Proper x Netflix Netflix & Chilli Caramel

Well, this Proper x Netflix collab is a first for me. As is the flavour, which appears to be Netflix & Chilli Caramel. Sorry? Since when was Netflix a flavour? We don’t subscribe, but I am pretty sure Netflix is a well known streaming service.

However, never mind that, this is a very tasty popcorn, and I ate nearly the entire 90g packet all by myself. Over nearly a week though. Remember how light popcorn is? So that’s a lot more than 90g of crisps. But the packet has a high in fibre label (good fibres only) so here’s hoping this snack is fairly healthy as snacks go. 

And it is incredibly tasty. The Chef thought the chilli was a bit too hot, but I think it works very well with the caramel. Delicious!

The Netflix thing is some sort of a competition to win a home cinema bundle, and other stuff, but it seems that I ought to have kept my receipt. It’s not entirely clear. The terms and conditions are very complicated.

And yet another article about crisps…

Both images grabbed from the Internet 

And yes, here’s another article about potato crisps, this time from The Guardian. 

It does seem that crisps are very much at the forefront just now. My local supermarket has suddenly broken out fresh supplies of retro crispy snacks that they don’t normally stock, and others that have appeared for Christmas. Although, very sadly, this same shop stopped selling Cheese Footballs years ago and I know they are a firm favourite with you lot, and they don’t even sell Cheeselets!

This of course means a traumatic visit to a different shop which has really difficult parking with useless signage, and of course a completely different layout making it hard to find what we are looking for.

If you like handbags and have loads of money to spend, keep an eye out for crisp themed bags. Obviously they are not always available new, but second hand sites sometimes have something fabulous to discover.

Don’t forget the book mentioned in the article: Crunch by Natalie Whittle.

Cheez-It Snap’d Double Cheese

I don’t find myself particularly impressed at the very small size of the Grab & Go! bag of Cheez-It Snap’ds. Can I turn a Cheez-It Snap’d into a plural? I’m going to anyway. 

And I still think this Grab & Go! bag is very small. It’s only 40g. Which not so very long ago was an ordinary size for a packet of crispy snacks. Grab & Go! used to mean considerably larger than this.

Still cheesy, thin & crispy, still quite orange, still parallelogram shaped… I am only going to quibble at the cheesy. Because they don’t taste of cheese. They taste of a cheesy snack. And that isn’t the same thing.

Plus, the Chef was not impressed at the amount of crummage at the bottom of the packet.

Don’t want to sound whiny but I don’t think I will bother with another packet.

Cheez-It Snap’d Cheese Sour Cream & Onion

So, these days we get Cheez-It Snap’d and Cheez-It Puff’d and all sorts of Cheez-Its. With stray punctuation thrown in just for fun. And this is a packet of the strangely parallelogram shaped biscuity snack that is a Cheez-It Snap’d.

This is a very fine snack, as in very fragile and thin. Cheesy, thin & crispy says the packet. And easily broken, and the bottom of the packet is sadly full of too many broken bits. And I do mean broken bits. More like crumbs. Which is a shame.

I like the flavour though I think it’s a bit odd mixing cheese flavour with sour cream and onion. I found it tasty. I really like sour cream and onion, possibly because it’s not a common flavour here in the UK so I don’t get the opportunity to try it very often. The Chef complained the taste is not cheesy enough. So we will have to agree to differ.

Check out the shopping page on the Cheez-It website! Special Cheez-It nail polish or socks anyone?

Walkers Wotsits Crunchy R-R-Really Cheesy

I’m not really sure what to say about this r-r-really cheesy flavour from Wotsits Crunchy. Strangely, if you ask me or the Chef, we think this crispy snack tastes less cheesy than a regular Cheesy Wotsit. 

I suspect the basic Wostsit Crunchy recipe tastes different to the basic Wotsit recipe, and the cheesy tasting flavour dust doesn’t have the same effect on these crunchy snacks. It might be the exact same cheesy flavour, it might be extra r-r-really cheesy but there we are.

Here’s what we thought about another flavour of Wotsits Crunchy.

Honestly I really don’t know why Walkers thought it would be a good plan to mess with the fabulous traditional Wotsit recipe. Yes, of course, this newer crispy snack may appeal to some… but I think I will stick with the original. 

And if you really want to know, yes they are cheesy, but I am not convinced they are r-r-really cheesy.

I don’t know why anyone thought to put this crispy snack in a Hallowe’en themed packet. Who knows? No bat or ghost shaped snacks here. And as so often these days, quite half the packet was filled with nothing but air. 

Proper Chips Ghost Chilli & Yuzu Chickpea Chips

We all know that the Chef prefers potato crisps to corn chips or other crispy snacks, but have we before encountered the Chef’s younger brother who really really prefers potato crisps to any other style of snack? I asked him to attempt these New! chickpea chips, and I gather (I wasn’t there) he was not impressed.

