Oooh... What Sauce!

Somerfield

Manufactured by: a shady indiscriminate Belgian for the equally shady and indiscriminate Somerfield Stores Ltd., P.O. Box 708, Bristol BS99 1GA. The Belgian in question may also be responsible for the Tesco inverted bottle, the truth however remains elusive
www.somerfield.co.uk
Ingredients: Soya oil*, pasteurised egg and egg yolk, water, vinegar, salt, sugar, concentrated lemon juice, flavourings (*Somerfield are generous enough to concede that their soya oil is genetically modified, so one shudders to imagine therefore, what secret mutations and grim horrors the euphemistic ingredient listing 'flavourings' is designed to hide)
Taste: Like a night spent trapped in a lift with Dennis Norden, this sauce is an uninspiring prospect. Powerful intonations of lard, braised wombat steak, crushed breeze block and marine lobster combine to assault the taste buds amidst a stormy tang of petrol vapour and rancid goat's cheese. What a great delight the faux icing nozzle provides though, one can almost ignore the sharp biting taste amidst the delighted flurry of joyous squeezing, coaxing and twisting it induces in even the most cynical of individuals
Colour: Akin to the slightly off white frost of a winter's dawn around a petrol pump in Acton
Comments: The most tactile user friendly bottle containing one of the more insipid sauces, if only the Italian sports car casing was enough to successfully ignore the two stroke hedge strimmer motor throbbing beneath the bonnet
Overall: 6 out of 10 - due mostly to the ability the bottle provides to allow one to write one's name in artful mayonnaise letters on slices of Somerfield Basics loaf (15p rrp), and also because of the frustrated creativity that is relived in large doses at every single meal time as the mayonnaise squiggles dance around one's dinner plate in increasingly intricate patterns

Organic OMayo!

Manufactured by: Healthy Harvest (UK) Ltd., 2 Spring Villa Park, Edgware, Middlesex HA8 7EH
E-mail: HHarvest1@aol.com
Ingredients: Water, Cider Vinegar, Vegetable Oil, Modified Maize Starch, Soya Protein Concentrate, Natural Stabilisers; Guar Gum, Powdered Cellulose, Carrageenan; Sea Salt, Mustard, Natural Spices, Sweetener; Acesulfame K, Ascorbic Acid. All very well and good, and all very healthy I'm sure, but am I alone in wanting a hysterical acesulfame health scare to shatter their organic smugness? Always remember that golden rule of successful cooking: never use ingredients that do not figure in the average word processor's spell check program
Taste: Wrong, all very wrong! (Sorry once more for the prevalence of exclamation marks in this review). Tastes like some rancid recurring Freudian nightmare, in which a haggard old witch straight from the most terrifying European folklore tales pours warm starling's guano into the ear of a week dead vole before adding emulsion paint (matt finish), runny porridge, putrid yoghurt, gnat's vomit and concentrated essence of stale cabbage. If this jar is left unlidded the smell can swiftly permeate several acres of woodland
Colour: Like an albino badger caught full in the light of a slightly overcast wintery full moon whilst indulging in some disreputable activity of which it is particularly embarrassed
Comments: The consistency of rancid yoghurt churned long and forcefully with wild blossom honey by a particularly misshapen Guatemalan dwarf, the full aroma of a Brazilian hockey player's jock strap combined artfully with all the character wit and charm of a Polish provincial town planner. OMay-no!
Overall: 1 out of 10 - Narrowly avoiding the dreaded 0 out of 10 purely because it has a jar and a lid which can always been cleaned out and filled with something tastier. Had this been served in a bucket or a smeared on the head of small dog, nought would have been duly recorded for the first time in condiment history

ORGANIC OMAYO!

Beware of anything that claims to be 'traditional mayonnaise in taste', for the truth is almost certainly that it is anything but mayonnaise in reality. 'OMayo!' is surely a great title for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, or a whimsical anecdotal biography of a now reformed Hollywood star with a once career threatening mayonnaise addiction, but as a condiment concept it is noticeably flawed and lacking.

