International sighting: Tayto Velvet Crunch
Posted: 10:10 Sun 28-Jun-2009. Price: 75c (but in a shop that over-charges for things). Location: Dublin, Ireland. Sub-flavours: Cheddar Cheese and Spring Onion flavour. Nutritional unusualness: Tapioca flour is the main ingredient, cassava the second, sugar the third.
"kilburina" reports: I found these on a quest to fill in the gap between morning tea and a late lunch with something savoury. It's a "new snack [...] inspired by the Brazilian Cassava plant - the perfect low carbohydrate alternative to the potato" so one for the girls, I suppose since we are those who are foolish enough to buy crisps on a quest to a lower fat diet rather than eat less or choose an apple. Or perhaps I am being sexist. They were very nice, actually. Quite like Snax potato puffs but I think they are also by Tayto so not available in the UK. Sad really. They had a good strong cheese and onion flavour that lingers but make sure you shake the packet to distribute it evenly 'cos otherwise the sweetness (a result of sugar being the 3rd ingredient) is the foremost taste. Anyway, I'd buy them again.
...Cheers "kilburina" - while, continuing a month of first-time sightings, "Dave Hodgkinson" paid 70c for these Lays Sensations, Cream of Mushroom flavour in Alamada, Portugal, supplying the evocative detail that he: "Spotted these in a grimy cornershop at the base of an apartment block in Lisbon. First impression is a definite mushroom overtone and a deep inhalation gives quite an intense cream of mushroom soup essence, maybe one of those cubes you make soup from. From then on though, it's downhill. The overwhelming impressions is of very musty salt. Not a sensation."
Confirmed sighting: Haagen-Dazs Cherries and Cream
Posted: 11:10 Sun 21-Jun-2009. Price: £4.19. Location: Blockbuster, Marple.
As luck would have it, I subsequently found a tub in Morrisons for just £2.50 (and have since updated the "awaiting sightings" column), but it was still enough for first-time spotter "freakfire" to get in touch about this impressively cherry-packed limited edition, reporting: Only seen it in one Blockbuster but they prob have them in every store. Surprised this is still under "awaiting sightings"...
...Sadly, I haven't seen any similar price reductions on the Antonio Federici Gelati that Foodstuff Finds seems at least mildly positive about, though I think I paid a pound or less for this optimistically co-branded Conditorei Coppenrath and Wiese
Mandarin Cheesecake made with Kraft Philadelphia in Tesco. And in other loosely dessert-related limited editions: there doesn't seem to be much sign so far of the hilariously topical Credit Crunch Cereal, though I'd be more suspicious if the same wasn't true of the presumably bigger-budget launch of Honey Monster Foods' more "health-orientated" Monster Rocks and Banana Puffs (Monster Rocks recommended price around £1.99).
Confirmed sighting: Pringles Gourmet Beef Burger flavour
Posted: 18:32 Sun 14-Jun-2009. Price: £1 (introductory offer, normally £1.55). Location: Morrisons, Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
Most of us will probably never know how these measure up to the USA's
Cheeseburger Restaurant Cravers Pringles, so it's straight over to the first-time sighting from "Heybunny", who reports: I spotted these in the local Morrisons at a £1 introductory price. They claim to be an "Exclusive Flavour" - the label says it is a "Roast Beef" flavour and I think it doesn't disappoint. It's easily my new favourite :)
...In other burger-related urgency: "There was a sighting posted re Hellman's burger sauce on this site a while back, apparently it tasted just like the sauce McDonald's use on their Big Macs," reminisced "JP", before revealing "Morrisons are doing a sauce which tastes exactly the same, it's their own brand burger sauce. Lovely stuff. Makes everything taste like a Big Mac!"
Or, if you're looking for something that tastes a bit less like one, McDonald's Great Tastes Of America 2009 lineup is an interesting remix of its previous summer 2008 and autumn 2007 incarnations - though at more than £3 for the burger alone, it faces tough transatlantic competition from KFC's £2.99 Tex Mex Wrapstar, complete with tomato tortilla, chilli salsa, sour cream and pepperjack cheese.
