Walkers Baked Wotsits Giants

Really cheesy. Well, not exactly tasting of actual cheese, but definitely tasting of the fabulously fake ‘cheese flavour’ of so many crispy snacks. But don’t take this as a criticism. I love cheese flavour snacks and this is a very good one.

Yes, they are just like the original Cheesy Wotsits, just about three times the size. And they taste the same and are just as moreish (which someone from Ohio once told me is not a word used in the United States - can that really be the case?).

 Very moreish indeed. Very hard to avoid having another one. 

Except… and for me I’m afraid this is a very big except, they really do gum themselves to your teeth like cement. With a regular sized Wotsit you can rid yourself of the squished puffed corn sogginess gummed to your teeth with your tongue. The giant version required much poking and prodding with a searching finger. So that is a bit of an issue for me.

I should have photographed the glossy blue packet before it got all scrumpled up but never mind, you’ve all seen a crisp packet before.

Chio Flips Peanut

I never had a peanut flavour crispy snack (that wasn’t an actual peanut) before my friend Giraffe Fan Taste Tester (who is Jewish) bought me a packet of Bamba peanutty snacks from the local Jewish deli. I learned these are a staple for Jewish children, certainly in North London, probably all over the world. And the ex-chairman of my ex-work told me he was convinced eating this crispy snack prevented Jewish children from suffering the really nasty peanut allergy that afflicts so many British kids. Who knows? It’s just his theory.

Then I discovered the French also fancy a peanut snack like this one from Carrefour. And here’s another from Serbia. And here’s a great big guess: it’s likely there are lots of peanutty crispy snacks produced all over the world. So why can’t you buy a peanut snack in the UK? (Unless you have access to a source of kosher food.) Well, gosh! Probably because we are all so set in our ways there isn’t any danger we might try something a bit different.

So here’s a peanutty snack from Germany which the Chef and I found in Switzerland.

It looks as though it would be the same as a Bamba snack, but it has a harder bite. The Chef thought it would be saltier, but it wasn’t. He also thought it would be sweeter like the fabulous M&S Cheese Tasters, but it wasn’t. And obviously it wasn’t cheesy either. Oh dear. I have discovered that quite a lot of the reasons why you enjoy (or don’t enjoy) a crispy snack are about expectations. The Chef expected something else and so he didn’t really like this peanutty snack. 

I rather enjoyed it. So long as you expect a peanutty taste and a crunchy bite you might enjoy this too.

Grizzy and the Lemmings: Crunch Yeah

This top quality (and amazingly violent in a jolly fashion) Canadian animation is about a grizzly bear who moves into a park ranger’s house as soon as the ranger leaves - perhaps he goes home to visit his mum? we never find out - and a slice or gang of out of control lemmings determined to invade his space and destroy his peace. [Numerous online sources assure me that slice really is the word for a group of lemmings but I confess I really find this quite hard to believe.]

Grizzy mostly eats salmon (he also watches what looks like Salmon TV), and a Nutella-style spread called Yummy; sometimes he spreads Yummy on his fish. The lemmings love speed, and anything bouncy (or disco), and will do anything including destroying the entire planet for a jar of Yummy but they are also pretty keen on the would-be Cheesy Wotsit (or Cheeto) crispy snack Grizzy sometimes eats: it’s called Crunch Yeah.

This rather bad snap of Grizzy vaulting upside down to escape some ghastly fate shows a packet of Crunch Yeah tucked into his belt.Which is interesting as Grizzy never normally wears a belt.

If any crispy snack entrepreneur is thinking of launching a new Wotsit style corn puff type of snack I can’t help feeling that “Crunch Yeah” wouldn’t be a bad name. I would probably buy a packet. I think maybe the reluctant taste testers might too. I might suggest calling it Crunch Yeah! though. I feel an exclamation mark might help the marketing.

I have struggled to find a scene to grab a shot of the Crunch Yeah snack but if you know what Wotsits or Cheetos look like you will know just what I’m talking about, and here’s a photo of some M&S Cheese Tasters (very similar in style) just in case you don’t.

Sadly only ever seen on French TV.

Vitaminka Stobi Flips with Peanuts

Slightly Red Haired Bristolian found this packet of crispy snacks in her local Turkish shop. She says the shop is full of interesting continental snacks she’s not seen before. So she bought this packet for the reluctant taste testers to try.

Stobi Flips are basically corn puffs with peanuts. This is a style of snack you don’t really get in the UK, but you do find it in France. And Israel. And apparently Macedonia too.

Actually if you’ve tried one of these peanut snacks I think you’ll wonder why we don’t get them in the UK. I mean, corn puffs are popular and peanuts are popular so why not a combination of the two?

