Thaas Chips Oignon de la ferme

 

Oh dear, what a disappointment.

A new French crisp company, Thaas, that I hadn’t come across before, onion flavoured crisps - again, not a flavour I have come across before. They also do lemon flavour crisps (not available to buy the day we visited the Carrefour outside Reims) but…. What, we ask ourselves, is not to like? 

Thaas crisps are grown in a place called Thaas, pronounced “ta”, the packet tells us so, in the Marne which is in north east France. Two brothers, Manu and David, run the farm, and grow their own potatoes, and the onions too. By the sound of things anyway. At any rate I think they grow and process the potatoes themselves.

Well, I am extremely sorry to report that I was not very excited by this packet of crisps. I would love to tell you that they’re great, but to be honest I am not that impressed and nor is the Chef. Too thick cut, with a dull crunch (I would much prefer a crisp bite), and most importantly, they don’t taste of onions. Oh dear, oh dear.

I was hoping for a great new crisp from a company I hadn’t seen before. I was hoping for a lovely crispy onion flavoured snack. But this heavy crisp doesn’t taste of much except, I don’t know, some sort of default crispy snack flavour. Certainly not onions. I wish I could give you better news.

The Chef, of course, although he’s not too impressed, continues to snack anyway.

Beigel & Beigel Onion Flavour Snack

Here we go with post number 601! Amazing. How did this happen? How did the reluctant taste testers and I manage to try quite so many crispy snacks?

Anyway, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that, apart from Tall Elegant taste tester (who doesn't like onion) and Architectural taste tester (who has discerning tastes and is not really a fan of crispy snacks), apart from those two all the taste testers loved this lightly onion fragranced crispy snack.

Including me.

Lovely light flower-shaped puffs, lovely light onion flavour. Lovely crispy snack.

Chairman taste tester asked me if this snack is wheat or potato based? Of course I had to tell him I don't read Hebrew. So I don't know. Because there's not a lot of English writing on the packet.

What I can tell you is that Beigel & Beigel mazon (1985) Ltd is based at 1 Chocolate Road, Safed 13110, Israel. Chocolate Road eh? What a great address. I wonder what other roads in the area are called?

We enjoyed this oniony snack very much.

Roger's Hand Cooked Sour Cream & Onion

Let's step away from M&S for a moment (even though they do make a lovely range of crisps) and try a brand which is new to the Chef and me.

We found these Belgian crisps from Roger's in the wonderful basement food department at Globus in Bern. I could have gone quite mad and bought up half the shop but had to restrict myself slightly as we were going home by train. As it turned out, the train was very crowded with both commuters and people taking their families away for the weekend and there wasn't really much room for such limited shopping as we had.

Anyway, it was interesting to find Belgian crisps. I'm sure I've not tried any before. And interesting to find that the front of the packaging is all in English.

But on the back. Oh my goodness. The ingredients are in 23 different languages. Including Finnish, Czech and Hungarian. Another great way to learn a language. Who knew that brambůrky was Czech for potato crisp?

On to the crisps... which are a pale golden, slightly strewn with tiny herbs, and with the skin left on. Rather a hard crunch but not in a bad way. A good lot of tasty flavour dust and a very nice way of looking hand cooked with many of the crisps folded over or featuring a large bubble.

The onion is not too harsh and the sour cream works extremely well. All in all a very nice crisp. I liked them a lot, and the Chef (always more reserved in his opinions) agreed that they are quite nice.

But really! My predictive text has gone a little mad today. I typed onion. The computer thought lion would be better. I typed pale golden. I got apple golden. Which could be a good description but not in this case.

So I thought you'd like know we rather liked these lion and sour cream crisps.

Bissli Onion Flavour Wheat Snacks

How interesting. I bought this bag of crunchy onion rings some months ago but I put off opening it because one of Osem's Bissli products I have tried tasted really horrible. To me. You might think I was a bit of a masochist buying the bag in the first place... but you  know me: I'll try anything once.

So here we go.  Well. Quite a good crunch and a nice soft onion taste. In fact not bad. Not bad at all.

Here we have 70g of quite large wheaty rings. It's a small packet (good) and the rings are quite big so you don't get very many. The rings are quite ridged on the outside; the packet photo is a pretty good representation of this oniony snack, and the rings are quite bubbly on the inside.

