I get groceries delivered to my home regularly. I find shopping in a supermarket very stressful, and so I avoid it if possible. But even I can manage to survive Tesco or Sainsburys when I need just a couple of bits. So when the Tesco man came to my door last Monday evening I felt the need to explain that I wouldn’t normally have him come round for just one bag of chips; they’d been ordered by a PR company to try out. Honest.
The chips in question are these McCain Home Chips – Straight Cut, which are new to the range. They are “authentic chips”; crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, and are cooked in the oven.
Oven chips aren’t all that bad for you really. It’s obviously better to make your own (or not eat chips at all!), but it’s always useful to have a bag of oven chips in the freezer – they’re an easy, quickly cooked meal accompaniment (and you just can’t beat ham, egg and chips sometimes!). On the front of the packet it says these contain 265 calories per 135g of chips when cooked. Not bad, I thought. Then I weighed them out – it’s barely a handful. I knew my portion control was a bit wonky, but I’d want at least double that… eek! Chips are never going to be health food are they?
What makes these chips very good is that they are coated in a batter type mixture to give them a properly crispy shell when cooked. And it works. After 20 minutes in a hot oven I had a portion (or two) of evenly cooked crispy yet fluffy chips that had a very nice flavour. They tasted just as chips should. The chunky straight cut gives a nice bite, and will hold a lot of ketchup or whatever you like to have on yours. I can see me choosing these over my usual choice when it comes to buying another bag.
McCain actually called this the chip challenge… I’m not sure that serving them up with leftover roast beef and some peppers really counts, so I’ll have a think and come up with something more exciting soon (feel free to comment with your frozen chip recipe suggestions!).