Food for a Quid: Is This the World’s Finest Beer Snack?

I always come back from the Philippines feeling somewhat liverish. Which is probably because Manila is, IMO, the world capital of junk food, and I end up stuffing my face with everything from cheesy popcorn to the amazing Cebuano peanut brittle, then wondering why I’m so mysteriously bloated.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Philippines were a US colony for quite some time. And so the pages of the newspapers not taken up with beauty contests, slimming tablets and diet tips are a riot of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar, high-chemical delights.

And so, in the spirit of experimentation, I bring you quite possibly the world’s best beer snack ever: Oishi salt and vinegar cracklings. Yep, they’re basically pork scratchings – chicharons in the Philippines, chicharrones in Spanish-speaking parts of the world, pork rinds in the US – but salt and vinegar flavoured!

So, two great pub snacks rolled into one.

And, rather than the genuinely porky chicharons that are sold on buses everywhere, great bubbling slabs of lard so greasy you can feel your arteries hardening with every guilty bite, Oishi’s are a shamelessly synthetic version of pork scratchings, with a crispiness to them that must have had Oishi’s finest scientists working overtime for years.

And at around 20p a packet, they leave plenty of change for the Philippines’ national brew, San Miguel. Cheers!

THE VERDICT
Cost: 20 Philippine Pesos (27p)
Flavour: 9/10
Presentation: 6/10