To say that honey butter chips are popular in Korea is a gross understatement.  Honey Butter chips have been around for a while now, nearly a year.  But it is still almost impossible to buy them.  At one point there was a black market for the chips, and you can still find them on Ebay for at least 5 times the original price.  The “honey butter chip” has become the unicorn of Korean snacks.  Luckily for honey butter fans, the chips have created a multitude of honey butter (or just honey) flavored snacks.  Seriously, everyone better start protecting the bees, because I’m not sure what will happen to Korean snacks if there is a serious honey shortage.

Honey butter snacks range from the expected to, what I consider, the bizarre.  You can get many things honey/butter flavored; honey lattes, honey butter fried pork, honey everything.  Here are a selection of options from my town.

Honey Butter bagel chips?  Probably delicious!

Honey Butter dried squid?  Maybe not so delicious.  (I’m not a fan of dried squid in general, however.) And in case you thought that was a one off- 

There are, in fact, multiple brands of honey butter squid available.  Yumm.

Here’s a selection of three different kinds of honey snack.  All of them varying degrees of deliciousness.  None of which come close to the actual honey butter chips (in my opinion)  I mistakenly bought both the honey tong tong and the honey butter potato snack, thinking they were honey butter chips. Sorely disappointed.  But that’s what you get for not paying attention to what you’re buying.

Honey churro popcorn is one of my new favorite things in life.  Honey shower popcorn- also good.  But lacks the cinnamon-y delicious flavor of the honey churro.

An assortment of honey butter nuts.  Not sure if it’s just me- but honey butter macadamia nuts sound amazing.  Unfortunately, at almost ten dollars a bag, I wasn’t about to find out.

Honey egg bread.  (Not to be confused with the British Eggy Bread) (This is a picture of the plastic display food… but it pretty much looked like that.  Kind of a grilled cheese egg sandwich made with honey butter on the outside for the grilling.)

My personal favorite: honey cheese ramen noodles.  Caution: when opened, the noodle bowl contains a foil packet of powder and a clear plastic packet of (what I thought was) honey.  Again, with the not paying attention!  So I decided to use half of the cheese powder packet, and all of the honey packet… (you know me: healthy healthy- trying to cut the sodium.)  Now, the ‘honey’ packet was CLEARLY labeled “Jalapeno Oil”  and the front of the package also clearly says 할라피뇨 (jalapeno) But me with the paying attention- I dumped it in.  Holy cow!  It’s really intense if you use all the oil and very little of the honey cheese.  So now I use the honey cheese packet, and forego the jalapeno oil all together.  They’re pretty good noodles though.

If all the snacks are making you thirsty, but you don’t want to give up your honey taste- don’t fear! There are honey based drinks as well, more than just the honey lattes.  These juices are delicious. The iced honey tastes like… well, cold honey.  I thought the honey orange pineapple was WAY too sweet.  But I mixed it with some sparkling water, and it was pretty good!

And this would be where I would post a photo of the honey butter chips that started it all.  But seriously, they are no where to be found.  I’ve only ever been able to buy one bag of them, and it was months ago.  In bribing a student to study, one of my coteachers offered a student honey butter chips if he got a good grade on his mid term test.  She had to go several hours away to find a bag.  There is a high end import shop on the first floor of my school building.  They had honey butter chips once- but there was a waiting list for them, so you couldn’t just rock up and buy a bag.

I will, however, leave you with what I consider the best honey butter chip incarnation that I have seen in Korea- honey butter chip socks!