Taste testing the WEIRDEST British crisps!
After six years in the southeast of England, I’d tried a lot of British food and plenty of crisps. I loved a good crisp. This time I went to Tesco for the bags I’d never got around to trying because, honestly, they didn’t look that great. There were six or seven bags at the checkout and just me. I felt embarrassed, but we had a taste test to do.
Crunch alone couldn’t save them
I’d never tried Skips before, and this was my first prawn cocktail flavour too. They were puffed little things, the sort of snack I called foams. The packet suggested letting them melt on your tongue. That wasn’t what I wanted from a crisp. The paprika-like part of the flavour was nice, but they smelled fishy to me. Paprika with a waft of fish? Not for me. I gave them one out of seven fluffy shrimps.
Crispy bacon Wheat Crunchies looked like tubes. I initially said cubes, which they absolutely weren’t. They were much crunchier than I’d expected, actually quite hard, and normally I liked that. I preferred crunch to the mouth-melting texture of the Skips. But the flavour was so bad to me that the good crunch couldn’t rescue them. I knew what bacon tasted like, and didn’t think this was it. Three out of nine cubes, despite my correction about their shape.
Walkers Sensations lime and coriander chutney poppadoms finally gave me a good one. They weren’t as thick as a classic crinkle-cut chip, but they still had crunch. They melted a little rather than completely disappearing, and the flavour was clear and delicious. Five out of six naans. These were moreish: I could imagine sitting down with the bag and eating the lot without noticing, just going back for more. I’d seen them in shops for years and never bothered to try them. I was excited about these.
Two bags I couldn’t quite decide about
The Tesco I visited had a wall of limited-edition crisps, and I picked up two Tesco Finest flavours. The crinkle-cut pigs in blankets were a little Christmassy, but I didn’t care. I already loved the ready salted and salt and vinegar versions of those crinkle-cut crisps. This bag didn’t smell good when I opened it, though, and tasting it was a flavour roller coaster I wasn’t sure I wanted to get off.
I seemed to love and hate them simultaneously. First came smoke, then pork, then a bacony meat flavour. I thought I hated them, but also thought I could keep eating them. They were a bit moreish and kind of disgusting. Seven out of thirteen little miniature piggies. I wasn’t often left speechless, but I really didn’t know what to do with those. They didn’t get a simple verdict from me.
Cheddar and pale ale was the other limited-edition Tesco Finest bag, this time regular cut rather than crinkle. The first bite tasted very cheesy, like cheddar. Then I thought it really did taste like pale ale. A crunchy, dry, crispy pale ale. I didn’t know how they’d done it. I thought these were nicer than the pigs in blankets, although maybe they were a little gross as well. Two out of six pints. Again, I kind of liked them and kind of hated them, especially that strange ale flavour at the end.
Twiglets were worse than I remembered
I broke my own rule about trying new things for Twiglets. I believed I’d had them at my first Christmas in England, before I was doing YouTube, but remembered little beyond them being weird. The packet called them crunchy, savoury wholewheat sticks. This tasting was so much worse than I remembered that I shivered. I still took a second bite, because I always did two bites for taste tests. Because of science.
I preferred savoury foods to sweet ones, so these felt like something that should have been made for me. Instead, I thought they tasted like licking the pavement. Minus four out of fifty-seven sticks of yeast was my score. I kept seeing them around Christmas and didn’t understand the association. I didn’t want more of them, whatever time of year it was.
The final bag was Seabrook Loaded Fries chilli heat, which I’d spotted in the crisp aisle and hadn’t seen before. They had a little crunch, but were mostly puffed, with a heat flavour and perhaps some herbs. I wasn’t sure at first. After another taste, no. I liked Seabrook’s salt and vinegar crisps much more. Two out of eight disappointing baskets of fries for these foamy things and their strange flavour.
The two limited editions weren’t ordinary flavours, so I considered them separately when deciding what was weirdest. Twiglets would be my strangest snack, but I wasn’t sure they counted as crisps. Among the more familiar crisp flavours in this haul, my choice was prawn cocktail. Crisps with a whiff of fish still didn’t make sense to me. The Sensations, meanwhile, were the bag I’d been genuinely excited to keep eating.
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