The packet tells me that this was a “Macedonia superbrand” in 2009. And why not? This snack smells peanutty when you open the packet, has a soft crunch and really tastes savoury and peanutty. Not bad at all.

Giraffe fan taste tester (currently on maternity leave so we haven't heard from her in a while) introduced me to Bamba Peanut Snacks which I reviewed in 2013. She's a big fan. It was the first peanut snack I ever tried - that wasn't actually a peanut. And I wasn't quite prepared for the interesting taste/texture combination. So I gave it a less than enthusiastic review.

Well, I've taste tested a great many crispy snacks since then, so I've got used to all sorts. And learned to enjoy all sorts of snacks. Probably I would now recommend Bamba ahead of all the other peanut snacks that I've tried. But Stobi Flips aren't half bad. I ate quite a lot of them.

Herr's Deep Dish Pizza Flavoured Cheese Curls

This was a very tiny packet of cheese curls from Herr's. Only 1 oz (28.4g). Which doesn't give you many snacks as these cheese curls are very big (and not at all curly).

Not at all curly but extremely tasty. I really liked these. Yum! A proper pizza taste which is quite unusual. Most allegedly pizza flavoured crispy snacks seem to taste mostly of oregano or some species of tomato sauce, and not in a good way. I really thought this was a genuine pizza taste. Although I cannot tell you that I can pick the old world flavour of traditional Chicago style deep dish pizza because I've never tried it. Definitely yum! though.

They are quite a bright orange, and Giraffe Fan missed out (not very many in this packet) because she thought they looked "too orange" to try. Can't think why. I'm sure she's tried orange snacks before. Bit of a mistake in my view.

I would definitely buy these again, and in a larger packet. Very very nice.

Cheetos Twisted Flamin' Hot

I was very excited to find I could buy a packet of Cheetos in this country. Until fairly recently Cheetos was a brand only available elsewhere. I had thought the USA only, but have of course discovered you can buy Cheetos in Spain. And I daresay in other countries too.

Anyway, here we have a packet of Cheetos. Hurrah!

But. But don't they seem pretty much the same as Smith's Twisted Flamin' Hot? Which we tried back in September 2013.

I have to say that looking back I wasn't super impressed. After two and a half years of taste testing I may be looking at this product with different eyes. I now think this is rather a fab crispy snack.

Great big twists of corn puff snack, lovely rich colour, not a bad crunch, and a warm sweet flavour followed by a kick of chilli. Not too terribly flamin' hot.

But still, pretty tasty.

Most of the reluctant taste testers seemed pretty keen, and I'm fairly sure that Extremely Senior Volunteer taste tester was very keen indeed. On the other hand, Extremely Sceptical taste tester said she thought this crispy snack was too big. I quite like the size but of course others are always welcome to their own opinions.

Tesco Cheese Balls

This is the most ginormous packet of crispy snacks known to  mankind. Or at least the mankind that shops in the UK.

As an experiment I scanned the packet in two halves to see what I could do without benefit of fancy photoshopping or whatnot. Pity about the white strip between the scans but you do get a sensation of how large this packet is.

300g of little crispy cheese balls. As I had to put 6 of these on my kitchen scales to register any weight at all (1g or possibly 2g; the scales could not make its - their? - mind up) that will give you a fair idea of how many you get in one packet. Far too many for even the most enthusiastic taste testers to eat at one sitting.

Not a bad crunch (light as expected), not too much virulent orange flavour dust, and an OK taste. Not terrifically cheesy. We weren't mad for the little balls but a large bowlful did get eaten.

Extremely sceptical taste taster said she thought they tasted of sick. No they don't I protested. Yes, said the Tall taste tester, they do. But I notice that did not inhibit him from eating rather a lot of them. Weird.

Oh and Senior taste tester sniped at me again because this product (a concoction of puffed maize) is not a potato crisp. No it's not. It's a maize puff thingummy and we've tried stuff like this before. Plus it's my blog! And if my choices are a bit arbitrary, so be it.

Not at all sure what the bunny rabbit with the crown has to do with cheesy crispy snacks.

Kims Ostepops Original

History Graduate taste tester went to Denmark & Sweden for the weekend, as you do, and brought home this totally amazing packet of cheesy corn puffs.

Når du er sulten for sjov... says the packet: hungry for the fun of it (translates the website).

Little curly bright orange maize snacks with a superb cheesy taste. Extravagantly cheesy. The reluctant taste testers and I were not prepared for just how fabulous this crispy snack was going to be.

Made by Danish firm Kims along the lines of the good old British staple the cheesy Wotsit these corn puffs look pretty much like what we choose to think of as "the original" corn puff. But they don't cover your fingers in bright orange flavour dust that takes days to fade.

