Keogh’s Irish Atlantic Sea Salt

Senior Taste Tester has just been to Dublin (for anyone struggling with geography, that's the capital of Ireland) where he tried and approved this packet of crisps. I didn't get to try the crisps (the packet was very empty) but the ex-contents of this packet smell pretty fabulous.

The Atlantic Sea Salt is handcrafted on the Beara Peninsular in West Cork by the O'Neill family. Pristine Oceanic Waters produce a pure Sea Salt Flake full of natural flavour says the packet.

And don't forget to activate Spud Nav™. Track your crisps back to the field they came from, just type the field name the tracker page of our website! Er... but I can't find the field name on the packet.

I can find the potato variety - Hermes - and they were cooked by Zintra, but call me dim - I can't find the field name. Nope. I looked on the website www.keoghs.ie and my field name is missing. Sigh. I wanted to follow that up.

The reluctant taste testers and I have previously tried Keogh's Atlantic Sea Salt & Irish Cider Vinegar, and Keogh's Shamrock & Sour Cream. I think I probably got both bags from the handy "foreign food" section at Tesco in Finchley Central.

But this is a bag of Irish crisps bought and eaten in Ireland. And the senior taste tester recommends these crisps.

Give them a try if you can find them. I'll be checking Tesco's shortly.

The 2121 packaging

Keogh’s Atlantic Sea Salt & Irish Cider Vinegar

The Keogh family have been growing potatoes in Ireland for over 200 years, and now they make hand cooked crisps. This particular packet contains Lady Rose potatoes from a field called Ballamadun, and the crisps were cooked by Sebastian. We don't know if Sebastian is a member of the Keogh family, or employed by the Keoghs.

Have you noticed how salt has ceased to be just salt in recent years? It's not even simply sea salt or rock salt. Or the wonderful Malden Salt with the lovely flat cristals. There's Anglesey Sea Salt, Flor de Sal de Ibiza, Himalayan Pink Salt, and now Atlantic Sea Salt; all these featured in crisps that I've tried. I actually have a packet of Hebridean Sea Salt (harvested from the shores of the remote Scottish Hebridean Isle of Lewis) in my kitchen cupboard although I've not encountered it in a crisp yet.

Well, these crisps have a good salty taste.

And there's an interesting selection of vinegars on the ingredients list: Llewellyn's Cider Vinegar, Malt Vinegar and also Balsamic Vinegar. I don't know what it is but somehow the taste is rather sweet as well as sour. It's not quite what the reluctant taste testers and I were expecting.

Nice big crisps with the skin left on and a good golden colour. They look lovely but we weren't very sure about the taste. Although a bowlful did disappear.

Grown with love in Ireland.

Boxerchips Salty Malty Vinegar

It seems a little harsh to try these salt and vinegar crisps so soon after the wonderful version by Pipers Crisp Co which we tried the other day, but every crispy snack must stand on its own merits.

Boxerchips say the fact - best damn potato chips in the world; the fiction - our crisps are a made from Farmers' Hats. Which, let's be honest, is a slightly strange thing to say. But they say other strange things on their website which also tells you all sorts of things about Boxerchips that you may find amusing, and there's "ye olde blog" disguised as latest news. You can even find out about spud juggling. In New Zealand of all places!

Anyway, back to the crisps. Which I bought on my Easyjet flight to Geneva. Still not seen them anywhere else, but perhaps I have had such ready access to other exciting crisps that I haven't really looked.

Quite nice. Good colour, quite a hard crunch, not too harsh a taste of vinegar (which we know can be a problem) and good and salty. But these crisps are a bit sweet. Not sugary but mysteriously remaining me of golden syrup. Could this be an "oh, so it's only me then" moment?

Remember, these are the crisps that come in a strange oblong cardboard box which you open up to get at the crisps. I had a lot of difficulty last year battling my way into the packet but maybe that packaging was defective. At any rate, this time it was quite easy to open the box and create a little cardboard serving dish from which to carry out my taste testing.

I think I liked the Boxerchips Savagely Salted better though.

Update on Boxerchips: by chance we went to Globus in Bern which is a large department store with a great food section in the basement. And guess what? They sell Boxerchips. Well, they do in March 2015. I was busy buying crisps I'd not seen before so I didn't look too carefully, but in case you are looking for Boxerchips you could try here. Quite close to the main railway station. Probably hard to miss this huge store.

Boxerchips Savagely Salted

Flying home from Geneva to London Southend I bought a packet of crisps on the plane. Not, you understand, because I felt under-crisped, but because they were there. And then I put them in my bag because the packet looked difficult to open. And how right I was.

You get a red bag with a cardboard box in it. and the box has instructions on how to open it which I completely failed to follow. I can only suppose that these crisps are sold on the plane because the box makes them easy to stack without crushing the crisps, but I found the packaging very difficult to get into.

Boxerchips are made by the Boxerchips Company based in Dublin and I confess I never heard of them before. I think they're owned by Spudmuckers Ltd but I never heard of them either. Here's the website.

The crisps are made of potatoes, salt and sunflower oil. Nothing else. And they are rather good.

The package says 40g which is less than 1.5oz so you don't get a lot of crispy goodness for the huge price charged by the airline. I think you get even less than you might because presumably that 40g includes the weight of the cardboard. But I guess if you buy them from an actual shop they can't cost quite so much.

The packaging includes a little guy throwing his rubbish away responsibly. I'm afraid he is a bit stout as though he has been eating too many crisps. And then there's the little stick man driving the tractor across the crunchy crisp mountain. He must be a hard working farmer who doesn't have time to slump around snacking.

I like the flavour "savagely salted but not indecently so". I also like the little bit of Latin text "optimus crustulum potatus obvious universitas" which Google Translate magically tells me means "best cookies in the world scornfully"!! How fabulous is that?

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