Hay recently announced, with confidence, that beetroot crackers are delicious. This was not framed as a suggestion but as a conclusion. I therefore tasted one, expecting earthiness, sweetness, perhaps a hint of damp allotment. What I got was a cracker. A perfectly respectable cracker. Crunchy, salty, beige in spirit. Beetroot had clearly been involved at some point, but only as a concept. Possibly as a sketch on a whiteboard.
This is how modern food works. You do not add beetroot for flavour. You add it for narrative. Beetroot suggests virtue, antioxidants, and a faintly smug inner glow. It gives the cracker a fashionable colour and a reason to cost more. Any actual beetroot taste would be disruptive and might alarm the customer. The flour, oil and salt are doing the real work. Beetroot is there to justify itself to Instagram.
The provenance matters too. These particular crackers were bought in Beaumaris, which upgrades them instantly. Beaumaris food is not consumed, it is experienced. It comes with sea air, independent shops, and the assumption that someone called Dafydd has strong opinions about grains. In that context the crackers taste better, or at least feel more sincere. Location does a lot of heavy lifting.
Then came the decisive pairing. With a decent cheddar, the truth emerged. The crackers taste of cheddar. Of course they do. Cheddar is a flavour bully. It dominates, overwhelms and takes charge. The beetroot cracker understands this and quietly fulfils its real purpose, which is to provide crunch, structural integrity and moral reassurance while the cheese gets on with being cheese.
So yes, beetroot crackers are delicious. They are delicious crackers, they taste of cheddar when required, and in Beaumaris they taste faintly of a nice holiday. Beetroot itself remains entirely unharmed by the process.
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