9 October 2010

McCoy’s Limited Edition Chicken Jalfrezi + Lamb Vindaloo flavours [By Spectre] (WH Smiths)


I’ve always been a big fan of McCoy’s chunky ridged crisps. Their offerings are always flavoursome and never fail to impress. My favourite flavour is Flame Grilled Steak, with Mexican Chilli as a close second. When Cinabar passed me these two limited edition curry flavours I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.

Chicken Jalfrezi
These crisps have a spicy Jalfrezi taste to them that drowns out any flavour of chicken, but a spicy curry usually masks any flavour of chicken anyway. The flavour seems so authentic that you can imagine sitting in a dimly lit Indian restaurant tucking into a Chicken Jalfrezi curry and crunching away happily at poppadoms. The fact that this was lunch time at work without the luxury of Cinabar’s company or a cool beer to wash it down with kind of ruined the moment. Having said that, these are probably the tastiest and most authentic flavoured curry crisps I have tasted since the good old days of poppadom crisps. The spice slowly crept up on me part the way through the bag and I felt a few beads of sweat trouble my nose. I really don’t think these should be a limited edition. A bowl of these crisps and a few beers with a good war film sounds like a proper night in to me!

Lamb Vindaloo
There’s a nice reddish colour to these crisps and spicy heat that hits you as you take the first bite. Not enough heat to make you run screaming, but a good tongue tingling temperature that wakes you up after a dull morning in the office. Unlike the chicken flavour, there is a good meat taste somewhere in the background behind all that Vindaloo spice. An image boiled into my head whilst I was chomping away at these ridged crisps of an idyllic summer’s day, a lamb prancing in a green field with a tranquil blue sky above, suddenly the lamb’s gobbled up by the devil holding a flaming pitchfork! The more you eat of these crisps the more you notice the burn. These aren’t the hottest crisps I’ve eaten, and I have a pack of Cofresh hot flavoured crisps in the Foodstuff stock room I’m avoiding at the moment, but they do have a very pleasing spicy heat that makes you look forward to the yoghurt at the end of your lunch.

I’d definitely buy both these flavours again and they should become regulars to the McCoy’s range, not limited edition crisps people will look back on and say; “I remember those McCoy’s curry crisps, they were mmmmmmm goooooooood…..”
By Spectre

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