I'd usually take a photo myself but the reluctant taste testers at work liked these so much that I didn't get the chance. I put a bowlful in the kitchen and when I came back there was only one ring left. So I think we can judge these a success.

We felt these were a little bit like Shreddies. "Shreddies and garlic," said one taster who does not normally comment on the crispy snack selection, "Quite nice for a change of crisp". Another taster suggested they were more of a crouton than a crisp. Not a bad reaction.

I like Shreddies as a breakfast cereal although not for every day (simply because they are too tasty), so the wheaty, slightly malty taste overlaid with onion worked quite well for me. Although perhaps not for every day.

No preservatives, no food colouring, suitable for vegetarians. Koshe Parve from (if that's the word) both Rabbi Jacob Moshe Charlap and the Chief Rabbinate Shderot. Could this be two branches of the same thing? I'm very ignorant about the kosher system so I can't answer that. And you have to protect these onion rings from the sun. This seems really odd. How will the sun damage them I wonder?

As ever Osem have used the dynamic duo of slightly bearded red-haired guy with an earing, and nerdy guy with glasses on the Bissli packaging. I still think they are a weird pair to advertise a crispy snack.

Pringles Xtra Kickin' Sour Cream & Onion

"Uma explosão de sabor", "Barstensvol smaak", "Une explosion de saveurs", "Wybuchowy ładunek smaku" and sadly I cannot find a cyrillic font so you don't get what is either Russian or Bulgarian. Sorry about that.

I haven't bought a tube (can?) of Pringles for ages. I quite like Pringles but I always have this weird idea you have to put them into your mouth whole. I have no trouble biting into other kinds of crisp if they are too large to fit in all at once, but for some reason I have this thing about not biting into a Pringle. Only they are quite big. My mouth isn't really large enough - maybe I mean wide enough -  to fit in a whole Pringle comfortably so I struggle them in and hope I'm not going to cut the corners of my mouth. Which I have done in the past.

I know they are specially manufactured like this to fit neatly into the tube and thus prevent the usual breakages, but who has a mouth this wide? Why not make them a bit smaller, the tube a bit narrower? OK, yes, it's only me isn't it?

So anyhow, I tried this, er, "kickin'" flavour out of interest. And you know what? I have the same trouble with the size of the Pringle and the apparent smallness of my mouth, but this favour is rather fabulous.

It starts out all sour creamy (which is interesting as all the other creamy flavours I've tried have kept the cream taste to the end), and then there's the onion, and then there's a great kick of.... something hot. The list of ingredients includes the somewhat vague "flavourings". But the drawing on the front of the tube shows onion, spring onion and chilli. So I guess the kickin' part of the flavour is probably chilli. The real problem, of course, is that so much of the Pringle flavour comes from chemicals and not from real ingredients. Nowadays so many varieties of crisp trumpet the virtue of their real ingredients so a crispy snack crammed full of MSG is rather a disappointment.

I am interested to see that in French this savoury snack is an aperitif. Which to the English mind is a drink. Here I guess it is a crispy snack to go with a drink, although what drink I'm not sure; the taste is kickin' enough to defeat most drinks.

Pringles come in a number of weird flavours and this Huffington Post article has some very strange ones for us to consider. Read about them here. Old American Circus flavour anyone? I know. It makes sour cream and onion sound dreadfully pedestrian.

I mustn't forget to tell you that this crispy snack gives an Intense Xperience and is "Bursting with Flavour" which is pretty much correct. I think they taste pretty good. But I also think that all that MSG, disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate cannot be a good thing. Oh, and I never knew Pringles belonged to Kellogg's. did you? Yup. Proctor & Gamble sold the brand to Kellogg's in 2012. And these Pringles were made in Belgium.

Space Raiders Pickled Onion

Another crispy selection from the local newsagent run by the amazingly cheerful man.

After careful scrutiny of the back of the packet I find the Space Raiders trademark is registered to United Biscuits who make Jaffa Cakes and Twiglets. This information is in very tiny writing, and the Space Raiders brand doesn't seem to feature on the United Biscuits website. According to Wikipedia, Space Raiders are made by KP but that brand doesn't feature on the United Biscuits website either. Oh, wait, apparently KP was sold to German brand Intersnack in December 2012. It's all terrifically complicated.

