M&S Reduced Fat Buttered Baked Potato Flavour Crisp

Sometimes at lunch it's all about the crunch. A quiet lunch will be just as filling and very likely a lot more nourishing but nonetheless sometimes you need a crunch. And on the crunch days you find me browsing the snack shelves in Waitrose or Marks & Spencer.

I never buy reduced fat anything because it's always horrible whatever it is. Much better policy to eat a lot less of the full fat stuff than battle your way through something nasty like totally fat free yoghurt. I mean, seriously, yoghurt is made of fat isn't it? (And a selection of bacteria of course.) So what can the fat free version be made of? Air, water and cardboard I suppose.

So I bought these anyway because baked potato seemed such a bonkers flavour for a crisp.

However weird it sounds, this flavour really works. These crisps really do taste of baked potato with plenty of butter.

How the flavour development team at Marks & Spencer ever came up with the idea is anyone's guess but it's a real triumph. Right at the end of the packet where the crisps get smaller and there's a higher proportion of what I call flavour dust there's a slight hint of onion, which is one of the ingredients listed. How onion makes anything taste of baked potato (or butter) I don't know but there you are.

Not a flavour for every day - they're a bit rich - but one to try if you see them. Only problem: they're never in stock.

M&S Reduced Fat Sour Cream & Chive

I tried these reduced fat crisps because they are from the same range as the fabulous Reduced Fat Buttered Baked Potato flavour crisps which you can read about here. But I'm not mad about them.

I never normally buy reduced fat items because I'm sure that reduced fat products are full of extra sugar and other goodness-knows-what. I'd much rather eat less of the full fat product. However, I was seduced by the exciting Buttered Baked Potato flavour which turned out to be wonderful (and really unusual) and then I noticed people in the office were eating this flavour.

So I thought I'd try it. Mmnn. Well, not so madly impressed to be honest.

These are crinkle cut crisps, quite a good size, not a bad crunch and nice little herby things (probably chives and parsley) strewn across the crisps. The taste is not nasty. Not at all. It's fine. It's just... I don't really know. The taste is fine. Not too much chive and as ever it's quite hard to detect the sour cream element, it's just the strangely greasy taste (or mouth feel - if that's a phrase) you tend to get with reduced fat products. I really don't like that too much.

Made with natural flavours, 30% less fat (than what exactly?), and suitable for vegetarians.

I can only suppose the picket fence packaging decoration, and the basket of grass (chives?) are supposed to make the product look more natural. But the bright green colour works well with the sour cream & chive flavour.

It's odd isn't it, and an oddity by no means confined to M&S products and I really do not want to be nasty about M&S who mostly produce brilliant crisps, that reduced fat foods often taste/feel greasier than full fat foods.

I don't want to be mean because the taste is fine. But the greasy mouth feel is not for me.

Kambly ApériSticks Kartoffel & Rosmarin

The Chef and I have tried a couple of Kambly crispy snacks before, but this one is new (neu/nouveau) so we hadn’t seen a packet before.

Potato and rosemary eh? Shades of the late lamented crisps from Marks & Spencer: Reduced Fat Buttered Baked Potato which astonishingly really tasted of buttery baked potatoes.

I am absolutely not convinced you can taste any potato in this snack, and the rosemary is quite gentle but they do taste quite buttery (even though I’m not sure there is any butter in the recipe.). A nice crunch, and a subtle taste is rather undermined by the pale uncooked colour which is a shame because actually this is  not a bad snack. It’s just that we are conditioned to expect a brown colour to indicate a cooked and crunchy snack. And this is cooked and crunchy while remaining pale.

This was the Chef’s main gripe. “A bit pale”, he opined.

Lay's Édition Limitée Saveur Sandwich Parisien

What? A limited edition crisp called Parisian Sandwich? Now there's a thing: I had no idea there was such a creature as a Parisian Sandwich.

Evidently I haven't been paying attention. Well, OK, let's be honest here. I haven't visited Paris since 1988 (it was during the Seoul Olympics), and that was only to change trains. My last proper visit was probably about 1980. So perhaps I've just failed to notice (or totally forgotten) that the people of Paris have a passion for ham sandwiches. Did you know?

I took this packet of crisps to work and all the reluctant taste testers were a bit surprised at the flavour. And then even more surprised that the taste is indeed ham sandwich.

The packaging tells me that Le sandwich Parisien (jambon-beurre) est un sandwich emblématique de la région Parisienne! Ham and butter, eh? I almost always start a sandwich with bread and butter. Perhaps this isn't the norm in France.

As I say, the reluctant taste testers and I were amazed that these crisps really do taste of ham sandwich. Tall elegant taste tester was particularly impressed. Some of us felt it was perhaps a ham and cheese sandwich but I can only attribute this to the butter part of the flavour as there is nothing in the ingredients to indicate cheese. The Chef and the Ski Instructor liked them too.

Very impressive use of materials to create a rather improbable sounding flavour. The best equivalent flavour I can think of is the M&S Reduced Fat Buttered Baked Potato crisp.

This is a limited edition crisp so if you happen to be in France grab them while you can.

Bret’s La Bretonne Subtiiilement Beurrée

 Purchased, you guessed it, from a motorway service station in France, this interesting crisp is just delicious. There were other flavours on offer in the little shop (where I also bought a packet of extremely good ham for our picnic lunch), but this looked the most intriguing.

So yesterday I put out a bowl of crisps for the Chef which he shoved to the far end of the table for fear of eating too many, and I sat down on the sofa with the packet. And ate far too many all at once.

Just delicious. A gorgeous buttery taste which may sound wrong, but trust me, it’s so right. Lovely crisp bite as always from Bret’s, finely crinkled, irresistible. Buy some to try if you see them, but possibly only available in France.

And they remind me quite strongly of the long lamented M&S Reduced Fat Buttered Baked Potato crisp which was great. It really was.