Zweifel Snacketti Bacon Strips

How fascinating it is that bacon seems to be English, and French and Swiss (all sorts of Swiss), and even Italian for bacon. Why don't they have others words for it?

And these bacon flavour crispy snacks from Swiss crisp giant Zweifel are even pretend bacon shape. The pretend meaty stripe is a bit pale (and completely the wrong colour in real life) but basically what we have here is extruded potato starch pretending to be smoky bacon. With painted on stripes.

Not my most favourite ever crispy snack but I didn't expect it to be. Somehow I usually don't like bacon flavour that much but it is better than ham flavour (which can be really horrible and I'm not sure why). But not so bad either.

The crunch is good and you can get the bubbles to burst on your tongue (if that makes sense). The taste is sweet and smoky.

I wasn't mad keen - you probably worked that out for yourself - and neither was the Chef, but some of the reluctant taste testers liked these a lot. I think they ate 2 bowlsful.

So, a success for some. But not really to my taste. Or the Chef's.

Smiths Frazzles Crispy Bacon

Wow these are salty!

I love salt, I really do, but this maize-based crispy snack is the saltiest thing I have tried for a long long time.

What we have here is a crispy crunchy corn snack made to look like strips of streaky bacon. Except that the ones in the packet look a lot less like streaky bacon than the ones on the packet: there's a lot less pinky brown stripiness in real life (which in real life is beetroot red in places not pinky brown at all). But they do feature a pretty good bacon-style crinkle.

The packet tells me Frazzles have been around since 1975. And I don't imagine they have changed very much; they do have a 1970s feel about them. The bag is only 43g which has got to be a good thing. Even a massive fan of should not be eating very many of these at a time. Don't run away with the idea that I dislike them. But I wouldn't want a packet every day. Or every week really.

The Smiths brand is of course owned by Walkers (so the packet features a little guy throwing his rubbish away responsibly). Walkers are owned by Frito-Lay, who are in turn owned by PepsiCo Inc. There are a number of bacon-alike crispy snacks out there but I'm lead to believe that Frazzles are the original.