Keogh’s Shamrock & Sour Cream

St Patrick's Day is approaching fast, so what better way to celebrate than with a packet of shamrock flavour crisps?

Shamrock flavour? Yes, really. And the shamrock is grown by the master shamrock growers (if that's a job description) who supply fresh Irish shamrocks to the President of the United States, and have done since 1952. Well, obviously you can't expect the President to manage without proper Irish shamrocks, can you? You can see President Obama accepting his shamrocks here.

I've not tried Keogh's crisps before but these seem rather good. Reasonably sized crisps with a good crunch, not too many breakages, plenty of flavour although most of it is sour cream with a hearty dollop of onion and garlic. As for the shamrock: well, to be honest I have no clue what shamrock is supposed to taste of. There does seem to be a faint aftertaste of that stuff they force on you in Chinese restaurants, you know, the seaweed stuff. I've always thought it terribly dull. Who wants deep fried cabbage anyway? There are plenty of nicer ways to eat it. (Yes, yes, I know; lots of people order it on purpose.) Anyhow, there seems to be a very faint taste of cabbage in the background if you concentrate very very hard so maybe that's the shamrock.

I took the bag in to work so the reluctant taste testers could try this unusual flavour. Most of them won't actually admit to liking them very much but I notice they managed to eat almost an entire packet. Several people said they thought the shamrock was a fiction "who on earth eats shamrock?" they asked, and in one case "what is shamrock?".

Some of the taste testers suggested the crisps are possibly cheese and onion in disguise. Although extremely nice cheese and onion. And I see that, along with the onion and garlic, there is cheddar in the list of ingredients. Parsley too, which may be the little herby bits. Where the Irish shamrock extract goes I don't know. Suitable for vegetarians though, and not chock full of MSG and other chemicals.

Keogh's is a family firm based in County Dublin. The family has been growing potatoes for over 200 years and now they are hand cooking Ireland's finest crisps on their farm. My packet of crisps was made from Lady Rose potatoes grown in a field called Ballamadun which I can pin point using the handy Spud Nav™ on the website and you can too. And my crisps were cooked by Darren. Thank you Darren.

I bought these crisps from the World Foods section in my local Tescos. Who knew Irish groceries would be sold alongside a selection of Polish or Caribbean foods?

And for those of you who really don't know, the shamrock is the national symbol of Ireland and is of course worn with pride on the feast of St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, which is celebrated around the world on 17th March.

Shamrock