Dan Q

Day: 24 October 2024

How I Learned to Enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch

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Right in time for International Crisp Sandwich Day (St. Crispin’s Day) tomorrow, I’ve taught myself to enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch.

Three jars of homemade pickled eggs; one in each of a chilli-spiced vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and white vinegar.
You might reasonably have assumed I’d have already enjoyed pickled onion crisps. After all, I not only enjoy actual pickled onions but also the far more “acquired taste” of pickled eggs, shown.

There’s a need for somebody… anybody… to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin’ Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.

Snack cupboard next to a 12-pack of Monster Munch featuring three flavours: Roast Beef, Flamin' Hot, and Pickled Onion.
Yes, I’m aware that there are multipacks of individual flavours, but none of our local supermarkets seem to stock multipacks of Flamin’ Hot, which is objectively the best flavour of Monster Munch and anybody who claims otherwise is wrong.

My entire life, I’ve claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into “meaty” flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I’d come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it’s from this that I realise that I’m probably being somewhat irrational.

Because if you think about it: if you want to make a “pickled onion” flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste “vinegary” and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste “onioney”. So in summary:

  1. I like pickled onions.
  2. I like salt & vinegar crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste vinegary.
  3. I like cheese & onion crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste onioney.
  4. Therefore, I ought to like pickled onion crisps, which use two ingredients I like to try to emulate a food I like.
A packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch, held in a hand.
I should like this. Right?

Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that’s it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!

Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So let’s try it out.

The first time I’ve tried a pickled onion flavour crisp in almost 30 years, captured on camera for your amusement.

It turns out they’re okay!

They’re not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I’m in a position where I can do something about our oversupply.

And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.

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