Vico Curly Sweety Cacahuètes caramélisées pointe de sel

The other day the Chef was talking about his childhood drives through France with his parents and his younger brother. Of course that was before the splendid motorway network was built with its service stations full of all sorts of interesting products to buy. He was bemoaning the serious lack of nougat on sale these days. I don’t like nougat myself, but I know a lot of people who love it. And it is disappointing to see shelves which used to be stocked with nougat filled with American sweets instead. There are an awful lot of British crisps on sale too. You know I am always on the lookout for French snacks and not something I could pick up at the local supermarket.

It seems his journeys over the years have been full of nougat, and, what has never been mentioned before, caramel covered peanuts. I couldn’t find any nougat, but I was pleased to find this packet of salted caramel  peanuts. The Chef was not excited. He said it wasn’t what he had meant. Because he meant peanuts with a hard brown coating.

I opened the packet anyway and I think this is a delicious little packet of peanutty goodness. Nice quality peanuts, not small or hard, and slathered in shiny, slightly sticky salted caramel. Yum! Very, very moreish. I ate rather a lot of them.

I put the packet in the kitchen and fancy that, would you believe it, the Chef at quite a lot too.

The packet tells us this was voted product of the year in 2023. I don’t know what the competition or the category was but I can easily see why these yummy peanuts won a prize.

For other Vico Curly products see here, or here. Goodness knows why all their peanut products are called Curly!

Snyder's of Hanover Sweet & Salty Pretzel Pieces Salted Caramel

Hmm... the name of this crispy crunchy snack seems to go on forever. The actual flavour is Salted Caramel and they certainly do taste of Salted Caramel.

I think the reluctant taste testers and I tried these Sweet & Salty Pretzel Pieces just before I was dragged off to hospital in early March. They've sitting around since then and are in pretty good condition considering. Paper clips seem to work as well as a kitchen clip at keeping the bag tightly shut. Which is lucky as here we are 4 months later.

As with all these Pretzel Piece snacks this has a huge great crunch which is fabulous, but of course as usual it looks like a snack cobbled together from the remains of an nasty accident in Snyder's kitchens. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's what happened once upon a time and gave someone a marketing idea.

We've tried 4 different packets of Pretzel Pieces before but they were all savoury flavours like Hot Buffalo Wings but these are Sweet & Salty which is a very different taste. These pieces of pretzel are swathed in piles of flavour dust which delivers a great thwack of Sweet & Salty flavour. And the Salted Caramel is very caramelly.

It reminds me of the olden days when William Morris Fan taste tester who worked with me and the taste testers before ever the taste testing was invented, introduced me to Sweet & Salted as a flavour for the first time. She rushed out to one of the local kosher delis and produced a snack such as I had never seen before  - I think it was popcorn. Wow! That must be less than 10 years ago. Amazing. Crispy snack flavours have come on apace since then. Although possibly that comment applies more to the UK than the USA.

Never attempted this sort of flavour? Definitely worth a try. Go on. You know you want to.

Bloom's Popcorn Salted Caramel

Hand-popped corn with a muscavado sugar caramel. Sounds very tasty doesn't it?

And it is tasty. Very sweet, but quite tasty.

The problem with this popcorn is the popcorn. The back of the packet tells us that our jumbo-sized popcorn is hand-popped the traditional way, in small batches in steel popping pans, to give crunch and character. But it isn't jumbo-sized. Or if it is then pretty much all the popcorn I've ever tried qualifies as jumbo.

And to be honest I wasn't that impressed at all the tough little bits of kernel skin (if that's a thing) that got stuck in my teeth.

None of the reluctant taste testers were particularly enthusiastic about this popcorn. In fact, Noble Friend said she thought it far too sweet. We didn't quite finish the packet.

I have another packet of Bloom's popcorn to try so we'll see how we get on with that.

Tesco Salted Caramel Crisps

Quite a handsome golden brown crisp. Not a bad crunch. Nice size crisps. So far so normal. But OK, we're here to discuss this exotic special Christmas flavour.

So, er, the taste? Well.... I have to say that we really didn't like these that much. The initial aroma on opening the bag was basically potato crisp. And after a minute or two it was... sort of sweet.

Sort of sweet eh? Yes, some people thought they could really taste the caramel but they thought it a dead weird crisp flavour. I couldn't really detect  caramel specifically. It could have been chocolate or something.  But basically it was more "or something".

As so often I poured out a bowlful for the reluctant taste testers at work. Usually I go back an hour or so later and refill the bowl. Not this time. Nope. I took home most of the packet. Which tells its own story.

Really not at all sure what Mr Tesco was thinking of with this crisp flavour. Weird.