In fact, lacking is what OMayo! excels at in abundance. The simple addition of a sprightly exclamation mark cannot hide the wretched fact, emblazoned proudly across the bottom of the jar that OMayo! is 95% fat free plus 100% sugar, gluten, eggs, cholesterol, and GM free. Hold on a moment there though, that sounds all fine and dandy, but eggs! Oh no! OMayo! Oh no! Your cunning exclamation driven marketing ploy has fooled me with consummate ease, and led me, the body conscious concerned consumer unwittingly into the bland cardboard and leaf chewing world of the vegan! Please enough with the your exclamation marks already! I surrender, I am yours, take me!!! 95% fat free and 110% taste free!

I often think that it would be better for vegans, vegetarians and various other well meaning liberal food faddists to simply find an alternative to produce which contains ingredients they find disagreeable. Mayonnaise, from its very conception, was always clearly intended to contain eggs. It is after all an extremely simple food stuff which only contains two basic ingredients: oil and eggs. Remove one of those and you quite blatantly do not have mayonnaise. You either have a few well chosen raw eggs or a cup of sloshing vegetable oil, and what good is that to garnish your plate of big fat chips with? You may as well go for the Dulux option and paint your food an agreeable shade of white for all the likelihood of either egg free guiltless OMayo! or any quick drying household decorative tasting even remotely like mayonnaise. At least Dulux can offer a range of off white colours and a subtle combination of shades, whereas OMayo will only ever offer you the same stale ambience.

As a committed carnivore with what I consider to be a more than healthy grip on reality, I sometimes feel disinclined to eat vegetables on a regular basis. Unlike the vegetarian however, I do not fashion the wholesome meat from my walk in freezer and abattoir into amusing carrot, broccoli and potato shapes, removing all taste and texture in the process, in the vain hope that I can successfully delude myself into the belief that I am consuming organic vegan wholefood. I hereby suggest all vegetarians and vegans immediately do the same. I don't know what you expect this 'low fat mayonnaise style dressing' to do for your healthy modern lifestyle, but please do it well away from me in a secluded health farm buried deep in the heart of some vegetable infested part of Ruritania.

Kite Wholefoods

Manufactured by: Kite Wholefoods, Y Cadw, 38 Ffordd Aneurin, Pontyberem, Carmarthenshire SA15 5DF
Web site: Kite Wholefoods
Ingredients: Pure sunflower oil, free range eggs, wine vinegar, freshly squeezed lemon juice, fresh ground black pepper, sea salt. Great use of the word 'pure' by the good people of Kite, the strong implication being one of a vile and gross impurity tainting all other similar products
Taste: A particularly tart and ostentatious sauce, reminiscent of a young harlot learning her immoral trade in an American 19th century gold rush frontier town. Extremely strong citrus tangs combine with a velvet textured sauce to pleasantly tickle the taste buds
Colour: Clean white and wispy, with a healthy sprinkling of coarse ground black pepper, making the sauce appear somewhat akin to the speckled grey moustache of a suave and debonair TV sports commentator
Comments: Like being bombarded with lemons by a vague speckly assailant atop a tall mayonnaise coloured column
Overall: 7 out of 10 - Perhaps a little bit too tart and acidic for the casual mayonnaise consumer but an engaging and rewarding delight for the educated palate

KITE WHOLEFOODS

Having now established organic foods to be the possible saviour of humanity (see De Rit for further details), we turn now to Wales, a region of the British Isles which remains a mystery to many from outside the United Kingdom and a great many more from inside the United Kingdom. Wales is a sparsely populated mountainous region inhabited by sheep, wispy ginger haired people with precious little fashion sense, new age suburban refugees and druids.

It is right therefore that organic foods should find such a ready outlet in this grim rain sodden land. It is not that there is a great desire amongst the populace to live healthy carefree existences, in fact just the opposite judging from the industrial sized quantities of oven chips, deep fried bacon and lager that the average Welsh citizen can devour in a single sitting. It is rather that all the additives so beloved of the global snack conglomerates, the antioxidants, preservatives, stabilisers, flavourings and colourings have failed to make it further west than Slough due to a cow on the railway line near Carmarthen and a sheep van blocking the high street in Lampeter. For those who do not make a habit of frequenting drab Berkshire towns, Slough can best be described as a vast sprawl of unusually uninspired industrial estates with a small but still uninteresting settlement of commuters attached, and famous of course for not being bombed sufficiently heavily during the Second World War to keep Sir John Betjeman contented.

