Savoursmiths is such a quintessentially English name. It conjures visions of posh gentlemen and ladies eating them with their tea as they discuss the latest cricket scores and lament the loss of the empire. There was no way I could sample all the salt & vinegar snacks I had bought over in the UK on my trip so these were chosen to make the flight home as they were housed in a tin and not a sack because posh people deserve a durable container for their junk food.
I purchased these chips at Heathrow at the beginning of our trip and the lovely light blue tin tempted me the whole time we were in England. That blue crisp containers indicate salt & vinegar in the UK as they do here in the States tells me that the color is a cultural universal and that David Brown should add it to his list.
Sadly, I no longer have the tin these came in to see if it noted from what desert the salt on the crisps came from. Yet another posh indicator - as if the use of "luxurious" wasn't enough. Sea salt is just too pedestrian for them.
The tin also notes that the crisps are made from British potatoes. On my 2 trips to the UK I've done a fair bit of crisp sampling and I have eaten the occasional potato in a different form such as chips or in a pie and I've tried to ascertain if British potatoes have a different flavour than America ones. How to describe the British tuber terroir?
When I take a handful of American potato chips, shove them in my maw, chew them to paste, and really taste them, I get that wonderful fried potato flavour - that mix of oil and spud with the spud having a certain sweetness to it. The closest analogy to it that I can think of is malt powder. Chips are much less sweet but their sweetness is akin to malt.
Doing the same with British crisps, the flavour is, of course, very similar but they taste less sweet to me. The earthy flavour of potato is much more prominent. I wonder if this is because UK crispsmiths use potato varieties that are more or less unavailable to American chip makers or if the same spuds have high availability on both sides of the Atlantic and companies just choose different varieties.
Sticking my nose into the tin, it was almost assaulted by the aroma of sunflower oil. Earthy potato and vinegar tang were also present but in much smaller doses. The crisps were yellow with an occasional patch of dark yellow and had their skin around the edges. They were definitely thicker than your normal American chip and their surfaces were littered with bubbles of all sizes.
My mouth was greeted by a hearty crunch biting down on a couple of the crisps. My tongue caught a firm dose of vinegar tanginess and perhaps a tad of extra salt. As expected, the potato flavour was quite earthy with just a hint of sweetness.
These were some very fine crisps. I couldn't discern that the salt was from a desert but appreciated very much the good, firm vinegar (white) tang. These crisps were delicious to this prole.
No comments:
Post a Comment