M&S Collection Hand Cooked Crisps Parmesan & Prosciutto

Really rather pleased I spotted a small packet of these Parmesan & Prosciutto crisps. Marks & Spencer crisps nearly always come in 150g packets. It’s only a few select flavours come in a smaller size and you find them next to the sandwiches for your crunch at lunch. Not usually, perhaps no surprise, next to the salads.

I think you can guess we didn’t find this a super successful flavour. The Ski Instructor nearly guessed (what is wrong with his taste buds?) roast chicken. Again. According to him everything tastes of chicken! Then he revised his thoughts and failed to find an answer. I’m not very surprised. This is a difficult flavour to pick even if you’ve read the packet.

The problem is that you can taste a lot of the ingredients but not really taste the whole. You can taste the cheese (actual Parmesan, also Cornish cheddar), you can taste the ham (genuine Prosciutto), you can taste the lemon juice. In fact that’s the taste that really hit me. It's quite an acidic flavour.

Neither Ski Instructor nor Tractor Fan taste tester was madly taken with this crisp flavour, nor the Chef neither come to that, but somehow the entire packet was eaten with hardly any assistance from me. And they were taste testing another crispy snack at the same time.

The crisps are good, a nice rich colour with a good bite but the flavour.... we think this is an example of the crisp development team trying a bit too hard.