myoptiblog

Let’s just make this clear straight away - I am a fiend for condiments:  mayo; ketchup; horseradish; tartare; chutney; pickle; mustard; salad dressing - I love them all (you could say I relish them, but I wouldn’t stoop to such poor puns). In fact, some foods I use purely as vehicles to get my sweet, tangy goodness.

Remember to say Grace

I’m not sure whether my enamour for all things pickly stems from a similar fixation from the male side of my father’s family, or the fact that I share a surname with a famous Norfolk mustard-maker (albeit with a slight spelling difference). All I do know is that nary a meal can pass my lips without some kind of bottled or jarred accompaniment.

I was so used to this being the norm at home, I was utterly shocked when I visited my future in-laws for the first time:

Me: Ooh, roast lamb - my favourite! Could you pass me the mint sauce please?
Mrs R: I’m sorry, we don’t have any.
Me: *taken slightly aback* Um… ok that’s fine, I can make do with mustard. I’d prefer English if you have it.
Mrs R: I’m sorry, but all we have is salt and pepper.
Me: *visibly attempting to lift jaw from the floor* Ok, that’s uh… *trails off*

The above transcript is not verbatim, as I can barely remember what happened yesterday, let alone four years ago. For example, the meal may have been different (in fact, I can almost guarantee that my better half will read this at some point and say “it was roast beef with yorkshire pudding that day, you know. You had two helpings and then some apple pie. Then my dad forced us to watch Time Team.”), but it was very much along those lines.

Another fine mess

Reading it back makes me sound like an ungrateful little sod, but I wasn’t. I didn’t turn my nose up at the meal, I was just genuinely amazed that someone didn’t have a fridge and cupboard stocked with twenty-two selections of mustard and eight different salad dressings. To me, lamb without mint sauce would be like having Oliver Hardy without Stan Laurel. Can you imagine that? A fat Charlie Chaplin wannabe just sitting about doing nothing. No hilarious slapstick; no attempts to answer the phone but picking up a milk jug and pouring it into your ear instead; and definitely no Trail of the Lonesome Pine. It just wouldn’t be right.

The issue we face now, however, is that there is so much choice. If you visit your local supermarket you’ll find not just rows, but aisles of the stuff. Not only now do you have three different grades of own brand products, but also low sugar versions, low salt versions, spicy versions, non-spicy versions. I mean for heaven’s sake, we even have two main types of non-sugar Coke! With top brand names also branching out into previously unexplored areas, it has become a confusing time for consumers. As C. Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons might say, “Ketchup or catsup?” Now I don’t profess to being a culinary expert in general, but I know my pickles and chutneys. My aim in MCttC is to give advice on what’s out there on the condiment aisles before you get taken away by store security and taken to a comfy padded cell in your local loony bin.

Touching on top brand names expanding their product line brings me nicely to my first review. Branston have been making pickle since 1922 according to Wikipedia. Now we could argue over this site’s veracity until the cows come home, but suffice to say we can agree that they have been making the crunchy brown stuff for a very long time. Over the last few years, however, they have been producing different foodstuffs. It started with small chunk pickle for easier spreading in sandwiches, branching out to spicy versions and even the quite frankly revolting-sounding smooth pickle.

Not only have they been making different variety of sandwich pickle. Over the last couple of years they’ve even branched out into making burger relish, baked beans, ketchup and brown sauce. The latter is the one which I am to review today.

Can it beat the brown sauce heavyweights?

Now while Heinz dominates the ketchup market, there are two big names in brown sauce who this new pretender to the crown must be compared to. They are of course HP and Daddie’s. My favourite is the HP brand, due to a slightly richer, fruitier taste, but the difference in quality is a hair’s breadth. Pretty much every other brown sauce I’ve tasted has tasted like a thick, concentrated vinegar, including the one made by our German-sounding-but-actually-American friends (in fact, their brown sauce was so rubbish they decided to buy HP Foods in 2005). By this reckoning then, Branston’s offering is going to have to wow my tastebuds in order to knock the top two off their lofty perch.

Viva Piñata!

The acid test for all brown sauces for me is the classic British snack, a bacon sandwich. Usually this would be made with two slices of white bread, three rashers of unsmoked back bacon and lashings of the lovely brown. However, due to the fact that I’m not eating bread at the moment due to attempted weight-loss (please ignore the fact that I’m about to eat a bacon sandwich) means that for this test I would be doing it slightly differently - a bacon and brown sauce tortilla wrap. A true taste sensation from your local greasy spoon via Mexico City!

Looking at the bottle first, the packaging is aesthetically pleasing and the plastic squeezy bottle has a stay-clean cap, which means no spillages! The sauce itself is a good colour, a rich dark brown. Upon first taste you can tell this is high quality. As with the best brown sauces it is sweet at first, then rich and tangy, with a fruity finish. It complements the salty taste of the bacon well, and I am suitably impressed.

It seems that a newcomer has muscled in with the top two as I’d place this in second place, just ahead of Daddie’s. Do we now have the holy trinity of brown sauces? Final marks are all out of ten:

Aesthetics: 9
Consistency: 8.5
Aroma: 8.5
Flavour: 9
Overall: 8.5

So there we have it, a top-notch brown sauce from a company with a track-record for quality food. It can currently be purchased online for £1.29 at Tesco or Sainsbury’s.

So, I was sitting here thinking about how I was going to kick this blog off and I must have tried writing the opening entry at least three or four times. I imagine most, if not all writers find a blank screen empties the mind; the ideas of many days suddenly sucked away by the glaring white of nothingness.

I think where I was going wrong is that I was trying to post some kind of welcome message; an announcement of the myoptiblog, fanfare and all. After a good twenty minutes head-scratching, I gave up on this idea and decided instead to dive straight in with some proper content.

As I was writing the above preamble to my first post proper, I noticed that it was suspiciously starting to look like an introduction - the slight whiff of irony was not lost on me. Perhaps after this small victory I should quit while I’m ahead.

Welcome to the myoptiblog (there, I said it).