Confirmed sighting: Rowntree's Randoms
Posted: 10:37 Sun 07-Jun-2009. Price: 40p/50g bag. Location: Sainsbury's, Finchley Road, London. Nutritional unusualness: "No artificial colours or flavours" - forcing them to resort to the likes of Nettle Extract, Spinach Extract, Black Carrot, Pepper, Hibiscus, and Salt.
Snackspot
reports: "Four different textures, six fruit flavours and 258 different shape and colour combinations, with shapes as diverse as a monkey, cupcake, acorn, shuttlecock, palm tree and even a pair of y-fronts" - take that, Haribo! I reckon you'd have to be a bit of an expert to readily distinguish between the "regular jelly", "foam-backed jelly", "foamy sweet" and "liquid-filled jelly" textures in a blind taste-test, but well done to Rowntree for keeping up with this year's "soft and chewy" trend - perhaps also the inspiration for
Fruittella Liquorice and Fruit sweets and Fruittella Juicy Gummies, plus the Pulse Crisp Tropical flavour of Wrigley's 5.
...(That said, I'd question the wisdom of Wrigley naming their Cobalt Cooling Peppermint after a metallic element associated with 'dirty bombs' - sadly, "Sizzling Caesium" and "Soothing Strontium" do not appear in the rest of the range.) Anyway, in other fruity finds: there's a pleasant - if ultimately undefinable - aroma to the new Berry Snack-A-Jacks (46p/30g bag, Sainsbury); McVitie's Mini Croissants (currently £1/ bag of 7 in Tesco) are available with either something like Nutella or strawberry jam in the middle; and word is that Kellogg's may be getting rid of their FruitaBu dried fruit range, which always seemed intriguing but unlikely-to-be-missed by many?
Confirmed sighting: Asda Extra Special Scottish Heather Honey BBQ crisps
Posted: 22:56 Sun 31-May-2009. Price: £1.22. Location: Asda, Leicester.
"Nick T" reports: It's difficult to imagine now quite how supermarket own brands have changed shopping over the past 30 years. Prior to their arrival, British purchasing habits revolved around solid, reliable, lump-in-the-throat British names: Huntley and Palmers. Brasso. Sturmey-Archer. Every housewife's wicker shopping basket was the more or less the same, and they always had been. But upstart supermarkets like Fine Fare and Tesco changed all that. Previously, if you wanted fish, you went to Mac Fisheries, but now you could go to the Co-op and buy their own brand, which you trusted just as much and cost less. At first own brands were cheap, in generic single-colour packaging. Now they cost only pennies off the big brand - and often cost more; sporting poncified names such as 'The Best' or 'Taste The Difference' or 'We Think You're Stupid Enough To Pay Even More For Quality Which You Should Have Expected To Begin With'.
I'm a sucker for that sort of scam, and happily picked up a bag of Asda 'Extra Special' Scottish Heather Honey BBQ crisps. Not English heather mind, nor Welsh, but definitely Scottish, perhaps from the bucolic bee-loud glades of verdant Castlemilk. Such provenance makes all the difference apparently, but not that you'd notice because they just taste like rather pleasant barbecue crisps with a distinct but anonymous sweetness to them. You can't identify what kind of barbecued meat Asda had in mind either, and maybe the liquorice extract is added to lend another Caledonian hint, this time of Irn-Bru. I'm a big fan of Tyrrell's Summer Barbecue flavour and these are similar in their fashionable overdone look, but the Asda flavour is more in-your-face, like smoke off a suitably carbonised burger. Together with their equally splendid (if a little on the bland side) Wensleydale and Fruit Chutney stablemate, Asda have been giving Sainsbury's a good run for their money in the own-brand snack arena lately and I'd happily recommend them at this price, even if the heather honey flavour came from a laboratory jar. Which I'm sure it didn't *cough*.
...Another penetrating critique from "Nick T" here - obviously the big crisp news of the moment is Walkers' latest
baffling new flavours, though specialists may be interested to hear that, as well as multipacks of Marmite Crisps, Unilever have also diversified into Marmite Oven Baked Cashews (£1.69/90g, Sainsbury), addressing the potential problem of the Marmite drowning out the subtly-flavoured cashews via the ingenious measure of... hardly making them taste of Marmite at all!