Space Raiders have a very strong flavour. I love silverskin pickled onions, although not so keen on the larger pickled onions, so I was dubious about how these would taste. But it's a pretty good approximation of the genuine pickled onion taste and just as strong. Perhaps it's not such a bad thing you only get 22g in the bag: any more and all the skin would get burnt off the inside of your mouth.

So here we have a pickled onion flavour, reconstituted maize, alien-face-shaped crunchy snack. With a great big green alien face on the packet. Could this possibly be yet another savoury snack aimed at children? They do have their own Facebook page... and only 20p....

Not a snack to go with a gin and tonic or a glass of sherry. Maybe a Swiss wine would work? I always drink Fendant or Johannisberg with an Assiette Valaisanne; a plate of cold meats (jambon cru, viande séchée, saucisse sèche and lard), and local cheeses with pickled gherkins and onions. It seems a pretty good combination.

Anyway, despite the luminous green alien on the packet, these "cosmic" corn snacks are rather good. They have pretty much the same bubbly texture as most quaver-style corn snacks, perhaps a little thicker than some but with a good soft bite. There's plenty of flavour dust and the flavour goes all the way through. I'm impressed. Yes, snack fans, I rather liked these bonkers crispy things.

Don't forget the most important thing of all.... these crunchy oniony snacks come in the shape of an alien's face. Wow. I gather that in the bad old days when all of us in Europe were allowed as many E numbers as we liked, the pickled onion flavour snacks were bright green. What a shame I missed that! Ordinary "crunchy corn snack" colour just isn't the same.

Yes I know they are frightfully bad for me. But they are suitable for vegetarians, and baked not fried, and the packet does tell me I should keep active for a healthy lifestyle. Probably the embarrassment of being spotted buying a bag with a luminous green alien on will help with the healthy lifestyle because I likely won't be doing that again. Lying in bed on a Sunday morning taste-testing Space Raiders, however, will not.

Private thought: I wonder if my brother will read this? He doesn't seem to believe blogs exist. Let's find out.

M&S Sour Cream & Onion Pitta Chips

I have to admit right from the start that I'm not mad keen on these pitta chips from Marks & Spencer. They seem very hard - perhaps they're meant to be hard but that doesn't seem such a good thing - and once you get past the seasoning it's a little like eating one of those famously hard biscuits, the Bath Oliver. Never had a Bath Oliver? What about a Rich Tea? Both of them taste of nothing but plain biscuit with a hard crunch. Bath Olivers definitely win in the hardness stakes although they are rather more buttery. (There is a Chocolate Oliver biscuit which has a very thick layer - very hard - of dark chocolate over the plainness that is the Bath Oliver. Rather good. You can nibble the chocolate off so you don't actually have to eat the biscuit if you don't want.)

These crisps are supposed to be square. Or squarish. The top (or front) is shiny and toasted, with a scattering of onion flavouring. The bottom/back looks like badly toasted bread. In my packet the square chips were few and far between. It seemed that many of them were broken which was a shame.

The oniony part of the flavour seems to be mostly on the shiny toasty top. So that all gets licked off at once. Then when you bite there is a waft of sour creaminess which is quite an interesting sensation - and a good taste. And then there's all the dry biscuityness.

Apparently they are baked with genuine pitta flour. Yes? So how come pitta bread isn't all dry and biscuity?

I find online that you can buy pitta chips made by a company called New York Style. They appear to be an American company although it is very difficult to tell from their website: they have no address or any other details. The only thing that makes me fairly sure is the recipes which feature cups. English recipes never feature cups as a scale of measurement.

Perhaps Marks & Spencer sent their product testing team to the USA and brought back a suitcase full of pitta chips and thought it a good idea to develop their own? On this evidence I'm not certain that was such a top plan.

So. Really hard and rather dry and biscuity.
Not nearly enough flavour, although I like the onion a lot.

Unless this is what pita chips are always like I feel this is a missed opportunity to introduce the UK to something tasty and new. I left these a week and went back and tried again. No. Sorry. Not worth the effort.

And seriously, if pitta chips are all like this, the question is why?