Walkers Do Us A Flavour Reviews
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’m a sucker for limited editions, unusual flavours and basically turning any familiar food into something new! Especially Kit-Kats.
I was therefore a perfect mark for Walker’s “Do us a flavour,” campaign. A couple of months ago Walker’s set up a website that lets users invent their own new crisp flavours. This website did not publicly display the entries because Walkers has learned something from when they tried the same experiment in America earlier this year and got entries such as:
And my particular favourite.
There is in fact a tumblr devoted purely to these parodies.
6 flavours were chosen as winners and have now been made are on sale. Another website located here lets you vote for your favourite and the winner will receive £1 million plus their flavour will become a permanent part of the range.
So enough wittering, what do they taste like.
Hot Dog with Tomato Ketchup
Ketchup flavour crisps have been knocking around for a while now and are somewhat controversial. For me, the mix of tangy vinegar and sweet tomato works well on a crisp and is at least as good as prawn cocktail (another not uncontroversial choice but one with staying power at least). Others though find ketchup crisps to just be wrong on every level.
These are still mostly sweet and taste of tomatoes but they lack the vinegar kick of most ketchup crisps. Instead they have a meaty under current that is probably the hot dog. They’re surprisingly savoury too, still very sweet but not as sweet as I’d expect. I can’t say they astonish me though, they’re just somewhat average tomato flavour crisps.
Pulled Pork in a Sticky BBQ Sauce
The last time I visited the States was in 2003 and that was the first time I ever tried pulled pork. I was instantly smitten with it. Moist, tender, meaty, flavourful, juicy and just delicious in every way imaginable. Going back to the U.K. I didn’t think about it again until Man vs Food began airing on these shores and introduced Brits to the full plethora of creative and delicious ways Americans have invented to kill themselves with diabetes. It was revelatory, and now, about 4 years later, pulled pork is everywhere slathered all over menus like grease on a pig. It’s like piri piri all over again.
Whenever you see X meat with Y sauce flavoured anything assume that the main thing you’re going to taste is the sauce. These are no exception, they taste like sweet BBQ sauce. And since sweet BBQ sauce is basically tomatoes and honey they’re not dissimilar to the Hot Dog flavour. A bit fruitier and much sweeter but not very interesting.
Chip Shop Chicken Curry
I’ve had chip shop curry flavour crisps before. Growing up , for a very limited time, there existed Beano* themed crisps and being a comic obsessed kid I wanted them. Amongst the frankly bizarre flavours on offer was chip shop curry and to my mouth they tasted like some kind of exotic masterpiece.
I have loved chip shop curry ever since. Chip shop curry, for the uninitiated, bares only the faintest of resemblances to Indian food. It is basically gravy with the meat juice replaced by generic curry powder, the tiniest whiff of turmeric so as not to frighten old ladies with its foreignness and enough yellow food dye to make this season’s Norwich home kit. As tastes have adapted it has gradually got spicier and more like actual curry but I still seek out the truly naff stuff. There is something about the way the claggy fat on a chip allows it to cover the inside of your mouth with the spicy goo and then when you drink a hot, sweet cup of tea the whole inside of your mouth tingles in response. I love it.
It should be noted that most of these crisps are sort of lightly dusted in their flavouring powder and so the colour is still predominantly the light brown of a crisp. These though, these are stained brown with the masses of curry powder dumped into the bag or bright yellow where the turmeric hits them. I’m pretty sure Walker’s didn’t bother creating any kind of flavour powder here but instead just bought a job lot of curry powder from a cash and carry and said, that’ll do. And it does, by heavens it does. Do they taste like chicken chip shop curry? Oh heaven’s no! Do they taste like Bombay mix? Yup, exactly like Bombay mix. They’re basically crisps drowned in curry powder and that is no bad thing my friends.