Kite Wholefoods seem to genuinely care about the preparation of their produce and their inspired production and customer care routines would put most large companies to shame. Their web site is an amusing and diverting trifle with some fine illustrative articles of their excellent range. If they only cared about their animated gifs like their cared for the mayonnaise, the world would be a better place without the unnecessary and frankly scary use of exclamation marks that some organic producers see fit to utilise with wanton abandon and complete disregard for the planet's limited punctuation resources.

____________________________

Manufactured by: a shady indiscriminate Belgian for the equally shady and indiscriminate Somerfield Stores Ltd., P.O. Box 708, Bristol BS99 1GA. The Belgian in question may also be responsible for the Tesco inverted bottle, the truth however remains elusive www.somerfield.co.uk Ingredients: Soya oil, pasteurised egg and egg yolk, water, vinegar, salt, sugar, concentrated lemon juice, flavourings (Somerfield are generous enough to concede that their soya oil is genetically modified, so one shudders to imagine therefore, what secret mutations and grim horrors the euphemistic ingredient listing 'flavourings' is designed to hide) Taste: Like a night spent trapped in a lift with Dennis Norden, this sauce is an uninspiring prospect. Powerful intonations of lard, braised wombat steak, crushed breeze block and marine lobster combine to assault the taste buds amidst a stormy tang of petrol vapour and rancid goat's cheese. What a great delight the faux icing nozzle provides though, one can almost ignore the sharp biting taste amidst the delighted flurry of joyous squeezing, coaxing and twisting it induces in even the most cynical of individuals Colour: Akin to the slightly off white frost of a winter's dawn around a petrol pump in Acton Comments: The most tactile user friendly bottle containing one of the more insipid sauces, if only the Italian sports car casing was enough to successfully ignore the two stroke hedge strimmer motor throbbing beneath the bonnet Overall: 6 out of 10 - due mostly to the ability the bottle provides to allow one to write one's name in artful mayonnaise letters on slices of Somerfield Basics loaf (15p rrp), and also because of the frustrated creativity that is relived in large doses at every single meal time as the mayonnaise squiggles dance around one's dinner plate in increasingly intricate patterns	NEW SOMERFIELD MAYONNAISE Somerfield are the poor scruffy relations of British supermarkets, living as they do in a crowded and dilapidated run down terraced house, with an old bath tub and two broken cars lying forgotten and rusting amid the high unmown grass of the untidy front garden. Surviving on well meaning charity and handouts from the state, the Somerfield family watch an unhealthy amount of highly inane television, eat a great deal of deeply fried food and, far from seeking to become upwardly mobile, increase profits and reach a larger and more sophisticated market, they instead revel in their cheap, greasy, shoddy and completely apathetic atmosphere. Highly revealing was Somerfield's decision to purchase the Kwik Save chain of stores, surely the only brand name on earth which possesses a legitimate claim to be more utterly useless and more thoroughly nasty than Somerfield. In Somerfield's chain of soiled silent miserable stores, with their rows of forlorn empty rusting shelves and miserable vacant looking members of staff, disinterested arrogant and surly to a degree normally only seen in former Soviet republics, attempting to purchase any goods worth the admittedly highly competitive price is a challenge one would not wish upon even a committed enemy. Goods are cheap, but as any member of the Somerfield staff will glumly admit, here life too is cheap. It is a surprise then, among these disheartening surroundings to purchase a mayonnaise that whilst not tasting much better than the more mundane budget sauces on offer, does at least have more surprises and innovations to grab the interest of the typical gadget obsessed chef, than say the entire Apollo lunar program. Observe the bottle, relish how it's sleek inverted design allows for easy constant and forceful flow with minimal consumer effort, easy to hold and easy to love, the buxom top heavy frame bears a more than passing resemblance to a portly Wagnerian heroine, held aloft by her dainty pallid legs as she prepares to sing a Siegmunde solo at Bayreuth. And ah, when the lungs, or in this increasingly faltering analogy, the bottle is squeezed, what issues forth may not be the most elegant note ever to be heard, but the presentation is truly remarkable, for the chief innovation of Somerfield's top scientists is the star shaped nozzle. Yes that's right, a nozzle sent from the heavens. With the sauce stored correctly at the optimum chilled temperature that all mayonnaise demands, the small patent five pointed hole in the lid forces the precious mayo through a tight tiny point, from whence it is disgorged with a consistency and appearance almost exactly like the sugar icing of a particularly skilled confectioner baker. The issues of taste in this sauce are subsumed by an all consuming desire to recreate the great and cherished cakes of one's fondest memories, reliving favourite christenings, weddings, birthdays or even some of the more unruly and hilarious episodes of The Generation Game. A happy time is guaranteed for all, as long as any lingering issues of taste and aroma are shelved in order to enjoy the pure physical delight of squirting elaborate mayonnaise patterns across a plate of steaming chips.

