Biscuit Blog: Tesco Rich Tea Fingers

Tesco Rich Tea Fingers

One type of biscuit I have been asked to review is the Rich Tea.  There is some prejudice against these.  I had a colleague who claimed they were unsuitable to be eaten and instead should just be used to build things for children.  Though some people find them dull, they are a cut above Digestive biscuits.  However, I think Rich Tea biscuits are both very British and serve a useful function as was summed up in McVitie's 1978 campaign for their Rich Tea biscuits - 'a drink's too wet without one'.  This does not mean dunking them; that is a disgusting practice which ruins both the drink and the biscuit, but it does mean that the dryness of the Rich Tea complements beverages very well.

The first Rich Tea I am looking at is from Tesco and is slightly different to the standard in not being circular and not having a smooth, though pierced topside.  These are a finger variety which I suppose do sit nicely in a saucer.  The packet is long which is good because these are pretty small biscuits.  They are thin as well, certainly not as thick as you would expect from a Rich Tea; this makes the snap when you bite a little feeble compared to what you would anticipate.  In terms of taste they are ultra-dry, almost like paper on your tongue and lack the creaminess at the back of your mouth that you expect.  They do their job but not brilliantly and there is room for improvement.  I guess they are for people expecting a lot of guests and yet does not want to spend too much on giving them anything too tasty or large.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Nice Biscuits

Tesco Nice Biscuits

This is a type of biscuit that is available from many companies, that I have not yet explored but will look out for from a range of shops in coming months.  Note that while many biscuits may be 'nice' these are 'Nice', apparently, possibly, named after the city on the French Mediterranean coast.  The fact that the Dutch equivalent are called 'Nizza' biscuits adds to that view, as the Dutch word for 'nice' is 'mooi'.

As with many biscuits available in Britain there is a shape and a patterning which you will almost always find with this biscuit.  There are no 'tractor tyre' edges as on a shortcake biscuit though there is no reason why there could not be.  There is something about how the biscuit appears, no matter what company produces it, that is important to signal to consumers what they are receiving.  Though, as I am increasingly noting on this blog, actually the tastes are more and more varying from what you might expect from that type of biscuit.

Put simply a Nice biscuit is always rectangular, pale in colour and with the word 'NICE' impressed on the top side and little indentations right around edge.  It can have a covering of sugar on the top side.  It is quite a sweet biscuit and you should find strands of coconut as you bite through it.  Some can have a soft bite to them, a lack of snap, but really they should not crumble.  These from Tesco largely have these element, they have a reasonable snap and you can sense, rather than taste the coconut in them.  The striking thing about them was that they felt very 'dry' on the tongue almost as if I was eating a cracker biscuit.  This was not expected from a Nice biscuit.  Overall aside from coconut shreds, these were almost painfully plain biscuits.  They seemed better as they matured a little in biscuit jar, but I was not getting the experience I was expecting from these biscuits.  They are not appalling but I think Tesco needs to work at the recipe.  They look perfect but something is missing, some sweetness and certainly some moistness from the coconut to make these good Nice biscuits.

Rating
*****

Biscuit Blog:Tesco Spiced Stem Ginger Cookies

Tesco Spiced Stem Ginger Cookies

I suppose it is natural that with summer here I am eating fewer biscuits.  I am aiming still to review at least two types per month.  It is now easier to get to some different supermarkets in my neighbourhood now that the long-term road works have come to an end.  These are a new biscuit from Tesco.  They are a little soft to my taste, but I guess that is signalled by them being called 'cookies' rather than 'biscuits'.  There seems to be a growing, unwritten consensus, that the US term cookie refers to a biscuit that is deeper, usually has something in it like chocolate chips or dried fruit and maybe soft; certainly lacking a snap.

The biscuits are not bad but not brilliant, lacking the 'fire' I seek from a stem ginger biscuit, indeed even from the best ginger nut biscuits.  The biscuit itself has quite a bland flavour.  There is some flavour from the chunks of ginger, but these are not numerous and lack the chewiness I expect.  This is a good standard biscuit for a tea break, but when you are buying something with only 10 in the pack and with this kind of packaging, you are expecting something more flavoursome and overall better, hence this one gets marked down for raising and then not fulfilling expectations.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Shortcake Biscuits