Sizzling Steak Fajita
Whereas the pulled pork in STICKY BBQ SAUCE tasted of the sauce and the chicken CHIP SHOP CURRY tasted of curry this steak fajita does actually have some slight beefiness to it, enough that if asked what flavour these were supposed to be without knowing you would probably guess correctly. Mostly though they taste of two things. Firstly they taste like fajita seasoning mix, the blend of cumin, coriander, cayenne and other spices beginning with c that you use to season Mexican food. Again, I suspect that part of the reason this flavour was chosen was that Walker’s didn’t have to do much more effort than ordering a job lot of pre-mixed seasoning from Old El Paso and then knocking off early for a long lunch.
The second thing they taste of is green peppers. They have a really, really strong green pepper flavour from the first taste to the after taste. Consequently they’re quite bitter which is an unusual flavour for a crisp. Not a bad flavour, just an unusual one. They’re also super savoury. I checked and they’re not really any saltier than the other flavours but Christ, you wouldn’t know it to taste them.
Overall though, I like these. Bitter and savoury is kind of unique for crisps and it works surprisingly well.
Cheesy Beans on Toast
Out of 6 flavours I cannot believe we had 3 that basically amounted to, tomato. It’s not like tomato is a universally loved crisp flavour either, it’s actually quite divisive.
These are horrible, just gross. They neither taste of cheese nor beans nor cheesy beans. They don’t even really taste of tomato. If blindfolded and asked what these were I might plump for foot sweat, rotten onion or maybe, just maybe that plastic they make fake vomit from. These are foul, avoid!
Ranch Raccoon
Walkers are jumping on the Guardian’s of the Galaxy bandwagon I see.
You loved his antics in the movie, but what does he taste like?! This could be a whole new kind of tie-in marketing. Ratatouille with real rat flavoured crisps for Ratatouille. Penguin flavoured chicken bites at KFC for Happy Feet. Human liver flavoured ice cream for Hannibal! You could really invest yourself in the story when you’ve eaten one of the lead characters.
Kidding aside I am dreading this flavour. Not because it is raccoon. I love eating weird meats and would jump at the chance to eat a raccoon in real life. I’ve personally consumed snake, alligator, jellyfish (it tasted of nothing), sea snail, kangaroo, various insects and hot dogs before now.
No I am apprehensive because these are in ranch dressing and creamy crisp flavours are of Satan. I am a firm atheist and whilst I’ve seen no evidence that god exists, the existence of cream cheese and chive flavour crisps certainly strongly implies that old scratch has a job at Walkers somewhere.
Well I can’t tell you if they taste like raccoon but they sure don’t taste like ranch dressing. And whilst that might be a relief these are disgusting in their own unique way. I actually can’t tell you what these taste like. I’ve tried an entire bag now and my best guess is like something that used to be food but now should be thrown away. To start with they smell bad, like meat that’s juuuuuust starting to turn and after that smell I think that my brain intervenes and shuts my mouth down. I can’t detect any distinct flavours just a big red flashing light in my brain going “warning, warning spit this shit out of your mouth at once you moron or we’re going to get e-coli.”
A check of the ingredients reveals this to mostly be parsley, dried milk and dried sour cream. So I guess when you dry sour cream it starts to taste like rancid meat. That makes a certain amount of sense, why did someone decide to make crisps this flavour?
Final Verdict.
Ranch Raccoon is almost intriguingly bad. I urge you to eat it just to have a point of comparison that will help you appreciate normal food all the more. Cheesy Beans on Toast however is both boring and terrible.
Hot Dog is okay, Pulled Pork is marginally better and basically the same thing. It’s a slightly more complicated flavour and less obviously tomato.
Sizzling Steak Fajita and Chicken Chip Shop Curry are both far and away the best. In both cases they’ve basically just drowned the potatoes in spices but since I like spices and since there are a lot of conflicting and complementing spices going on they’re a winner for me.
In the end though there is a reason Bombay mix is already a thing. The Chip Shop flavour is basically Bombay mix and that has to be the winner.
*The Beano is a children’s comic available in the U.K. with a series of short humorous strips. It was launched in 1938 and has been telling pretty much the same jokes ever since. It may once have been ground breaking and artistically inventive in the 60’s and 70’s when it was the U.K.’s answer to MAD but it hasn’t been good in the 28 years I’ve been on this earth. Still, as a kid with no taste, I loved it!
mummyboon 