Manufactured by: Healthy Harvest (UK) Ltd., 2 Spring Villa Park, Edgware, Middlesex HA8 7EH E-mail: HHarvest1@aol.com Ingredients: Water, Cider Vinegar, Vegetable Oil, Modified Maize Starch, Soya Protein Concentrate, Natural Stabilisers; Guar Gum, Powdered Cellulose, Carrageenan; Sea Salt, Mustard, Natural Spices, Sweetener; Acesulfame K, Ascorbic Acid. All very well and good, and all very healthy I'm sure, but am I alone in wanting a hysterical acesulfame health scare to shatter their organic smugness? Always remember that golden rule of successful cooking: never use ingredients that do not figure in the average word processor's spell check program Taste: Wrong, all very wrong! (Sorry once more for the prevalence of exclamation marks in this review). Tastes like some rancid recurring Freudian nightmare, in which a haggard old witch straight from the most terrifying European folklore tales pours warm starling's guano into the ear of a week dead vole before adding emulsion paint (matt finish), runny porridge, putrid yoghurt, gnat's vomit and concentrated essence of stale cabbage. If this jar is left unlidded the smell can swiftly permeate several acres of woodland Colour: Like an albino badger caught full in the light of a slightly overcast wintery full moon whilst indulging in some disreputable activity of which it is particularly embarrassed Comments: The consistency of rancid yoghurt churned long and forcefully with wild blossom honey by a particularly misshapen Guatemalan dwarf, the full aroma of a Brazilian hockey player's jock strap combined artfully with all the character wit and charm of a Polish provincial town planner. OMay-no! Overall: 1 out of 10 - Narrowly avoiding the dreaded 0 out of 10 purely because it has a jar and a lid which can always been cleaned out and filled with something tastier. Had this been served in a bucket or a smeared on the head of small dog, nought would have been duly recorded for the first time in condiment history	ORGANIC OMAYO! Beware of anything that claims to be 'traditional mayonnaise in taste', for the truth is almost certainly that it is anything but mayonnaise in reality. 'OMayo!' is surely a great title for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, or a whimsical anecdotal biography of a now reformed Hollywood star with a once career threatening mayonnaise addiction, but as a condiment concept it is noticeably flawed and lacking. In fact, lacking is what OMayo! excels at in abundance. The simple addition of a sprightly exclamation mark cannot hide the wretched fact, emblazoned proudly across the bottom of the jar that OMayo! is 95% fat free plus 100% sugar, gluten, eggs, cholesterol, and GM free. Hold on a moment there though, that sounds all fine and dandy, but eggs! Oh no! OMayo! Oh no! Your cunning exclamation driven marketing ploy has fooled me with consummate ease, and led me, the body conscious concerned consumer unwittingly into the bland cardboard and leaf chewing world of the vegan! Please enough with the your exclamation marks already! I surrender, I am yours, take me!!! 95% fat free and 110% taste free! I often think that it would be better for vegans, vegetarians and various other well meaning liberal food faddists to simply find an alternative to produce which contains ingredients they find disagreeable. Mayonnaise, from its very conception, was always clearly intended to contain eggs. It is after all an extremely simple food stuff which only contains two basic ingredients: oil and eggs. Remove one of those and you quite blatantly do not have mayonnaise. You either have a few well chosen raw eggs or a cup of sloshing vegetable oil, and what good is that to garnish your plate of big fat chips with? You may as well go for the Dulux option and paint your food an agreeable shade of white for all the likelihood of either egg free guiltless OMayo! or any quick drying household decorative tasting even remotely like mayonnaise. At least Dulux can offer a range of off white colours and a subtle combination of shades, whereas OMayo will only ever offer you the same stale ambience. As a committed carnivore with what I consider to be a more than healthy grip on reality, I sometimes feel disinclined to eat vegetables on a regular basis. Unlike the vegetarian however, I do not fashion the wholesome meat from my walk in freezer and abattoir into amusing carrot, broccoli and potato shapes, removing all taste and texture in the process, in the vain hope that I can successfully delude myself into the belief that I am consuming organic vegan wholefood. I hereby suggest all vegetarians and vegans immediately do the same. I don't know what you expect this 'low fat mayonnaise style dressing' to do for your healthy modern lifestyle, but please do it well away from me in a secluded health farm buried deep in the heart of some vegetable infested part of Ruritania.

