Burton's Daily Fish'n'Chips Brown Sauce

Noble Friend spotted this little packet of crispy fish and chip shaped snacks and thought.... hmm,, I don't think we're tried this flavour. And she was right. We haven't.

And, erm, well..... well I'm not quite sure what to say. These little biscuitty snacks are always rather sweet. The biscuits are sweet before you add any flavour. Or so it seems. And the Brown Sauce flavour is sweet and fruity and vinegary. What you end up with smells irresistibly of mince pies. And pretty much taste of mince pies too.

For those not in the know you make a little pie crust and fill it with mincemeat and eat it at Christmas. It's a traditional Christmas delicacy in the UK. In the olden days mince pies were made with meat: hence mincemeat. I guess as Christmas is in the middle of winter all the spices and fruits like cinnamon and raisins and grated apples were a way of disguising the taste of the meat which probably wasn't very fresh. Now of course we have freezers, and can feed more livestock through the winter, so we have access to fresh meat at any time of year.... and although a proper mince pie recipe should include suet, you can also find vegetarian versions.

Never had a mince pie? Not had the chance to try this crispy snack? Let me help you to a mince pie recipe. This is a vegetarian recipe for mince pies from Mary Berry, but here's one that's more traditional from BBC Good Food.

So to me, this crispy snack tasted and smelled so much of a mince pie I could hardly credit it. Interesting. But I should point out I have never tried Brown Sauce. So I don't know what it tastes of, but here's a Wiki page to help me out.

From the packet it looks as though Burton's have pitted the Brown Sauce flavour against a Red Sauce flavour. Perhaps. Because I can't find anything about this on the Burton's website. However, if I ever looked at Twitter....

Walkers French Fries Cheese & Onion

Halloween was approaching fast when I bought this multi-pack of French Fries (along with several packets of chocolatey this and that and some lollipops) for the basket of goodies. And obviously I tried one of the little 18g packets of Cheese & Onion.

You get a surprising amount of French Fries for your 18g; well, they probably are mostly air, being nothing but extruded and puffed potato starch and granules. And they definitely are very thin.

So the reluctant taste testers and I tucked in.

Very tasty indeed.

It isn't a very obvious cheese & onion flavour. In fact somebody thought it was salt and vinegar! However I thought, and it seemed that everyone taste testing agreed, that this is a very tasty crispy snack.

With the strange shiny texture of packing peanuts it is plain that French Fries are a fairly pretence kind of food. History graduate taste tester said he'd never liked them. He didn't like the texture. I kind of know what he meant and can't blame him. But he tried them anyway and reported that now he "really rather liked them" and this packet had "changed his view".

Success.

And it does rather go to show that periodically you should try foods you don't think that you like just in case you find you've changed your mind.

Cheetos Cheese

This packet of Cheetos Cheese came from the world foods section at Tesco. I wasn't sure at first glance whether it was a world food from Ireland or Poland. I mean, at first glance you see Cheetos Cheese, Big Bag, and Hotel Transylvania 2. And this was on the shelf between the Polish and Irish products.

However, on closer inspection, you see w kinach od 9 pazdziernika which, however odd you may find the Irish language, is patently not Irish.

So, here we have a packet of Cheetos from Frito-Lay Poland and imported into the UK by a firm based in Wokingham.

These Cheetos look pretty much how I would expect them to look. And they do taste pretty good with a wonderful light crunch. But I'm not impressed that they are a bit dry. You might say, well all crispy snacks are dry aren't they? Yes, of course. But somehow I felt the after-mouth (if that's a word), and it's not to do with the taste, is a bit dry.

It's also worth pointing out that according to the English language sticky label on the back of the packet there is no actual cheese in the recipe. There is "cheese flavour seasoning" but it contains no cheese. There is monosodium glutamate, disodium gaunylate, and disodium inosinate. Which sounds entirely too much sodium to me. There is milk and whey powder though; which may account for the interesting buttery taste.

It's odd. The packet says cheese so when you crunch in you think you taste cheese. But if you concentrate it's obvious that the taste is in fact butter. Not nasty at all just not what I was expecting.

The Chef, somewhat unhelpfully, says this crispy snack reminds him of something but he can't think what. But he did eat a few and not under duress.

I'm not sure if this packet was issued purely to advertise Hotel Transylvania 2, or as a Halloween tie in. So I thought I'd post them today.

Happy Halloween crisp fans.

PS There's a competition to visit Sony Pictures Animation Studio which (I think) runs until 16 November. So still time to enter if you fancy battling with www.cheetos.pl.

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!

KP Cheese Footballs

Oh wow! It's Cheese Football time of year again. 

They are sort of wonderful and sort of the last thing you ought to be eating all at the same time. And I can't help loving them. Yum yum yum.

OK, so if you never tried a Cheese Football think two semi-spherical half-football-shaped wafer outsides with a squishy salty fake cheese filling. It's a completely pretence food made of 100% not actually cheese at all. Just delicious!

Of course, one of the great things about Cheese Footballs is that you only get them at Christmas. So you get to look forward to them. Like looking forward to real English-grown strawberries in the summer. If Cheese Footballs were available all year round I probably wouldn't buy them. Yes, I know it's me being contrary again.

What do they actually taste like? Hard to say. The outer shell is a sort of wafer which doesn't taste of much, it's just there to hold the cheese in. And to pretend to look like a football I suppose. And the inner cheesy bit is a sort of cream-coloured salty cheesy mush. And quite sweet. Sounds horrible doesn't it? And yet... and yet, I find them hard to resist. At least once a year.

The trick is to bite off one half of wafer shell and eat that, then bite off the second half of the shell so you're left with the squidgy cheesy bit. And then you let that dissolve in your mouth. Or you can just eat them like a normal person would.

Because Cheese Footballs come in a drum I can't shove the packaging into the scanner so here it is on a bookshelf. The packaging says "the winning snack at home or away". Is this a snack you would take to a football match? I shouldn't think so. We also have two dreadful riddles:

Q What does Santa do when elves misbehave? A Give them the sack.

Q What do you sing at a snowman's birthday party? A Freeze a jolly good fellow. 

Probably best not to comment. Cheese Footballs were originally made by Huntley & Palmer and I have to admit I thought they were currently made by Jacobs but since many confusing mergers and a takeover by German snack conglomerate Intersnack they seem to come under the KP brand name these days.

Important Information 2 January 2022

I contacted KP at the end of December 2021. The Customer Services Team kindly replied almost immediately to tell me, and I am passing on the information to you lot, that this fabulous crispy snack is sent out to “most supermarkets” in mid September. So the advice is, if you find a shop with a stock of them, buy lots and eke them out. Because they have a 12 month shelf life you can safely keep a supply in the cupboard under the stairs. Or like me just gorge to your heart’s content over Christmas. And this Christmas I was given 2 tubs by 2 different family members! What could be better than that? (Because I don’t really like chocolate that much).

Just to add, I’m not sure what “most supermarkets” actually means. I haven’t seen Cheese Footballs in any of our local Waitrose branches for years, and my spies tell me that the smaller local Tesco stocks them, but the very large branch doesn’t seem to. And at least one branch of Sainsbury’s had them in December. So obviously you need to shop around….from mid September. Good luck next year.

October 2022: I followed my own advice and just picked up 5 tubs of Cheese Footballs from a giant branch of Tesco. But beware - there were four huge shelves of crisps and none of them were Cheese Footballs. We were super disappointed but kept looking and found what we were looking for on a completely different shelf some distance away. So keep looking.