The vinegar-flavoured salt may be the best thing to happen to a fish and chip supper since sliced bread

Malt salt - what soggy chips have been waiting for? Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The question has inspired culinary debate for decades. How do you sprinkle vinegar on your chips without making them too wet? We may have an answer: Malt Salt – a new vinegar-flavoured salt that US makers J&D's say will make your chips both salty and malty, but not "soggy as a Seattle winter".

Will fish and chips ever be the same again? In the spirit of journalistic inquiry, I head to the Guardian canteen to put my pot of Malt Salt – yours for about £2.80 – through its paces. I take two chips. One I lace liberally with vinegar and salt. The other with Malt Salt. The vinegared chip is delicious: soggy, salty and fiercely acidic. And Malt Salt? It does taste vaguely vinegarish. And it is definitely dry. But I actually miss the chip's soggy centre.

Thankfully, Malt Salt is just a sideline for J&D's, whose main trade is bacon-flavoured condiments: kosher-certified bacon salt, "baconnaise", "Mmmvelopes" (bacon-flavoured envelopes) and, best of all, bacon lip balm. "Everything should taste like bacon," say founders Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow. Well, everything apart from vinegar.