Manufactured by: Kite Wholefoods, Y Cadw, 38 Ffordd Aneurin, Pontyberem, Carmarthenshire SA15 5DF Web site: Kite Wholefoods Ingredients: Pure sunflower oil, free range eggs, wine vinegar, freshly squeezed lemon juice, fresh ground black pepper, sea salt. Great use of the word 'pure' by the good people of Kite, the strong implication being one of a vile and gross impurity tainting all other similar products Taste: A particularly tart and ostentatious sauce, reminiscent of a young harlot learning her immoral trade in an American 19th century gold rush frontier town. Extremely strong citrus tangs combine with a velvet textured sauce to pleasantly tickle the taste buds Colour: Clean white and wispy, with a healthy sprinkling of coarse ground black pepper, making the sauce appear somewhat akin to the speckled grey moustache of a suave and debonair TV sports commentator Comments: Like being bombarded with lemons by a vague speckly assailant atop a tall mayonnaise coloured column Overall: 7 out of 10 - Perhaps a little bit too tart and acidic for the casual mayonnaise consumer but an engaging and rewarding delight for the educated palate	KITE WHOLEFOODS Having now established organic foods to be the possible saviour of humanity (see De Rit for further details), we turn now to Wales, a region of the British Isles which remains a mystery to many from outside the United Kingdom and a great many more from inside the United Kingdom. Wales is a sparsely populated mountainous region inhabited by sheep, wispy ginger haired people with precious little fashion sense, new age suburban refugees and druids. It is right therefore that organic foods should find such a ready outlet in this grim rain sodden land. It is not that there is a great desire amongst the populace to live healthy carefree existences, in fact just the opposite judging from the industrial sized quantities of oven chips, deep fried bacon and lager that the average Welsh citizen can devour in a single sitting. It is rather that all the additives so beloved of the global snack conglomerates, the antioxidants, preservatives, stabilisers, flavourings and colourings have failed to make it further west than Slough due to a cow on the railway line near Carmarthen and a sheep van blocking the high street in Lampeter. For those who do not make a habit of frequenting drab Berkshire towns, Slough can best be described as a vast sprawl of unusually uninspired industrial estates with a small but still uninteresting settlement of commuters attached, and famous of course for not being bombed sufficiently heavily during the Second World War to keep Sir John Betjeman contented. Kite Wholefoods seem to genuinely care about the preparation of their produce and their inspired production and customer care routines would put most large companies to shame. Their web site is an amusing and diverting trifle with some fine illustrative articles of their excellent range. If they only cared about their animated gifs like their cared for the mayonnaise, the world would be a better place without the unnecessary and frankly scary use of exclamation marks that some organic producers see fit to utilise with wanton abandon and complete disregard for the planet's limited punctuation resources.