Sunday 9 March 2014

Pringles Xtra Kickin' Sour Cream & Onion

"Uma explosão de sabor", "Barstensvol smaak", "Une explosion de saveurs", "Wybuchowy ładunek smaku" and sadly I cannot find a cyrillic font so you don't get what is either Russian or Bulgarian. Sorry about that.

I haven't bought a tube (can?) of Pringles for ages. I quite like Pringles but I always have this weird idea you have to put them into your mouth whole. I have no trouble biting into other kinds of crisp if they are too large to fit in all at once, but for some reason I have this thing about not biting into a Pringle. Only they are quite big. My mouth isn't really large enough - maybe I mean wide enough -  to fit in a whole Pringle comfortably so I struggle them in and hope I'm not going to cut the corners of my mouth. Which I have done in the past.

I know they are specially manufactured like this to fit neatly into the tube and thus prevent the usual breakages, but who has a mouth this wide? Why not make them a bit smaller, the tube a bit narrower? OK, yes, it's only me isn't it?

So anyhow, I tried this, er, "kickin'" flavour out of interest. And you know what? I have the same trouble with the size of the Pringle and the apparent smallness of my mouth, but this favour is rather fabulous.

It starts out all sour creamy (which is interesting as all the other creamy flavours I've tried have kept the cream taste to the end), and then there's the onion, and then there's a great kick of.... something hot. The list of ingredients includes the somewhat vague "flavourings". But the drawing on the front of the tube shows onion, spring onion and chilli. So I guess the kickin' part of the flavour is probably chilli. The real problem, of course, is that so much of the Pringle flavour comes from chemicals and not from real ingredients. Nowadays so many varieties of crisp trumpet the virtue of their real ingredients so a crispy snack crammed full of MSG is rather a disappointment.

I am interested to see that in French this savoury snack is an aperitif. Which to the English mind is a drink. Here I guess it is a crispy snack to go with a drink, although what drink I'm not sure; the taste is kickin' enough to defeat most drinks.

Pringles come in a number of weird flavours and this Huffington Post article has some very strange ones for us to consider. Read about them here. Old American Circus flavour anyone? I know. It makes sour cream and onion sound dreadfully pedestrian.

I mustn't forget to tell you that this crispy snack gives an Intense Xperience and is "Bursting with Flavour" which is pretty much correct. I think they taste pretty good. But I also think that all that MSG, disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate cannot be a good thing. Oh, and I never knew Pringles belonged to Kellogg's. did you? Yup. Proctor & Gamble sold the brand to Kellogg's in 2012. And these Pringles were made in Belgium.

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