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.