not more rhubarb than butter or apple.

If I have the energy, I'll go see if I can find the contact details for the company, and make a complaint.