Here I am imagining a feature which compares bags of chips to one another, which presumably will occur any time I buy two different, suitably interesting bags on the same shopping trip, and then have occasion to photograph them side by side before one is consumed. And so, welcome to the first (and last?) edition of Chip Comparison, featuring two East Asian offerings from the global Lays Empire. The Thai chips, pictured to the right, were purchased from Elmhurst snack emporium Sugar Club and labeled ‘seashell’, although the seafood pictured appears to be a scallop. I’ve admittedly had a hard time with nautical flavors since New Year’s Day 2014, when I left a half-eaten bag of Hwa Yuan’s ‘Oyster Omelet’ chips on a hot stove, suffusing my entire apartment with a sweet, oystery funk, but these were far from overwhelming. The seasoning was piquant and gently fishy in the style of many seafood chips, a market that the maritime sections of Asia appear to have cornered (Walker’s ‘Shrimp Cocktail’ style seems tame and ketchup-y by comparison). The Magic Masala, purchased from the Jackson Heights Patel Brothers, presents a much more familiar flavor profile, albeit one that’s also completely dissimilar from most American-market preparations. The main difference here is not the masala spice seasoning, which is only a few tweaks away from a BBQ or sour cream and onion, but how clearly the individual spices come across. The Indian market, I imagine, would not take kindly to chemical interpretations of flavors that can be easily conveyed via simple, natural powders. This brings us to the bag design; notice how both feature entire potatoes transmorphing into sliced ridgey shards, indicating the focus on freshness, which appears to be a company-wide concern. The Thai potato definitely looks a bit chunkier, a difference not reflected in the chips themselves.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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