Apparently they don’t taste of anything, they are too hot for his taste, too citrusy and he didn’t like the texture. I am not sure that he entered into the spirit of reluctant taste testing.

Cliffs of Moher taste tester came for dinner and found them weird.

And what do I think? Well, the texture is a surprise. It’s sort of prawn cracker or very fine Quavers style texture - only not. Presumably a slurry of chickpeas is extruded to form roughly crispy snack shaped shapes. That’s a charming way to put it, I know, but I imagine that’s how these chickpea chips are made.

And the taste? Surprisingly citrusy. Surprisingly, because that’s not what you expect of a crispy snack. All the bright lemony flavour comes from yuzu; an East Asian citrus fruit a bit like a clementine but with a sharper more grapefruity taste. And the ghost chilli is a very hot chilli, once the hottest in the world, but now overtaken by the Carolina reaper in 2013, and Chilli X in 2023. The internet tells me it originated in Bhutan and Assam. But it’s not too hot in this crispy chip.

This is an extremely exotic combination of flavours for a crispy snack sold by conservative supermarket Waitrose in North London. Proper Chips have certainly been working hard to find us new flavours. But perhaps a little too weird.

Tongue tingling! And yes, they really do tingle your tongue.

Retro Crispy Snacks are Making a Comeback

 

I read several articles this September about how retro style crispy snacks are making a huge comeback. Of course, one person’s retro snack is another person’s childhood favourite. Apparently it’s a TikTok trend. I have never looked at TikTok and don’t intend to start now, but it seems that TikTokers will watch absolutely anything for a laugh. And if that means discovering retro snacks that’s fine by me.

Here’s the Daily Mirror. And here’s The Guardian. And The Daily Mail.

Here’s what I had to say about Nik Naks. How interesting, I had quite forgotten them. They’re rather like Crunchy Wotsits. 

And here’s me trying Skips if you are interested.

Since I started eating crisps and crispy snacks in the early 1960s none of these “retro” snacks strikes me as particularly old school. Especially as the little local shop at the bottom of our road has never stopped selling this style of snack. Ditto our post office. Mind you, these days retro seems to apply to anything that wasn’t made or thought of this year. So you decide if these snacks seem retro to you.

Also TikTokers seem to have the attention span of a goldfish (I gather this is longer than we thought), so this trend will probably be over by Christmas, if it isn’t over already.

Dogritos Bones

Our granddaughter will have her first birthday very soon. No doubt she will be showered with presents, so as well as buying her a pull-along Scottie dog on wheels called Walter, we thought it would be nice to buy a little something for the family spaniel. Because it’s no fun feeling left out.

So, here we have a squashy packet of Dogritos. It squeaks. It also makes a noise like scrumpled up crisp packets. I hope Ziggy likes it. If he pulls it apart inside 5 minutes we will take that as a sign he was having fun.

I found this squeaky dog toy on Etsy.

Tyrrell’s Roasted Chicken & Sage

 

New! A gold coin thingy with a crown tells us that this is a New! crisp flavour. With, I read on the back of the packet, oodles of flavour to tickle your tastebuds.

Well. Normally I love a chicken or roast chicken crisp. They taste chickeny and I like that. However, I see that yeast extract (Marmite to me) is one of the ingredients for this crisp. And despite the cooked chicken powder - second crisp in a row to contain actual meat: so not suitable for vegetarians - I think this crisp mostly tastes of Marmite. What a disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Marmite. On toast it’s fabulous. And my mother brainwashed me to believe that a mug of hot Marmite would cure any ill from period pain to a broken leg, and trust me, it really works. Only do go to A&E if you think your leg might be broken. Maybe have a mug of Marmite while you wait for the ambulance.

However again, I was hoping this new New! crisp would taste of chicken and some sage. And it doesn’t. It smells of Marmite too. 

But the Chef has absentmindedly noshed down almost the entire packet so one can only assume that he has been enjoying the taste. And there is nothing the matter with the crunch.

Manōmasa Limited Edition Chimichurri Steak

Quite a lot of ‘meaty’ or ‘chickeny’ flavoured crisps are in fact suitable for vegetarian snackers. Even, perhaps some of the fake bacon shaped snacks. Is this to save money, or is it easier to create a flavour without adding dried meat or extract of meat or whatever sort of meatiness the food scientists are tinkering with these days? 

Whichever, the family vegetarian told me once that even though a crispy snack might be entirely vegetarian (though likely not vegan), if it has a meaty name that’s enough to put her off. In any case, that doesn’t apply here, because much to my surprise, this Chimichurri Steak flavour corn chip is actually made with meat.

I think it’s a long time since I tried a meat flavoured crisp that is actually made of meat. And that’s probably a good thing because I’m not sure I like these. They are…. aggressively meaty. And for me that’s not a good thing. 

And I am not at all sure I can taste the black beans. Maybe they are in the recipe to give a weird dark brown colour to the chips. 

Not really sure what I think. See what you think.