Of course, in other parts of the world one might say they are much like Cheetos. But as I haven't had too much exposure to Cheetos I will continue with the Wotsits theme.

And they taste better than Wotsits! Better even, I venture to suggest, than M&S Full on Flavour Cheese Tasters which are pretty good.

Amazing. And wow! And we all liked these a lot. Delicious.
This is intended to be a rave review. I hope you can tell.

I think we are all going to have to visit Denmark to pick up more crispy snacks from Kims.

I'm not wild about the packaging design though.

M&S Vampire's Fangs Salt & Vinegar

This is the 2015 Halloween offering from Marks & Spencer. Corn grits extruded and puffed into Vampire Fangs are a departure from last year's scorpion shapes. And the toothy shape is pretty good. One of the taste testers mistook them for false teeth and was quite put off.

 The crunch is not so light as it should be; it's rather dull and heavy. So all in all not a massive success there. But the salt & vinegar taste is not too strong and the reluctant taste testers and I found that we ate a few more than we meant to.

But after all, this is a snack for Halloween only.

The packaging is actually a much brighter, lighter orange than shown here. So this is yet another example of the scanner doing weird things with colour. But the ravens and the bats and the skulls and the (presumably haunted) house show up pretty well.

Happy Halloween!

Willards Thingz Siesta Snack Original

I was looking for something quite un-crisp related on Amazon when it did that thing of recommending a product you find yourself unable to resist. Oh no! A packet of crisps called Thingz from Zimbabwe.

Well! Knowing that I will never visit Zimbabwe (never say never but it does seem wildly unlikely) I thought why not? And thanks to the annoyingly efficient Amazon Prime delivery system here they are.

So, you're a crispy snack company based in Zimbabwe, and for the hard of geography readers that's in Southern Africa (alright, I know you knew that), and naturally you decide on a Mexican theme for your snack. Why not?

Thingz (says the packaging) the Spicy Siesta Snack for Desperados! And the Desperado has presumably gorged himself on Thingz and fallen into a deep slumber under the shade of his Mexican hat and a selection of Saguaro cactuses such as you might find in Southern Arizona and Western Sonora in Mexico.

But oh dear, what a disappointment. I offered these puffed corn rings to the reluctant taste testers, to the Chef and even the Chef's brother. And none of us like them.

I think the taste is sort of curry-ish (but not in a good way) and there's a hint of something from my childhood that I can't put my finger on (and not in a good way either).  You can't tell what the flavour might be aside from "spicy" because the packet simply says flavouring. I can only suppose, given the packaging design, it must be meant to be a sort of Mexican chilli.

And the texture doesn't have a light bubbly crunch as you might suppose, but degenerates quickly into cotton wool. Which then glues itself to your teeth in an unpleasant fashion.

Sorry, but we are not impressed.

I tried to find out more about this crispy snack but beyond the fact that it seems to be called Willards Thingz (confusingly Willards does not appear on the packet at all), there's not a lot I could find. Nothing about Cairns Foods either. The link to Cairns Foods on the packet defaulted to a site called Thousand Military (very odd) with links to Nespresso Expresso, Military jobs, Food Industry jobs in Canada and Dubai and Nursing jobs in Zimbabwe. Very very odd indeed.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet search engine I did discover that Zimbabweans eat a lot of corn snacks but nothing about their preferred flavours. Except Willards also produce Cheas Naks, a cheese flavoured corn chip, and Flings (flavour unknown).

I have no idea at all if Mexican food is popular. But you never know.

Sudden thought: what a shame Thingz aren't cactus-shaped.

Unfortunately this giant 150g packet is too large to fit into my scanner. But it does feature a little guy throwing his rubbish away responsibly so here he is, on the back of the packet, plus a lot of cactuses.

Riska Umai Wa Yasai Salad

I hope I have the name of this Japanese crispy snack correct. Luckily, because I only have 3 or 4 words of Japanese and cannot read it at all, I found a handy blog (Eating WDW) the writer of which seems to know more about it than I do.

On the front of the packet the flavour is called Yasai Salad. But a little sticky label on the back of the packet give the name of the importer, a list of ingredients and gives Umai Wa Salad as the flavour. So I'm going to follow the blog writer and amalgamate the two names.

This packet was bought from a local Japanese shop by tech expert taste tester in search of Japanese ingredients. And he kindly allowed me to try a few.

Despite the slightly scary packet design (I usually prefer a more minimalist style) these puffed corn hoops are really rather good. I don't know how you make a salad flavour for a crispy snack and indeed I couldn't pick any salad going on here. What I did get was a very tasty hit of garlic.

