Propercorn Fiery Worcester Sauce & Sun-Dried Tomato Popcorn

Wow! this popcorn is extremely good. I tried Propercorn Sour Cream and Chive last November and to be honest I thought it tasted of washing up liquid but friends had other ideas. Yes, I didn't like the flavour at all but obviously that was just me. Anyway you can read about that here.

So (bravely) and because Waitrose had this flavour on special I thought I'd try it. And I'm impressed. Very nice. Yum. Lovely and a very hot tomatoey flavour. Indeed, quite fiery. A bit more fiery than I would usually go for but somehow this popcorn is extremely moreish.

I tried a bowl on the reluctant taste testers at work and the popcorn was suddenly (as the snow from the desert's dusty face) gone. I tried a second bowl and that disappeared too. So a definite success.

It's very nice popcorn. You can see from the photograph that there is a fair amount of flavour dust going on here. Lots of cayenne and pimento pepper probably. The crunch is a little bit soft but that's OK. And, impressively, there are very few unpopped kernels. It definitely qualifies for a yum.

96 calories per serving, gluten and wheat free, suitable for vegetarians. Oh, and made in the UK.

Very pleased that I tried this popcorn. I like the packaging better than the Sour Cream and Chive flavour too.

There's an article on the BBC website today about Propercorn so I'm going to repost these thoughts (first posted on 5th March 2014)..

Walkers Worcester Sauce

Look! A crisp with a simple name and a (fairly) simple flavour. That makes a change doesn't it?

I quite liked these.

The Chef said they are a bit vinegary aren't they, and we know he isn't mad for vinegar. But then he had another, and another, possibly a few more too. So not too vinegary for him then.

Nice fine cut crisps, good crunch, nice clean taste.

Not made from actual Worcester Sauce by the look of it, but the ingredients include cocoa powder, ginger, clove, cardamom, garlic, onion, and wheat breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs? It never fails to amaze me the weird selection of stuff you get in crisp flavours.

The bag calls itself a Grab Bag and Great to Share. What does that mean exactly? Bigger than the old fashioned bag size I like best at 60g, but not as big as a Sharing Bag. Which is too big.

The packet does feature a nice example of the little Walkers guy throwing away his rubbish responsibly. But nothing we haven't seen before.

Walkers French Fries Worcester Sauce

Another little packet of crisps found at Paddington Station. And another packet with the number of calories: 93. This packet has 21 g of crispy snack in it and 93 kcal. I've never studied calories so I have no idea if this is good or not. But I'm guessing it probably is.

I've tried Walkers French Fries before but only Ready Salted. So finding a little bag of the Worcester Sauce flavour is something of a triumph. This seems to be the sort of crispy snack found at airports and railway stations, or in little corner shops.

As we don't have many of any of these near where I live I stock up when and where I can.

So what do the Chef and I think? Pretty good actually. There's a lovely sharp something or other that contributes to the Worcester Sauce flavour: it's a secret recipe I'm sure so we have to go with ingredients like "Worcester Sauce flavour", "Flavour Enhancer" (that's MSG to you and me), dried garlic and tomato, and... so on. It's not a very clear recipe. But it certainly is a tasty recipe and there's a great after taste.

The French Fries still remind me of very long thin packaging peanuts or whatever they call themselves but luckily this snack is not made from expanded polystyrene. The sharpness of the flavour - maybe the umaminess (probably not a word) - seems to work very well with the texture.

The packaging includes an image of that little guy throwing his rubbish away responsibly. But if you want to see him you will have to click on the Ready Salted link above because it's the same design. He's a lot thinner than usual.

The Chef & I rather liked this little packet of crispy snacks. We managed to eat the whole tasty (rather small) packet without really noticing. Which is surely an encouraging sign.

Actually, we liked the small size of the packet very much. It's good to have a small packet to try. I'm so fed up of having to buy gigantic bags of crispy snacks without knowing whether I'm going to like them or not. This is fine if you like what you've got, but if this is a taste test then a small packet is miles better.

I am including some photographs I took in the Oxford University Botanic Gardens which were looking beautiful this weekend. I read that this is one of the oldest scientific gardens in the world; founded in 1621 for "the glorification of the works of God and for the furtherance of learning". What a wonderful reason to found a garden, and how very nice to see such old gardens looking so pretty. Really, what more can you ask?

M&S Full on Flavour Worcester Sauce

Another tasty crisp from the ever reliable Full on Flavour range. Available at a Marks & Spencer near you. Provided you live in a country where M&S sell food.

These are rather large crisps for the most part, with a large flavour and a big crunch. In fact, the flavour could be described as enormous!

Of course Worcester Sauce itself has a huge flavour. Most people use it a few drops at a time. Well, I never use it at all but the Chef puts it in his shepherd's pie all the time. Only a few drops.

So these crisps with the great big flavour are made with Worcester Sauce then? Well, no. Not exactly because that's actually called Worcestershire Sauce even though many people including me lazily call it Worcester Sauce.

And for those of you ignorant of English geography, Worcestershire is a county in the West Midlands and Worcester is the cathedral city on the river Severn. This part of England was once part of the Anglo Saxon Kingdom of Mercia. What exciting things you can learn when reading about crisps, eh? Don't even get me started on how J R R Tolkien apparently used the Mercian dialect as the language of the Kingdom of Rohan.

Anyway, the super-helpful Wikipedia tells me that Worcestershire Sauce is a fermented condiment and draws allusions to the rather horrible-sounding garum (fermented fish sauce) that the ancient Greeks, Romans and Byzantines used to flavour a lot of their food. There was another sauce called liquamen that sounds almost nastier; something about the name perhaps? I saw a Roman dinner reproduced on TV many years ago and a bunch of archaeologists brought in as taste testers: only one person would eat the pears in garum. Yum! fruit served with fermented fish sauce. Perhaps not.

The recipe of Worcestershire Sauce is a closely guarded secret but a glance at the label of a bottle of Lea & Perrins - the leading UK brand - will tell you it includes anchovies and tamarind extract. And it is thought that the ingredients include onions, garlic, cloves, soy, lemons, picks, peppers, malt vinegar, molasses, sugar and salt. Complicated then.

This is a much simpler recipe but it does make for a very tasty crisp which I recommend if you are into big flavours. The silver bag is excitingly shiny if that makes a difference.