Tokapi Snacks Gaufrettes Fromage

You all must know that I am devoted to Cheese Footballs, so you can imagine I was very interested to try a new to me version.

I have never seen the brand Tokapi before so I had to look them up online. Apparently they sell nuts, tins of cocktail sausages, those bacon strip crispy snacks the French mysteriously call snack’s, mini crêpes, all sorts of snacks suitable for the all important l’heure d’apéro.

So, on to the new cheese footballs. At first sight they look pretty much identical to the UK cheese footballs. Not very surprising perhaps, because if they didn’t look the same they would be a poor excuse for a cheese football. Which suddenly makes me wonder, why don’t we have cheese rugby balls? 

Anyway, the soft squishy totally fake not actually cheese at all filling is less sweet than the UK version, and all the better for it. The crispy wafer shell is very similar, but seems to be a little bit acrid. Interesting. 

I have tried other brands of cheese footballs from France before and they seem to be available all the year round. Which is very welcome if you are suffering withdrawal symptoms while you’re on your summer holiday. And, they come in different flavours too.

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.

Carrefour Gaufrettes au Fromage (footballs)

OK, so this is confusing. Carrefour, a great big French supermarket, has produced two different products called Gaufrettes au Fromage. I have taken the liberty of renaming one we have already tried "squares", and I will name this one footballs.

Because one of them is square, and one of them is ball-shaped.

I just love cheese footballs. I really do. They are one of my absolute favourites. And I was pleased to try this French version which I probably picked up at the big Carrefour outside Reims. And if you too like cheese footballs this cardboard box of snacks will please you.

But.... here are two weird things.

Cliffs of Moher taste tester won't try this crispy snack. She says they (they?) don't have them in Ireland and she's not going to start trying them now. Maybe, she temporised, Lidl or Aldi sell this style of snack, but nobody shops at Lidl or Aldi because the Irish don't trust them. OK then.

And, then we have Architectural taste tester, who we have known for a while, but she doesn't comment much. She tried this globe-shaped snack as though she had never seen it before. She savoured it in a suspicious "I don't know what to expect here" sort of a way. She tells me that she had expected it to be sweet and not cheesy. Weird!

Has she never seen the fabulous British cheese footballs which I first wrote about in 2013? Apparently not. However, she really enjoyed this crispy snack, and ate quite a number of crispy little footballs.

Van Doesburg Cheese Filled Krisps Tin

So annoying. I wrote a whole post, filled in the labels section, published the post, shared it on face book and Google+ and wandered off to eat supper. After supper.... no post. All gone. Why does this happen? I have no idea.

Anyway.  Have you ever put a lot of stuff in storage for a while? It's very easy to forget what you own. OK, so it's hard to forget about sofas and dining room tables, but the bits and bobs and ornamental pigs fade away quite easily into the no-mans-land of memory. And when you went and picked up a bunch of boxes did you open one of them and wonder why?

Why did you save this lengthy correspondence with your friend in Morocco, why didn't you throw out this broken china dog ( I know it has a pretty face but...) or, oh look at this hat. It's got your mother's silk scarf tied around the brim. I know. It's tough throwing out your past life. The letters and cards from Morocco I have recycled. I'd be here 3 weeks from now still reading if I even started looking, and neither of us is famous (unless you could me: 135,000 readers and counting - no probably not) so someone would have to recycle it all some day; and the china dog has found a home with a friendly dog lover so I don't have to throw him away. And I'm going to keep the hat.

But sometimes you think amazing! I'm so pleased to find this again!

And here's an amazing one. I had completely forgotten about this little tin, and I don't remember where I got it, but what could be better?

This isn't a tin for my favourite KP Cheese Footballs. Instead it's for some football-like cheesy snacks made by Van Doesburg in the Netherlands. I've never seen them to try. Look tasty don't they?

On the tin there's an image of a windmill and a woman in Dutch national costume. She's even wearing clogs and clutching a handful of tulips to show how Dutch she is. So far so Dutch. Then there's a glass with a fizzy drink in it, and a .... strange kind of oval container with a sort of spout. What is that? Seriously, what is that strange container? Can it be a cocktail shaker?

Today's photographs aren't very good. The light was all wrong wherever I tried. I'm too impatient to wait until tomorrow and actually the forecast for tomorrow isn't much better so here we are with photographs taken too close to the window and the too much reflection. If you look hard enough you can even see that my camera is pink.

And here's the lid. It's a lovely little tin. A shame it looks as though these Krisps were made in the 1940s (websites in Dutch, which I don't speak).

KP The Real McCoy's Ridge Cut Flame Grilled Steak

I thought I'd try these because (a) they were recommended by the amazingly cheerful man who runs the local newsagent and (b) there was an empty packet sculling about on the floor of a friend's car so somebody obviously likes them. And?

