Three 'Pretentious' Ingredients That Are Actually Worth Buying

Introduction

Some ingredients wear their indulgence on their sleeve, and the fun is working out which ones deserve the hype. We tasted three contenders that come with real stories behind them: a savoury gin made with crayfish from English chalk streams, a vegan spice blend that promises bacon flavour in a sprinkle, and an English sparkling wine with a trophy cabinet most Champagne houses would envy. Here is what each one is actually like, and whether the price makes sense.

Cray Cray Gin: A Savoury Gin With a Story

Cray Cray Gin comes from the Kennet Crayfish Company, a business whose main trade is crayfish, with a couple of playful spinoff products like this one. The botanical list is unusual: savoury notes of dill, a peppery hit from watercress, fresh zest from ripe lemon, and the lingering sweetness of crayfish. Sipped neat it is very clean and smooth, and it really comes into its own as a gin and tonic served over ice with a slice of lemon and a Mediterranean tonic.

The backstory is genuinely good. Signal crayfish are an invasive species in the UK, very few people hold a licence to fish them, and they cannot be sold or bought live. Removing them from local waterways does real environmental good. These ones live in the chalk streams around Hampshire, which is said to make them particularly pure and sweet. Whether you can taste the crayfish is another matter: the dill and watercress come through clearly, the seafood character is more an idea than a flavour, and the pairing works best in your head alongside a prawn or crayfish Marie Rose style dish.

At 35.99 pounds a bottle it sits between a solid high-street gin and something indulgent, and it does not feel overcharged for a decent gin plus a story you will retell every time you pour it. Priced at 40 or more, it would start to feel like paying for the tale rather than the liquid.

Baconizer Dust: Smoky Bacon Flavour in a Shaker

The Dorset Spice Shed Baconizer Dust is a vegan spice blend built from paprika, salt, sugar, smoked paprika, onion, natural hickory smoked flavour, tomato, garlic, chipotle, cayenne and cloves. All natural spices, naturally dried, with no actual bacon inside. The promise is simple: smoky, chilli, bacon flavour whenever you want it, as a rub, blend, or dust.

Nothing tastes more like bacon than bacon, and this does not pretend otherwise. What it delivers is that smoky, slightly sweet savoury vibe in a form you can sprinkle over almost anything. It works dusted over salads, stirred into pasta sauces, or thrown into a carbonara when you have no smoked pancetta or guanciale to hand. On a simple leftover salad of avocado, chicken and tomato with just olive oil and a splash of white wine vinegar, a light dusting genuinely elevated the dish. It is not a bacon replacement, more a very convenient shortcut to that flavour direction.

The Dorset Spice Shed also makes a wider range of grilling blends, including kebab and chicken mixes branded around dinosaurs, a nod to the Jurassic Coast and its 185 million years of UNESCO-listed history. At 4.99 pounds a tub this sits just under the five pound mark, clearly pitched at the gift market, and it would make an excellent secret Santa present. Delicious, unpretentious, and unlikely to blow the world away, which is exactly what it should be.

Hattingley English Sparkling Wine: Award-Winning and Genuinely Local

Hattingley’s English sparkling wine arrives with serious credentials. The vineyard has won 160 awards and countless trophies, and this particular wine alone has taken 62 global awards, many of them golds, in global wine challenges and awards. Made in the traditional method, a percentage of the wine is oak barrel aged, blended to a house style, then bottled for a second fermentation and left on the lees for four years, which builds those biscuity, brioche notes. Overall it takes over five years to make a single bottle.

The chalk terroir echoes the Champagne region, and the taste lands somewhere between prosecco and Champagne: more winy than prosecco, less so than Champagne. Tasting notes run to floral honeysuckle, lemon zest and orange peel, and high-acid green fruits like green apple. There is a proper story here too. The vineyard began as a diversity project on a farm about six years ago, and the surrounding projects have helped reintroduce incredibly rare butterflies, which now serve as the brand logo. Long-time winemaker Emma Rice built the winery to her exacting standards and won winemaker of the year twice, the first woman ever to do so.

At 36 pounds a bottle it undercuts classic Champagne houses that start around 40 pounds and up. For an extra tenner, 46 pounds in total, you can have the bottle personally engraved and shipped in a wooden box with your own message. If you are already spending that much on a bottle of wine, going all out for a gift is an easy call.

So, Are They Pretentious?

Three very different verdicts. The gin and the sparkling wine both trade on story and locality without overcharging for it, so neither earns the pretentious label, though the wine’s standing does partly depend on how you feel about Champagne in the first place. The spice blend is the cheapest and least showy of the three and simply delivers a tasty, useful flavour shortcut.

The real test is the fourth item in most lists like this: the extreme end, such as Japan’s Ruby Roman grapes from Ishikawa Prefecture, which must hit at least 18% sugar and 20g per grape, can sell for around 48 pounds a punnet, and are undeniably pretentious and undeniably delicious. That tells you what pretentious really means: paying a premium for an experience you want to tell people about. If that sounds like your kind of purchase, the three ingredients above offer the story without the silly money.

Conclusion

Each of these earns its place for a different reason. Cray Cray Gin is the best conversation-starter pour, Baconizer Dust is the cheapest way to add smoky depth to everyday cooking, and Hattingley is the one to open when the occasion deserves something genuinely special. Pick the one that matches how you actually eat and drink, and none of them will feel like an indulgence you regret.