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.

Terry Pratchett’s Cheese ‘n’ Smoky Dragon Flavour Crisps

Thanks to epiclootshop 

No, of course this isn’t a genuine potato crisp flavour. How could it be? For a start we have no idea what dragon tastes of, although perhaps the food boffins might choose chicken or turkey flavour as a starting point? 

I was thinking that a dragon flavour crisp might be a bit like a raccoon crisp. Because that sounds completely fake. Except people really do eat raccoon. Not perhaps in Britain, because here a raccoon would be either a very unusual pet, or part of a collection in a zoo, but certainly in the United States. Apparently. None of my friends live in a state where raccoon is a regular menu item (New York, California, Texas, Colorado, Rhode Island). At least I don’t think so. But in states like Georgia it might be, or so the internet tells me. And obviously the internet is the fount of all wisdom and we believe everything it tells us.

Meanwhile, back with the Cheese ‘n’ Smoky Dragon flavour: I really don’t know why I should be surprised that there are online discussions as to what dragon meat (and thus dragon crisps) might taste like. Yes, there really are people who waste their time posting about this all important issue. Other discussions are available. And yes, there are also people who waste their time writing about fictional flavours of crispy snack (me).

Anyway, if you are at all interested, I came across Cheese ‘n’ Smoky Dragon crisps in a book of Terry Pratchett’s early writing: A Stroke of the Pen. The crisps feature in a story called The Quest for the Keys. The book was published in good time for Christmas 2023, so what a pity that serious Pratchett fans didn’t lobby a crisp manufacturer to create a tie in snack. Don’t you think it would have been fun?

It’s quite OK if you don’t read this unserious post. Come back next time.