Thursday, January 13, 2011

Product Review: Kettle-Cooked Salt and Vinegar Chips

It took me a long time to come around to salt-and-vinegar-flavored potato chips. The first time I had them I was still in grade school and we were at my grandparents' house for Christmas. I didn't like them. At all. Then, while I was on my mission [1] in Monterrey, México, I developed a taste for salt-and-lime-flavored Fritos.[2] Not long after I'd started college at BYU, I discovered some lime-flavored potato chips (Lay's Limón) at the grocery store. But they only kept them stocked for a few weeks and then stopped.[3]

To curb my disappointment, I decided to give salt-and-vinegar another try. My reasoning was that citrate and vinegar are both acids. I wasn't wrong: I now like salt-and-vinegar chips. And as an added bonus, if I left my bag of salt-and-vinegar-flavored chips out, my roommates weren't likely to help themselves to a handful.


Recently I've noticed a new brand of potato chips at the store: Kettle. And seemingly in response to this, Lay's also put out several kettle-cooked varieties of chips. The ones that caught my attention, though, were the salt-and-vinegar flavors. So I bought some Lay's Kettle Cooked Sea Salt & Vinegar Flavored Potato Chips and some Kettle Brand Sea Salt & Vinegar chips and compared them.

My verdict: To be honest, there really wasn't much difference between the two. The flavor seemed exactly the same to me, while the Lay's chips were slightly crispier than the Kettle brand chips. But I was only able to detect this by doing a side-by-side comparison. So unless your teeth are really sensitive to crunchy chips, then you're better off basing your decision on the price and/or nutritional information [4] than on the brand.


Notes:

[1] For those who are unsure why Latter-day Saints (Mormons) go on missions, I recommend you visit here and here, where you can learn more about LDS beliefs concerning sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you have more questions, ask and maybe I'll do a full post on the topic.

[2] These are nearly impossible to find in the U.S.—even in the Mexican stores.

[3] They're back, now, which I'm grateful for.

[4] I don't recall the prices, but the Lay's were more nutritional.

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