HiJenx

A minor difference between the UK and the US is crisps and chips. Most people are familiar with the difference in terminology in that chips in the UK refers to hot fried potatoes, whereas the crispy room temperature potato product are crisps. This is not the extent of the difference though. They are really very different products on a few levels.

Firstly, the flavors are completely different. In the US, the most common flavors of potato chips tend to be original i.e. just salted, barbecue, sour cream and onion, cheddar and sour cream. In the UK, they have several very popular flavors that are nothing like the US flavors. Some of the most common ones are prawn cocktail, cheese and onion, smokey bacon and roast chicken. There are some newer flavors that have gained a lot of ground in the last few years, too, like Thai sweet chili. As a result, Chris finds American chips very bland and similar compared to British ones.

More than this, Americans potato chips tend to be one of the many products in the US that, frankly pointlessly, contain corn. As we have discussed earlier, corn products don’t do Chris a lot of good, so we try to avoid them. The basic American Lay’s potato chips can be cooked in corn oil. Their packaging is annoyingly vague in that Lay’s Classic Potato Chips list the ingredients as ‘potatoes, vegetable oil (sunflower, corn and/or canola) and salt. Whatever is actually in them, even I found this made me feel a lot worse than the British equivalent when I had them for the first time last year after several years of living in the UK. You can get something called Simply Lay’s now that is made exclusively with sunflower oil. This is what it turns out the British Walkers crisps are cooked in.

Now why are we making a post on this after being here so long? We knew this for a while, but an Arizonan friend of ours tried Prawn Cocktail crisps for the first time on camera. Have a look:

If you would like to try some more interesting flavors or just not have corn invade your crisps, these are actually not that expensive to get in the US. Most can be bought in six packs off Amazon at about a dollar a bag. Here are the links to prawn cocktail and cheese and onion. They take a few weeks to arrive, but the price is right and they travel well for the most part.