Confirmed sighting: Unilever Doner Kebab Pot Noodle/ Wot? Not in a Pot Noodle
Posted: 22:27 Sun 24-May-2009. Price: 38p. Location: Sainsbury's, Denton. Sub-flavours: Beef and Tomato; Chicken and Mushroom; Fried Chicken; Sweet and Sour.
They may be pushing the Doner Kebab flavour on TV, but that hasn't deterred "Dave" from seeking out the other varieties of Wot? Not in a Pot Noodle, reporting: Where to start? Pot Noodle without a pot? A sauce sachet... of powder?! A pot noodle you cook in the microwave? I tested the Beef and Tomato variant, the classic Pot Noodle flavour. Noodles were not the thick usual ones, but more like the Koka-style cheap and thin instant Asian noodle packs. In the bag, the noodles were plain, and the large sachet contained powdered Beef and Tomato flavour. There was no tomato sauce sachet. The end result was heavily beef-flavoured, not bad as far as weird Pot Noodle variations go, but probably not to be repeated. There was no gooey sauce after preparation, nor any soya beef-style chunks.
However, they are only 38p. An interesting variation which I think will be consigned to history. Having access to the raw powder-power of Pot Noodle is interesting, however, and offers a number of culinary opportunities. The powder, unprepared, is actually not so pleasant. These remove the sheen from the Pot Noodle experience, and for this reason mark a flawed direction for the range to take.
...And as for the Doner Kebab one - it's believably lamb-like in some respects, though take a taste before you add the chilli sauce, as that tends to overwhelm everything else. Similarly, it's quite fun to add extra jalapenos to the Bowl of Meatballs (£1.19) that tops Subway's new Snack Menu (from 79p), and to try and come up with more dishes they could rustle up from the ingredients they've already got hanging around their kitchens?
Confirmed sighting: Frijj Limited Edition Cookie Dough milkshake
Posted: 10:59 Sun 17-May-2009. Price: £1.05. Location: Sainsbury's, Archer Road, Sheffield.
"Brett Hadley" reports: This tastes like a cross between caramel and white chocolate to me, but when you think about it and imagine it as a cookie, it works! You can see where they get the idea from for sure. So the flavour description is pretty accurate. I wondered why they'd stopped having The Simpsons brand on the chocolate fudge shakes, and I guess this is your answer! Surely they should've called it Cookie D'oh! though ;)
..."Brett" is back with the first new Simpsons Frijj in a while, which seems as good a time as any for "hannah" to mention that she found Ice Cream Chewits on eBay, confirming: "Yes, that's right! They have them on
chocolatebuttons.co.uk too!" Speaking of ice cream, Foodstuff Finds has the lowdown on one of Haagen-Dazs' Ice Cream Smoothies - "smoothie" being the cool thing to call any kind of product this year, from Galaxy's Chocolate Orange Truffle Smoothie drink to Wrigley's Starbust Smoothies (in Strawberry and Banana; Blueberry and Strawberry; or Mango and Passion, from 39p).
Semi-international sighting: Mars Snickers Dark bar
Posted: 21:37 Wed 13-May-2009. Price: 60p. Location: Mercury News, Leicester. Nutritional unusualness: 250 calories, of which 120 are from fat. Gulp.
"Nick T" reports: Dark chocolate is one of those things which, like Marmite, has the power to divide nations. Eyewateringly expensive brands like Valrhona and Amedei are the domain of noncey TV chefs trilling on about how the beans are gathered by Guatemalan virgins at midnight, etc, whilst the slightly less outrageously priced - and my goodness, hasn't the price of chocolate rocketed in the last year? - Bournville and its ilk steadfastly remain pensioner territory.
Me, I like a bit of dark meat for a change, so I was delighted to spot this Marathon Dark (don't bother giving me any of that Snickers codswallop; it's a Marathon and it always will be). Sporting a US-centric wrapper I suspect it's an American grey import but a colleague has seen them in another shop locally too, so perhaps there's some manner of direct lard importer circulating the area. From a couple of business trips Stateside I had already concluded that American food falls into three camps. 1) Savoury foods, which contain deep fried meat and cheese, which is fluorescent orange, 2) Snacks, which contain peanuts, and 3) Chocolate which, if it's Hersheys, contains no chocolate.
