It seems like American chip flavors just keep getting crazier, with each trip to the grocery store yielding a rogue’s gallery of strange new monstrosities. But this craziness is also circumscribed, pushed toward ever more extreme, overdriven concoctions, mash-ups and combinations, as well as eerily faithful reenactments of foods that have no business existing as chips. On the fast-food side of this equation, Pizza Hut has recently launched the latest attempt at challenging the Doritos Locos Taco. This hulking abomination expands the humble Cheez-It to mammoth proportions. A Cheez-It is obviously not a chip, but it's pizza-fied offspring (the end-result of years of desperate promiscuity by Sunshine, a company that needs to realize the inherent perfection of its star product and stick with it) is so wrongheaded, and so representative of the grotesquerie which defines the current state of processed food culture, that I would be remiss not to mention it. I should also mention that Extra Toasty Cheez-Its are a godsend, and almost singlehandedly balance out the damage inflicted by the last 15 years of lab-spawned, misbegotten oddities. Still, all this insanity leaves the ardent snacker aching for a little subtlety, a crunchy respite for our frazzled, MSG-addled taste buds. The above chip canisters satisfy that craving. Rarely do you see a chip aim for something as simple as the unvarnished essence of a fresh vegetable (aside from potato, obviously), an exercise in minimalism that seems to directly defy the market dictates discussed above. Yet here, we have two. And while both also fall into the above category of “foods that have no business being chips,” I was happy in this case to find an attempt at such an ineffable flavor profile that actually pulled off the endeavor. The cucumber chips match the sturdy snap of the Lays Stax house style with a cool, aqueous piquancy that’s also slightly sweet. The tomato, also not entirely savory, do a better job of jibing with the vegetable’s essential character than any other version I’ve encountered so far. On the whole the duo is very far from the aggressive intensity of these two, with which they form a strange parity. Tomato chips are a big thing in China, apparently. Together, the two constitute a veritable salad of chips, a flight of fancy that might have been possible to arrange if I could have only tracked down lettuce (this, alas, seems to be one of the few flavors that does not exist in chip form). Since we’re now opening up the discussion to include other potential salad ingredients, I’ll use this opportunity to mention this red pepper-flavored German variety pictured above, which I also consumed recently. Named for nearby Hungary, a continental lodestar in the culinary use and dissemination of crimson peps, these seem more rooted in the actual taste of paprika, the dried and ground version thereof. The taste is somewhere in the neighborhood of American BBQ chips, subtracting the sweet element. This leads me to another digression, which is that years of peckish globe-trotting has provided some insight into how much behind-the-scenes crossover exists between seemingly disparate flavors, brands and styles. Sometimes this constitutes a sin of omission, as in the recent experience I had with The Whole Shabang, a bag of which was gifted to me by a friend with a perverse interest in the American penal system. Rumored to be constituted from factory floor sweepings (a nugget of urban legend hearsay I remember also being ascribed to Frito-Lay Munchies), these chips are more accurately described as an all-encompassing flavor buffet for snack food-deprived inmates. Even more accurately, they’re Canadian All-Dressed chips in disguise, a fact I was not the first to notice. This is not a total 1:1 parity, however, but more so an instance of a style being approximated and then obscured under another label, to create a greater illusion of novelty. On a recent trip to Amsterdam (covered in my next post), I had a stranger experience, one which hints at the creepy ubiquity of the commercial flavor library likely shared by various intertwined arms of international conglomerates. While wandering around the city, I chanced upon chips with the enticing name of “Joppie Sauce.” Part of the rich pantheon of frite dips that dominates BeNeLux street-eating, this is a mustard-based concoction apparently named after the café owner who invented it. Having never tasted it before, my sense memory immediately recognized the flavor of these chips as nearly identical to Snyder’s Honey Mustard and Onion Pretzel Pieces, with which I gained an undue familiarity during a long-ago stint as a teen grocery-store cashier, subsisting on the fruits of the less-healthy aisles for my daily lunch-break sustenance. Finding this flavor again, thousands of miles away under a different name, activated the conspiratorial quadrants of my brain: are those Lays “Do Us a Flavor” contests (of which Joppie Chips appear to be an alum) really just a shady means of tricking us into consuming chemical cocktails already formulated for other markets, as if we had come up with the idea ourselves? Considering the current state of corporate affairs, I would not be surprised if this were the case. Yet in the grand scheme of ongoing malfeasance, this surely ranks as a minor offense, and probably one best left on the backburner of things to be worried about. Better instead to focus on off-the-wall renderings like Chick n’ Chips, the Trinidadian answer to the salad in a chip concept. We’ve thus moved, with only a little bit of extraneous stretching, to the complete other side of the spectrum, from garden-fresh tomato-ey gustations to a quasi-ketchup-flavored sampler pack approximating the shape of chicken legs and french fries. These are actually pretty good for a ketchup chip, a style of which I am not normally a fan. Surprisingly subtle, they scrap the idea of making each shape taste differently, instead focusing on textural variation. Better than these, at least, and better at achieving the baseline quality which most gonzo American varietals miss: the potential to scarf down an entire serving without experiencing fried taste bud fatigue or a bloated stomach. Speaking of overstuffing, I have now compared seven types of chips in one post - the record for this series by a wide margin - and a high bar to beat for the next installment, whenever that may arrive.
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