We’re Torn Over SPAM Tocino

There is no doubt we love SPAM. We’ve tried almost all of their variants available at the grocery, with the original and the one with bacon topping our list. So when we saw a post on Facebook about SPAM Tocino, we thought it was some kind of April Fools’ day joke. 😀

I didn’t take it seriously UNTIL I decided to check out SPAM’s official Facebook page and saw the post above. I did mention it to Ken and he said he saw some people saying it was based on Mexican Tocino. Still, I was curious. He LOVES tocino, and I do too. And we love SPAM, so we just had to find out how this new variant tastes like.

We learned it was available at Robinsons Supermarket. We first checked the one at Victory Mall in Monumento – nada. We finally found it after a few days at the new Robinsons Supermarket here in Malabon. Though we wanted to know if we’ll like this, it took us a few more days before we decided to give it a taste.

The SPAM itself was a li’l wet compared to the original variant, so it slid smoothly out of the can. You can also smell that the sauce that surrounds it is sweet. When I started slicing the meat, I saw that the color was slightly yellowish (as you can see in the photo below). By this time, I was already excited to fry them up to get the crisp we wanted.

As soon as I was done frying the first can of SPAM, Ken came out of his room and had a taste. He wasn’t happy. 🙁 He said it was sweet but bland at the same time. I took a bite and agreed with him. We thought SPAM Tocino will have salty-sweet flavors like what you’ll get from the regular pork tocino.

I decided to eat them with rice, and I began to like it. Ken, on the other hand, said it was nakakaumay. He described it as “parang matamis na Maling”. :D He didn’t even need an extra serving of rice, so I knew he really didn’t like it.

So, there yah go. The verdict is 50-50 here at our household. Will I buy it again? Perhaps, but with the original SPAM to accompany it. I wish the SPAM Tocino had a little saltiness to it. It’ll definitely make a big difference, don’t you agree?

UPDATE: To those who are telling us to follow the cooking instructions on the can, we actually did that with the second can but we didn’t bother mentioning it since we have the same reaction. It lacks saltiness, and caramelizing them didn’t really do anything to improve the flavor for us. We actually prefer the taste from purely frying them than when we added water (parang sa regular tocino) and coating with vegetable oil as per the cooking instructions. 😉

SPAM Tocino is available at Robinsons Supermarkets, and we heard you can also find this at SM Aura’s Hypermarket.

Have you tried the new SPAM Tocino? What do you think? Let us know at the comments section! 🙂