Snacks Across the Pond

‘Life’s pretty straight without… Twisties cheese’. Ooh, get her. Maybe my life isn’t as straight as whoever wrote the slogan assumes. Or maybe these Twisties really will make me feel too straight once I’ve finished the bag. There’s only one way to find out.

But first, is there a possessive apostrophe missing from ‘Twisties Cheese’, and this is a bag of cheese made by Twistie? I’m supposing there isn’t and that there are other varieties of Twisties other than cheese, but I can’t be bothered to search the web to find out what other varieties are out there, mostly because I have an unopened bag of snacks in front of me. I’m not totally convinced that this a cheese-flavoured snack though, what with ‘100gNET flavoured snack’ printed on the bottom of the bag. It could be a computer error and ‘100gNET’ wasn’t meant to be printed there, or I could be in for a tasty new flavour experience. Or it could just be cheese and I’m being too literal again. The list of ingredients contains cheese powder, after all. Oh, and above the list of ingredients it states ‘cheese flavoured snacks. I am now curious as to what cheese powder actually is. Perhaps it’s the dust-like residue that is left around cheese factories, and it is swept up and used to flavour cheesy products. I’d better start tasting the snack, because I can’t wait to get to the Potassium goodness.

Opening the pack I am greeted with a cheesy snack food smell. Hey, why is it that so many crisps are cheese flavoured? Is there something special about the combination of cheese and crisps, or are people demanding cheese is packaged in a less severe bulkness? People around the world have cried out their love of cheese but a simultaneous dislike of eating it in chunks. We don’t want to have to buy and break out both cheese and crackers each time we want a snack, we want a single bag of cracker-like bite-sized chunks with the cheese already applied? Yes, that’s probably it.

Apart from being not very twisty at all, and nobbly instead, these little Twisties look awfully familiar. They are Wotsits created in a vacuum, removing any trace of fluffiness from their being. So Nik-Naks, really. But cheese-flavoured. Like Wotsits, the cheesy ones at least. In fact, I think I have something rather similar from the US that I have yet to feast on, a few bags of Cheetos. This seems to be a universal snack that is produced by each nation at one point or another, the demand for instant cheese and crackers being a defining point of a culture’s growth.

Mmm, this is quite a nice cheese powder sprinkled on the faux-crackers, and there is a satisfying crunch to the snack. It’s interesting, for the crunchiness almost hints at a grit-like texture yet without any sense of a grit-like substance being tasted on the tongue or left in the mouth. It’s quite curious, and creates a lovely crunch probably even long after the snack has gone stale. These are really tasty. The cheese isn’t overwhelming, they don’t taste too sweet or salty, and they are not too dry. On top of that, the cheese powder residue left on the fingers is neither a garish colour nor difficult to quickly brush off, which is almost essential for keyboard cleanliness when blogging about snacks. With these Twisties Cheese ‘made with Australian grown corn and rice’ I hope that Mr Burrage is rightfully proud of this purely Australian snack food, and it is a treat to sample them here in the UK. The American Cheetos snack has quite a lot to live up to now. Mr Burrage, what other flavours of Twisties are there?

To end, I’ll note that at the bottom of the rear of the pack is what I assume to be a common slogan on Australian snack foods, ‘Enjoy the snack, then dispose of the pack, thoughtfully!’ The pack’s punctuation, not my own. Personally, when I was chomping away on my bag of Twisties Cheese I was considering the effect of the division of labour on the happiness of the lower- and middle-classes and whether the availability of cheaper goods and more free time is adequate compensation for an overall feeling of dissatisfaction for most of the working week. I hope that was thoughtful enough, because it’s rather more demanding of a snack food than I am used to.