Tesco Shortcake Biscuits

In terms of being the kind of biscuit that they are supposed to be and tasting decent, so far these are the best biscuits I have bought from Tesco.  As I have noted before, even among supermarket employees, Tesco is not rated as having the most flavoursome products, but this shortcake biscuit, though very simple, delivers what it promises, no more; no less.  There is a touch of creaminess and they are not overly sweet, though there is a hint almost of a glaze in the taste even though it is not there for real.  Fortunately the bicarbonate of soda flavour is absent.  They are thinner than other shortcake biscuits I have known.  However, as I say, these do the job and in that respect exceed other biscuits I have recently bought from Tesco.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Scottish All Butter Shortbread Fingers

Tesco Scottish All Butter Shortbread Fingers

These biscuit have the longest packet name of any I have tasted so far for this blog.  I think, at present, my baseline for judging shortbread fingers are those produced by Walker's,  I tend to get them in packets of two at work.  These do not reach the level of those.  However, they are better than a number of the biscuits I have recently bought from Tesco.  They are sprinkled with sugar which used to be traditional with shortbread, but it is not ridiculously the case.  They have a decent crumble which is good for shortbread.  Some tourist brands go far too far and they are breaking up before you can even get them to your mouth and these certainly do not do that and they also do not snap which would be wrong for shortbread.  They have a hint of the butteriness that is promised, but it does not go far enough.  It is this final element which lets them down.  These are reasonable biscuits for having with coffee or tea and with a little work could be really decent shortbread biscuits.  I would cut down the sugar and raise the creaminess of the taste in order to get there.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Pink Panther Wafers

Tesco Pink Panther Wafers

I do not know if I expected to get a better pink wafer from Tesco.  The supermarket has a bit of a reputation for many of its own brand products lacking in flavour and so if you are looking for cheaper items you tend to be better off going to a cheaper store like Lidl or Aldi where the budget products taste better.  This product, however, clearly with the rights to the Pink Panther cartoon logo, even though that is not as prestigious as it would have been forty years ago, I thought would package a better product than the Lidl pink wafers I tried in January.  However, that was not to be the case.  For a start, like the Tower Gate ones from Lidl, these from Tescos are not pink at all, but orange in colour.  I do not know if the pink colourant is on the EU banned list these days, but these two sets of biscuits really lack vibrancy and more resemble packaging for parcels.

The most surprising think about this product was how sharp the snap is when you bite into it.  You expect a bit of a snap with a pink wafer rather than a crumble, but with these it is extreme.  The main problem after the colour is the taste.  Pink wafers should almost be painfully sweet, but these are almost plain.  I know they are termed 'vanilla' but that does not mean they should be lacking in sweetness.  Overall, these biscuits simply taste like those you might have stuck into an Italian ice cream, maybe even less flavoursome than those.  While I have struggled to find a creamy malted milk, getting anywhere near what a pink wafer should look or taste like appears even more remote.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Malted Milk

Tesco Malted Milk

I am still being thwarted in my quest for what I feel is a proper malted milk biscuit, i.e. one with a creamy taste.  This one resembles the Asda version, but though similar is even less lacking in flavour and ends with a bit of a sour aftertaste.  It is very plain, not with the richness you need in a malted milk.  It does crumble in the way a malted milk does, there is no glaze and no bits in the way the Lidl version had them.  It just lacks taste and ends up like a watered down version of a rich tea biscuit.  Very disappointing all round.  Really worth half-a-star if I could indicate that.

Rating:
***** 

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Garibaldi Biscuits

 Tesco Garibaldi Biscuits

After a burst of Malted Milks, I have turned to another common type of biscuit in the UK - the Garibaldi.  Aside from Bourbon biscuits, named after the Bourbon dynasty that ruled France (1820-48), Navarre (1820-30), Parma (1854-59) and Two Sicilies (1859-61), Garibaldis are the only ones named after a historical figure, i.e. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82) after he visited northern England in 1854, though manufacture did not begin until 1861, the year Italy was largely unified.  Italian unification had been central to Garibaldi's political work.

They are flat reasonably plain biscuit filled with raisins.  Unlike any other biscuit I can think of they come in strips and have to be broken apart along predefined lines.  The biscuit should be glazed and they should have some sweetness.  However, even ahead of the general trend to reducing sugar manufacturers seem to have been making them less sweet than they once were.  In a good Garibaldi biscuit this is made up for by the sweetness of the raisins.