Well, according to the sticky label the ingredients include garlic, spice, salt, parsley, seaosning (sic), and "calcium comes from the egg shel". So there we are.

Not bad at all. Nice taste, nice texture too, good crunch. We were rather impressed.

I gather that the strange creature on the back of the packet is called Umaemon and he seems to feature on a number of different snacks. You can see here he is riding a unicycle on a tightrope. And is wearing a sort of clown outfit. Why? Oh well, I don't really need to know do I?

I wish I knew what was going UP! on the front of the packet.

Walkers Baked Wotsits Really Cheesy

I've been eating so many exotic varieties of crisps recently I have ignored the old classics. And Cheesy Wotsits really are a classic which I always used to love.

But guess what? These cheesy flavour corn puffs aren't the same as they used to be. Yes, you've guessed; they're baked not fried these days.

Everyone knows that crisps and other crispy snack foods are not at all healthy and we shouldn't be eating too many of them. So changing from unhealthy frying to baking is surely just a marketing thing.  It makes your unhealthy crispy snack marginally less unhealthy; although still chock full of salt (and in many cases sugar too).

The only trouble is that baked snacks are never so tasty as fried. Well.... they are actually just fine if you never tried the old version. Sadly though they leave me lusting after the olden days when truly unhealthy crispy snacks tasted truly fabulous.

But ongoing ignoring the above, these aren't at all bad. Yes, and ignoring the fact that my newly upgraded Mac (which used to be Snow Leopard and is now Mavericks or something) randomly changes what I type for whatever it thinks fit; eg it changed ignoring to ongoing without asking me, they do taste pretty cheesy. The crunch is rather soft but the taste is good.

I must admit I miss the old excess flavour dust; there's nothing like so much flavour dust as there used to be, and your fingers don't turn orange any more. Perhaps the dust sticks better on each little baked Wotsit, or perhaps Walkers just use less dust these days? There wasn't even lots of dust left inside the bag or in the corners. Nothing left to lick off!

The flavour seems to be mostly created from milk: dried cheese, milk whey powder, buttermilk powder and milk proteins. So don't try these if you are allergic to milk. Also in the mix Disodium 5'-Ribonucleotide (sounds like a chemistry lesson) and Potassium Chloride which I could have sworn was mentioned in a murder mystery I was watching on TV this afternoon; yes, I read you can stop the heart with the correct amount of this chemical. Hmmn. They do put odd stuff into crisps sometimes don't they?

And here's the Walkers design team again playing with the little guy who throws his rubbish away responsibly. For some reason he has morphed into a mouse on the Wotsits packet. I guess it must be all the cheese.

The packet asked if I am a cruncher or a melter? Do I like to nibble each Wotsit? Or let it gently dissolve in my mouth? I think I'm a cruncher but unfortunately I finished the packet before reading the bag so failed to try out each eating technique. Stupid! I also should have weighed the bag before starting because weirdly it doesn't have a weight on. These convenient little portions have 99 calories or less (it says) but not how big the portion is.

Perfectly acceptable cheesy crispy corn puffs. But fings ain't wot they used to be. And my Mac hates the word fings.

Smith's Twisted Flamin' Hot

"Twisted (TM) soft, melty, deliciously twisty packed full of your favourite Flamin' Hot flavour" says the packaging in orange type on a swirl of red and cerise. I'm not convinced that anything called "Flamin' Hot" is in fact my favourite flavour. However, here goes...

Wow! Really hot. Possibly even flamin' hot. And extremely twisted. But in other respects just like an ordinary corn puff.

Very nice texture, good crunch, orangey yellow and really twisty. I would not describe these as melty though. A little bit too dry. The colour and taste all seem to be on the outside which is a bit of a shame.

I tried these twisty puffs at my desk at lunch and wasn't too impressed. I thought them too hot, and too dry. So I didn't finish the bag. I took it home to photograph the remaining twists and scan the packet. And then I accidentally helped myself to another twist, and another while I was drinking a glass of wine.

What a vast improvement.

 

How odd that a crunchy snack apparently designed for children tastes so much better with a glass of wine. My lunchtime glass of water was clearly not good enough.

So it turns out that these get a very good review; both for the amazing twistyness and the flamin' hot flavour. Shame about the dry element, but hey, just have another swig of wine.

Well done Smiths. Not a bad job. Suitable for vegetarians too.

But I mustn't forget the tongue twister printed on the back of the packet: tremendously tingly twisty twisted tickle the taste buds and tantalise the tongue, because totally twisty twisted are the tastiest tingliest twisted snack in town. "Ooh twisty!" it says.