Brets – Flemish Stew Flavour

I can’t say I’ve had too many snacks from France, so this is exciting for me. I don’t know much about the snack scene over there, but I imagine they are more about sauces then the crazy stuff we have over in North America.

Flemish stew, or Carbonnade Flamande is a stew that is a Flemish beef stew with predominantly onions, beer and various sugars and vinegars to flavour. I don’t recall having any in my adult life, but hey sometimes you have things in your childhood that you completely forget about so maybe I have back in the days of the horse carriage. Having said that, I’ve yet to find a standard European style stew that I didn’t end up enjoying to some degree, so this feels like a safe choice. Almost too safe…

The flavour is very unique, and is surprisingly complex. The predominant flavour here is actually the sweet, slightly earthy flavour of the beer, and the onions helps give the flavour a little more complexity. It’s sort of blowing my mind how subtle but gentle some of these flavours are. They almost taste like I dipped a chip in some actual stew, and it’s not overly salty and sweet. There’s a bunch of other very subtle flavours that don’t dominate but elevate the experience, like nutmeg and cinnamon. I cannot stress enough how fascinated I am by this flavour and what they managed to achieve with this. I eat a lot of chips but very few have a complex flavour that works on multiple levels like this. I am now very interested in Brets.

The texture of the chips is that of a typical chip but with very tight ridges. They are more softer then a Ruffle as they are still a fairly thin crisp, but the benefit being that they are very light and airy. It could be the method they fry, perhaps in smaller batches or the potato breed they use, but where they lack crunch they more than make up for by being crisp. These really do feel like a crisp with ridges, more than what us North Americans are used to where ridges usually means crunchier and harder.

These are relatively difficult to find in my neck of the woods. The few places I do end up finding them are expensive specialty stores. Having said that, if you can find these they are worth a try, assuming it’s not too expensive. I would get these again for the flavour alone. Suffice to say this brand is now on my radar and I will be seeking them out like a missile.