Shop Talk: Crunch time for posh crisps

But which are whorth shelling out for and which should be consigned to the rubbish bib?

CRISPS have gone posh. Once they were pub food, just there to soak up the lager. They came with flavours to knock your socks off. Cheese and onion, and salt and vinegar were strong enough to fight back, to compete with the pickled onions and pork pies. And there were always those nice little greasy bits in the corner of the packets.

Then we used them to fill a corner of children's lunch boxes. (I see mothers in supermarkets piling their trolleys with multi multi multi packs of crisps. Do they have 25 children or just two who are very greedy?)

But now crisps have come out of the bar and the lunch box and onto the canape tray. They've gone seriously upmarket.

No longer piled high with flavourings and additives, the new generation are "hand cooked " in small batches, using different potato varieties for subtly different results. At this rate, we could soon have crisp experts in the way in which we now have wine experts.

But in a way, potato crisps are going back to their roots.

Actually, crisps started off as pretty posh food for millionaires. Apparently, back in 1853, an American Indian chief made them for Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railway millionaire. They made their way to France and then to London, when Frank Smith was manager of a wholesale grocery company and his boss bought the recipe back from France.

Frank Smith branched out on his own, with a dozen staff peeling and slicing and frying the crisps, and packing them into little greaseproof bags.

Now they make about 1,500lbs of crisps an hour and we eat nearly nine billion packets of crisps a year in this country. And as children and lager drinkers can't eat many more, the market has moved to the grown ups.

The new generation of crisps are hand cooked in small batches. We know what potatoes they come from. We sometimes know the name of the person who cooked them.

We even import crisps from America. Cape Cod Gold Russett potato chips have a little story on the back even telling you about the discovery of the particular type of potatoes. What's more, they say their crisps have "real personality".

Personality? This is a snack, not a chat show.

The flavours are more interesting and more subtle. None of your bog standard salt and vinegar - it's now sea salt and balsamic vinegar. Or crushed black pepper.

Cheese and onion has become mozzarella and toasted red onion. Sounds wonderfully exotic until you read that it's actually mozzarella and toasted red onion flavoured seasoning and consists of: salt, whey powder, mozzarella cheese powder, cream powder, sugar, cheddar cheese powder, onion powder, garlic powder, flavourings, citric acid, colour, paprika extract.

And after all that, do they taste any different?

Well, yes and no.

THE BEST

BURTS HAND FRIED POTATO CHIPS SALT AND BLACK PEPPER FLAVOUR

59p for 40g

Made in Devon, sorry "deepest Devon", where, they tell us in breathless prose on the back of the packet, "they are sorted by hand and sliced straight into a cauldron of the finest sunflower oil. We then fuss over the frying chips, stirring like mad all the time." We also knew that our salt and black pepper crisps were fried by Nick, and our Bloody Mary flavour (£2.05 for 200g) by Roger.

Well done Nick and Roger - the crisps were just the right thickness with a very good flavour. Extremely moreish...

Posh enough for any company. Go well with lager too.

SAINSBURYS LIGHT SALTED PAN FRIED CRISPS

55p for 50g

Thick but crisp and an excellent flavour. We also liked Sainsbury's Rosemary Oil crisps at £1.99 for 100g - they were a bit different, thicker but still with lots of snap

KETTLE JERSEY ROYALS

£1.99 for 120g

Don't know whether it was the potatoes or the method but the Jersey Royal Kettles were noticeably nicer than the ordinary Kettles.

MARKS & SPENCER

Salt and Balsamic Vinegar 40g

Wow. These could hold their own against a whole jar of pickled onions. They don't so much titillate the taste buds as grab you by the back of the throat. You'll either love 'em or hate 'em. We loved them.

BETTER THAN YOUR AVERAGE CRISP

MARKS AND SPENCER RED DUKE OF YORK

£1.59 for 150g

These lightly salted crisps had a good flavour but if we were not picking we'd say they were a bit too hard to crunch - solid rather than crisp.

CAPE COD GOLDEN RUSSETT

£1.35 for 150g

Do we really need to bring crisps over from America? Even if they have got personality? These are perfectly good crisps, nice flavour, bit hard maybe, and with plenty to read on the back of the packet such as "each phase of our production is controlled by a human being". And you thought the chimpanzees ran the crisp factory.

Good crisps, but surely not worth the effort of bringing them half way round the world.

KETTLE CHIPS

Sea salt with crushed black peppercorns.

67p for 50g

One of the earliest of the new generation of upmarket crisps, but not necessarily the best. These were good crisps but not as good as their Jersey Royal variety.

ALDI BALANCED LIFESTYLE

Salt and Black Pepper, New York Cheddar and Chive

75p for 150g

These were the cheapest crisps we tested. Had a very nice texture, really snappy and crunchy but they were a bit lacking in flavour. They are meant to have 25 per cent less fat. Maybe, as so often happens, less fat means less flavour.

TESCO FINEST CREAM CHEESE AND CRACKED BLACK PEPPERCORN

£1.19 for 100g

Thick crisps, a bit soggy. But decent flavour, though not as peppery as we would have liked.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS

WALKERS SENSATIONS

£1.29 for 150g

Sea salt and cracked black pepper, oven-roasted chicken and thyme,

All our testers thought these were truly disgusting. The texture wasn't particularly nice and the taste was horrid. And our mouths were left coated with an unpleasantly flavoured powder. "Walkers Sensations are a new taste experience" they say on the packet. Well yes, we wouldn't argue with that, but it's also one we have no wish to repeat.

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