Lay's Stix Ketchup

I finally discovered the Polish shop in East Finchley recommended by one of the taste testers. And found this great packet (160g) of crispy potato sticks on special. Because they were almost at their sell by date.

What an amazing crunchy crispy snack! The Chef quite likes them (you know he is more restrained than I am) and I like them a lot. These teeny weeny chips have a good crunch and a great taste. Ketchup is a crispy snack flavour that seems to work very well.

Chipsy ziemniaczane o smaku ketchupu says the packet. Well, any fule kno that smaku ketchupu means ketchup flavour, but bear with me while I look up the rest of it on Google Translate as I don't speak much (any) Polish.... OK: potato chips flavoured with ketchup. Voila!

Kind of amazing that a word like ziemniaczane means potato though. Doesn't look very much like to the average English speaker.

And interesting to see that while some European crisps have text in many different languages (including English even if they're not sold here), Polish crisps have no truck with any language other than Polish. Although there is a sticky label with the ingredients in English added by the importer.

Anyway, an ex-taste tester from Poland tells me that people in Poland don't eat crisps (I may have mentioned this before). Obviously these fabulously crispy sticks aren't exactly crisps but... But they are definitely Polish. And if these are genuinely not eaten in Poland, Frito Lay Poland Sp. z.o.o. will be most disappointed.

I took the packet in to work and tried it on the reluctant taste testers. Even the most sceptical tester admitted they were tastier than she had expected. Indeed, pretty much everyone liked the taste a great deal, although we did feel that the teeny weeny chip shape does make them difficult to eat in quantity. But I think we all did our best.

The bag is an odd tall narrow shape with a printed zip showing where the bag should be opened Tutaj otwórz! and the helpful information that opening the "zip" will help you to share the contents. Although opening this zip would, I can't help feeling, cause the contents to spill absolutely everywhere.

Kubeti Mega Stix Cheese Flavour

Another bag of Bulgarian crispy snacks from Budgens in East Finchley. The reluctant taste testers and I tried the tomato ketchup version earlier this year and found it rather good, so when I saw this bag lurking amongst the chocolate Easter Eggs I thought it would be worth a try.

And yes, these little sticks of extruded potato crunchiness are quite nice. There's a sort of gentle slightly powdery cheesiness, and somehow the more you eat the cheesier they get. And there's an interesting aroma of chips (that's french fries to those of you who call crisps chips), and not a bad crunch. If you look closely they do look disconcertingly like a sliced up washing up sponge but sponges don't crunch like this.

Not bad. Because the taste is so gentle, and so much of these sponge-like sticks is fresh air, I think you could very likely (absent-mindedly) eat the whole 54g packet in one sitting.

Not tremendously exciting but quite pleasant. We decided that we liked the tomato ketchup version a little bit better but there's not a lot to choose between them.

I still think it a little odd that Budgens should stock crispy snacks from Bulgaria. But it's great for me. Otherwise I'd have to fly to Sofia or something. That might not be such a bad thing though; some of the buildings look amazing and there are stunning mosaics. This photograph of St Eudoxia (I think in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral) is from Wikimedia Commons. It was taken by Elena Chochkova.

Kubeti Mega Stix Ketchup Flavour

I had to go to the local sorting office this morning to pick up a parcel too big to fit through the letterbox (three books), so I went a little further, to East Finchley, to pick up a newspaper and a loaf of bread from Budgens. And, oh joy! It turns out that Budgens sells an exotic and different selection of crispy snacks and I found a couple I had never heard of before. And fancy that; I couldn't resist buying one or two. Or maybe five.

So here we have Kubeti Mega Stix. These square tubes are about 50mm long and made so you can actually see through them. They had two flavours but I got the ketchup because I thought it might be more fun.

And they are rather good. There's a slight smell of ketchup when you open the bag, and a slight taste of ketchup, but mostly they taste of frying. In a good way. A good golden yellow with a spattering of dark orange; I expect that's the ketchup flavour dust. Nice crunchy texture.

Of course these are not crisps. These are made from extruded potato starch and all sorts of things like disodium gaunylate (what is that? I probably don't really want to know) and obviously we know that's a bad thing. But there is no denying that this is very tasty snack and if I'm not careful I will eat the whole bag on my own. Well, the Chef is in another country so there's only me here.

I couldn't find out much about Kubeti from the website which seems to be under construction and a bit clunky. There are going to be games so I suppose this crispy snack is aimed at teenagers. The packaging does say POTATO + GAME = STIX.

But guess what? This snack comes from Bulgaria! Although it is, somewhat confusingly, produced by a company called Ital Food Industry S.A. So initially I thought Italy.

Since when did Bulgaria have a crispy snack industry? Well, what do I know? Why shouldn't Kubeti export crispy snacks to all the exciting places listed on the back of the packet: Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Albania, Croatia, Czech Republic, and Repulika Srpska? This makes me feel a little bit old. Some of these countries weren't even invented when I was at school, and don't feature on my atlas. Armenia and Georgia have very exciting alphabets too. It's always fun reading the ingredients in 12 different languages although the different alphabets do make it more complicated. Luckily Kubeti also exports to the UK so I can read the ingredients in English if I want.

I like these. And will definitely go back for the cheese flavour Stix at some stage.