But this new bar seems to have heralded a welcome new food sector; it's really delicious. Not too sweet, not too bitter and containing a satisfying nut crunch, one of these with a mid-morning coffee really hits the spot. Yum!
...A quick midweek sighting here from "Nick T" - while, in other odd chocs: Cadbury has created more "vibrant" packaging for the new Boost and Double Decker Duos; also hoping to appeal to purchasers beyond their "older consumer base" are Bendicks Bittertubes (in bitter mint, bitter orange and bitter ginger flavours); and my local Sainsbury is still selling Original Source's external-use-only Winter Vanilla Milk And Cocoa Shower
Cream, though sadly not as the ideal accompaniment to the equally edible-looking Andrex enriched with Shea Butter (£1.75/4 rolls, Tesco).
Confirmed sighting: Walkers Doritos Flamin' Cheeseball/ Pizza Express Leggera range
Posted: 19:35 Sun 10-May-2009. Price: Special offer, £1.00 (otherwise £1.49); 225g. Location: Tesco.
I'm not sure if this is the same "Fishface" who left a couple of comments here about 6 years ago, but he/she didn't have much to add about the Flamin' Cheeseball Doritos, other than: "Taste like a combination of Flamin' Hot and Nacho Cheese. Still bright orange."
The Pizza Express Leggera range, "Fishface" continues, costs £7.95-£8.90 for a Margherita Leggera, Vitabella, or Gustosa, and comprises: "A pizza with a hole in the middle, which is filled with salad! 'The hole at the centre of each Leggera (Light) pizza is filled with a tasty salad of baby spinach, rocket, and santos tomatoes, finished with a drizzle of our light dressing.' Not too sure if any of these will tempt me away from their Classic menu..."
...Either way, both sound like a better bet than the
Golden Wonder Sausage and Tomato flavour that "Jack 'The Whack' Harding" says he found in Cardiff, reporting: "I saw these in Home Bargains a few weeks ago. I had them and they tasted of tomato ketchup and stunk of sausages. It wasn't very pleasant. I don't recommend these to anyone who does not like tomato ketchup. Really, it's just Walkers Tomato Ketchup in another packet."
And back with cheese-like coverings: KFC is taking on McDonald's Ranch Snack Wrap and Little Western with Paninis: The Gourmet Lunch (in Spicy Chicken or Italian Chicken, £3.49) - obviously there's a debate over the correct plural, but I'd also like to hear opinions on Sainsbury's current use of "antipasties", which sound like what you have before (or instead of) Cornish pasties?
Confirmed sighting: Coca-Cola Relentless Juiced Energy Berry flavour
Posted: 12:29 Sun 03-May-2009. Price: £1.49. Location: Sainsbury's, Hemel Hempstead. Nutritional unusualness: New (abridged!) Wordsworth quote - "There are in our existence spots of time/ That with distinct pre-eminence retain/ A renovating virtue, whence-depressed/ By false opinion and contentious thought./ A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced/ That penetrates, enables us to mount/ When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen".
"Michael F" reports: Definitely a response to the ever increasing energy drink competitions. Maybe a pre-emptive attack on the imminent re-launch of Mountain Dew this year.
...Thanks "Michael" - and, in case anyone wants to argue that most of the energy drink competition now comes from Coke themselves, I found this new Relentless a bit blackcurranty compared to, say, the tropical Guava-flavoured Rockstar Punched Morrisons were selling at the start of the year. In other berry-based beverages: I remain bemused by the two separate sightings of Thirsty Original Orange submitted by "David" (69p, Newspoint Trafford centre, "Value for money, well designed well balanced drink with sports caps, well done, I will buy again"), and "Martin" (30p, B and M Bargains, "Excellent value for money, lovely drink"), though they both agreed that it's also available in Blackcurrant, Kiwi and Lemon, or Raspberry. Plus, I was reasonably pleased to discover that the UK arrival of Starbucks' Dark Berry Mocha Frappuccino (£3.25/Grande) largely lives up to the expectation that that it's a Black Forest Gateau put into a blender with a standard iced coffee, though some of the remaining chocolate pieces were a bit lumpy to get through the straw.
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