Erm... perhaps not really for me. But why not?

Perhaps because these are MAN CRISPS. As thick as you like them and built with ridges deep enough to carry the maximum load of our unique full on flavours! The real McCoy's: accept no imitations. Can you tell I am quoting from the manly reddy brown packaging?

Oh boy. These really are man crisps. They even have an online pub! Oh yes, really really aimed at men. You can enter the pub here. And play darts! I didn't have a go - I really ought to be hoovering my bedroom or putting a wash on in a girly way. The whole time I was looking at the website there was a soundtrack of men chatting away in the background and someone chomping at crisps. Sigh.

Quite thick. Quite good size crisps. Quite crunchy. Not mad about the flavour to be honest. There is a little bit of steak going on but I didn't really like the flame grilled bit.

I tried a couple of crisps a month or so ago and thought them horrible. But to give them a second chance I sealed them up tightly and today I'm having another go. Still not wild about the flavour but the crisps are great and I'd like to try another flavour. Maybe Thai Sweet Chicken or Salted perhaps. Maybe those flavours would work out a little bit more girly (what am I saying?).

Unbelievably these flame grilled steak flavour crisps are suitable for vegetarians. Although I don't suppose any veggie would buy them on the off chance.

McCoys Crisps are made by KP Snacks (who make the fabulous Cheese Footballs), and they belong to United Biscuits. Once upon a time United Biscuits had an in house radio network which operated from 1970 to 1979. I was surprised it wasn't longer because when I used to listen to Capital Radio in the 70s it seemed quite half the DJs came from United Biscuits. These days they play independent local radio stations instead (says Wikipedia).

KP Cheese Footballs

Oh wow! It's Cheese Football time of year again. 

They are sort of wonderful and sort of the last thing you ought to be eating all at the same time. And I can't help loving them. Yum yum yum.

OK, so if you never tried a Cheese Football think two semi-spherical half-football-shaped wafer outsides with a squishy salty fake cheese filling. It's a completely pretence food made of 100% not actually cheese at all. Just delicious!

Of course, one of the great things about Cheese Footballs is that you only get them at Christmas. So you get to look forward to them. Like looking forward to real English-grown strawberries in the summer. If Cheese Footballs were available all year round I probably wouldn't buy them. Yes, I know it's me being contrary again.

What do they actually taste like? Hard to say. The outer shell is a sort of wafer which doesn't taste of much, it's just there to hold the cheese in. And to pretend to look like a football I suppose. And the inner cheesy bit is a sort of cream-coloured salty cheesy mush. And quite sweet. Sounds horrible doesn't it? And yet... and yet, I find them hard to resist. At least once a year.

The trick is to bite off one half of wafer shell and eat that, then bite off the second half of the shell so you're left with the squidgy cheesy bit. And then you let that dissolve in your mouth. Or you can just eat them like a normal person would.

Because Cheese Footballs come in a drum I can't shove the packaging into the scanner so here it is on a bookshelf. The packaging says "the winning snack at home or away". Is this a snack you would take to a football match? I shouldn't think so. We also have two dreadful riddles:

Q What does Santa do when elves misbehave? A Give them the sack.

Q What do you sing at a snowman's birthday party? A Freeze a jolly good fellow. 

Probably best not to comment. Cheese Footballs were originally made by Huntley & Palmer and I have to admit I thought they were currently made by Jacobs but since many confusing mergers and a takeover by German snack conglomerate Intersnack they seem to come under the KP brand name these days.

Important Information 2 January 2022

I contacted KP at the end of December 2021. The Customer Services Team kindly replied almost immediately to tell me, and I am passing on the information to you lot, that this fabulous crispy snack is sent out to “most supermarkets” in mid September. So the advice is, if you find a shop with a stock of them, buy lots and eke them out. Because they have a 12 month shelf life you can safely keep a supply in the cupboard under the stairs. Or like me just gorge to your heart’s content over Christmas. And this Christmas I was given 2 tubs by 2 different family members! What could be better than that? (Because I don’t really like chocolate that much).

Just to add, I’m not sure what “most supermarkets” actually means. I haven’t seen Cheese Footballs in any of our local Waitrose branches for years, and my spies tell me that the smaller local Tesco stocks them, but the very large branch doesn’t seem to. And at least one branch of Sainsbury’s had them in December. So obviously you need to shop around….from mid September. Good luck next year.

October 2022: I followed my own advice and just picked up 5 tubs of Cheese Footballs from a giant branch of Tesco. But beware - there were four huge shelves of crisps and none of them were Cheese Footballs. We were super disappointed but kept looking and found what we were looking for on a completely different shelf some distance away. So keep looking.