"crisps" news and stories

About five years ago my good friend Edward J. O'Halloran told me about Tayto, an Irish brand of crisps, or potato chips, as we call them here in the States. This was long before I attained my current status as an international junk-food maven. Since then I've noshed on treats ranging from downright fishy to bland beyond belief. Sadly I've never tried Tayto, or any other type of Irish crisps, for that matter. All of which brings me to the subject of this St. Patrick's Day dispatch: a survey of Tayto and some other crisps that I purchased in the Irish enclave of Woodside, Queens, yesterday. As a bona fide beer geek, I'm a wee bit ashamed to admit that this tasting was done with bottles of Guinness that did not have the famous widget; be advised your results may vary. Slàinte!!

Since they're so in line with my affinity for fishy flavored junk food, let's start with Tayto Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps. While there's nothing wrong with this crisp as far as tastiness and crunchiness, I detected not even the faintest hint of prawn. I suspect that in Ireland "Prawn Cocktail Flavour" has as much to do with seafood as "cheese food product" has to do with dairy farms on this side of the pond. This suspicion is borne out by the fact that on the ingredients, prawn cocktail flavor is composed of a dozen subingredients, including MSG and saccharin. It's a craveable crisp that goes well with the Guinness, but I can't help feeling that the folks at Tayto Castle let me down by not giving me my fix of fish flavor.

I never munch on pickled onions, save for when I'm drinking a Gibson, but I hear they're a renowned delicacy in the United Kingdom, so next up is Tayto Pickled Onion Flavour Crisps. These little guys are really quite good and they certainly taste like pickled onion. In fact, they're so addictive I'm struggling not to finish the whole bag! Now if only I had a Gibson to sip with them instead of this bloody Guinness. Or are cocktails and potato chips déclassé? The one down side of these crisps is that I now have quite the case of onion breath. That aside, Mr. Tayto and company have done right by the global snacking community.

I've just passed the halfway mark on my first bottle of Guinness and I'm eager to try yet another snack oddity from the folks at Tayto, Roast Chicken Flavor Crisps. Yeah, you heard right. Seems that Koreans aren't the only ones out there trying to make junk food taste like chicken. Tayto's stab at poultry-flavored potato chips doesn't taste terribly much like chicken either. This is the worst of the Tayto products I've tasted so far. Perhaps it's because what are supposed to be chicken-flavored crisps are described as suitable for vegetarians on the package. I'll stick to chicken cracklings.

What is it about the change of taste you get when you shrink down a larger food into a smaller one? I can see how baby peas or other foods can taste different, because they are different, but something like the new Pringles Minis, why do they taste different than the ordinary Pringles when they are just smaller versions of the original?

OK, so they don't taste that different. But they don't taste exactly the same either. Even if you put enough smaller ones in your mouth to equal a whole Pringles large chip, there's still something slightly different about the taste. I was never very good at science in school.

These are pretty good though. They come in Original, Sour Cream and Onion, and Cheddar Cheese flavors. I don't think I'd buy them over the regular Pringle's, but they do retain their shape in the little bags. I thought they'd be Pringles Dust because they're not protected and stacked like the bigger chips, but the two bags I've had were fine. (Pringles also has some new Pringles Selects, but I haven't tried them yet.)

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is mounting a campaign to educate Britons about "hidden salt, fat and sugar in common foods" to give people some perspective on the foods that they are putting into their bodies and to try to encourage healthy eating habits. Their focus, for the moment, is on crisps. A survey done by the BHF revealed that 49% of children from 8-15 ate at least one package of chips (crisps) each day, and 20% ate two or more. They are consuming roughly 5-liters of cooking oil every year at that rate, or about 1 1/3 gallons.

Crisp-addiction isn't limited to kids, though. As a whole, the nation consumes "a tonne of crisps every three minutes, enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours." Using the number provided by the BHF, which says that the average 1.2-oz packet of chips has 2.5-tsp of oil, there are about 950-gallons of cooking oil consumed for every tonne (2,204 lbs) of crisps, a massive amount over any length of time.

Source

If you appreciate the snack food reviews of Taquitos.net, you owe yourself a visit to The Chippie, a slightly more specialized blog of potato chip reviews. Created and maintained by self-proclaimed chip lover Janet Higdon, The Chippie has roughly a year's-worth of chip reviews so far. There are categories for best and worst chip reviews on the site, and these come in helpful when you're trying to tell the good beer-flavored potato chips (Beer Chips) from the bad (Kettle Chips Cheddar Beer). I was also glad to see that Barbara's Yogurt and Green Onion Chips were Janet's choice for Chip of the Year. A fine chip, indeed. Just the sight of that bag conjures up childhood memories of health-food stores.

There's no doubt that a lot of people love Kettle Chips (the brand), with their thick cut, crunchy texture and interesting flavors. I am one of those people. However, I have always been a fan of the simpler flavors - salt and pepper, salt and vinegar, and plain.

Recently, I tried the Spicy Thai flavor as an accompaniment to an Asian-flavored burger, which was strange for me because I am not a huge fan of typical Thai flavorings and ingredients (lemongrass, cilantro). The chips were slightly sour, but were also sweet. I didn't mind the tangy-ness, but it was the sweetness that turned me off. Don't get me wrong, I have a huge sweet tooth, but I like my sweets as candies, pastries, and desserts, not potato chips.