These trends explain the problem with these Garibaldis from Tesco.  The biscuits have no real flavour, they would be plain even if they were biscuits for cheese.  There is a bit of a crunch, whereas you expect chewiness in Garibaldis, and this just re-emphasises the lack of flavour.  I only got something like a hint of bicarbonate of soda in the after-taste.  The raisins which can save a Garibaldi, fail with this particular example and themselves taste rather stale, imbuing no sweetness to the biscuit.  There is no moreishness in these biscuits and overall they were very disappointing.  Yes, Garibaldis, despite the name are not ostentatious biscuits demanding attention, but neither should it taste as if you are simply eating packaging.  I hope to find a better variety of Garibaldis elsewhere.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Biscuit Shortage!

I could not continue producing my biscuit blog postings without noting that Britain is currently in a biscuit shortage.  This is the result of flooding even before  http://www.cityam.com/230293/storm-desmond-carlisle-floods-close-united-biscuits-mcvities-factory-as-army-drafted-in-and-cobra-meetng-called-to-handle-flood-fallout of a large United Biscuits factory in Carlisle.  This produces biscuits branded as McVities and Carr's.  The largest impact seems to have been on ginger biscuits which are in short supply even now, two months after the initial flooding: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35482789  This has provoked uproar on local radio stations even in southern England and on the dreadful Mumsnet which exists for indignant people.  I had noticed the shortage of ginger nuts even own brand ones in Lidl, Tesco and Asda as people deprived of the brand names have clearly switched to others and have stripped shops of them.  It does show how vulnerable we are to simply one factory going down.  I think Lidl has missed a trick, it should have shipped in more speculoos biscuits from the continent; instead they have just added more digestives where the ginger nuts used to be.  My sympathies go out to all of you unable to get your favourite biscuits but I will be holding on to my small supply of them extra carefully until the crisis is over.

P.P. 06/03/2016
The BBC has an update outlining that the biscuit shortage is likely to be coming steadily to an end over the next few weeks: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-35696027

Biscuit Blog: Carr's Melts Cheese

Carr's Melts Cheese

So, you thought this blog only dealt with sweet biscuits.  In this posting I look at some savoury biscuits in another common sub-set of biscuits.  You get 'biscuits for cheese' which are often plain wafers or sometimes digestives that are meant to put cheese on and then you get 'cheesy biscuits' which have a cheese flavour.  These Carr's Melts almost manage to straddle those two categories.  They came from Tesco and are quite complex with what appear to be small seeds and strands perhaps of dried cheese or to give that feel.  They are quite slender and have a shallow snap unlike some biscuits for cheese.  The cheese flavour is subtle but of a more mature flavour of cheese than that you find in most cheesy biscuits.  The one flaw aside from them being rather insubstantial, is that this flavour does not linger and also there is not the smooth aftertaste that I personally look for in a cheesy biscuit.  They are reasonably rather than excessively moreish.  Overall, pretty good, but not the top level.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Everyday Value Ginger Nuts

Tesco Everyday Value Ginger Nuts

As this biscuit blog builds up, I will be comparing the same type of biscuits from different UK stores.  I do not know whether I can bring myself to compared digestives between the different shops, I may leave that to my mother.  However, ginger 'nuts' as they are termed are certainly on the cards as will be rich tea and malted milk biscuits.  Though the sampling will naturally be spread out over weeks, even months, you can link through to all the relevant postings as I am carefully tagging each of them at the bottom.  This allows you to compare what I say about the nature of the same type of biscuit sold in different stores.

This week I have strayed beyond Lidl to Tesco where the woman in my house primarily shops.  These are the large packets of Everyday Value Ginger Nuts.  It says on the side that they have '30 servings' by which I assume they mean 30 biscuits, though I rarely eat single biscuits, usually I count two biscuits as a 'serving'.

I do like the mid-1960s styling of Tesco products introduced 2-3 years ago.  Marks & Spencer did something similar.  For someone of my generation these are very nostalgic as in the early 1970s this seemed a 'classic' styling, so I guess it is ideal for targeting people in their 40s and 50s.  These biscuits are alright especially for a value brand.  They are small in diameter and do not have a satisfying gingery flavour or an after taste which you would expect from a ginger biscuit whether of the nut or stem ginger variety.  They also lack a really good snap when bitten, but avoid being powdery like some of the worst ginger nuts,  They could be a 2½-star biscuit, but lack the tang you can even find in some cheap versions.  They do their job which I suppose is all you can ask for from a value version biscuit.

Rating:
*****