“No, dammit, I said weird things we’d WANT to eat. Yes, we’re going positive this time round. No, I’m not drunker than normal. Just get it done.”
~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt
When we talk about food here, outside of the general “fried? Gimmegimmegimme” context, we have a tendency to focus on strange flavors or, God forbid, Japan. That also applies to our discussion of potato chip flavors—generally, when we take the time to describe potato chips to you, the reader, we talk about flavors that other countries like to use, and why those countries are wrong and bad. We mention potato chips that you haven’t heard of because you live a good life and avoid bad things, and most other countries like to hawk terrible potato chip flavors, and they can go to hell and take their ketchup flavored potato shavings with them, those sons of a bitches.
But we’ve decided that today, just this once, we should try to be positive with our guidance. So we’re not going to talk about awful potato chip flavors you didn’t know existed. Instead, we will discuss underrepresented potato chip flavors out there, and let you know what you’re missing.
No, we’re not being sarcastic, why do you keep assuming we’re being sarcastic when we try to say nice things?
The Best Potato Chip Flavors You’ve Probably Never Tasted
This is not on the list.
Like most savory and fried treats, creating a proper flavor blend for potato chips requires not much more than common sense and a willingness to salt the shit out of everything. Sour cream and onion are amazing on potato chips because if you ate a baked potato with sour cream and onion you’d recognize that flavor combination as “oh God just so good, oh no I ate the potato before letting it cool and burned my mouth, everything will taste like chalk for a week.” Barbeque works because barbeque makes everything taste better, and let’s not kid ourselves, potato chip barbeque is a flavor that only exists on potato chips, and has about as much in common with the taste of barbeque ribs as a container of Tang that was left out in the rain.
While there are a lot of mistakes along the way in the road of making new but still good flavors of potato chips (we’re looking at you, Lay’s) it’s important to highlight the daring attempts to enhance our saturated fat potato whispers with flavors that might not be as popular as your cheddar and sour cream ruffles, but which still are delicious and worth celebrating.
Let’s get started with the potato chip that clearly was made just so we’d write nice things about it.
Burts Guinness Potato Chips
We know what you’re thinking. “Eww, wait, you actually like this? How are you not imagining potato chips soaked in Guinness to the point of getting soggy?” to which we’d respond, you say that like it’s a bad thing, and you clearly haven’t found a good dive bar that gives out free potato chips. Now, these chips are only made to taste like Guinness, and as far as we can tell don’t have alcohol, which knocks them down a peg, but we’d still eat a nice, Guinness-accentuated bag of thick cut potato chips any day. Apparently, they’re pretty good, and are actually seasoned with roasted barley and hops, which means it’s probably more beer-like than a Budweiser at least. While they’re sold in grocery stores in the United Kingdom, you could get them shipped to America for the low price of…
Jesus Christ, $50 for 20 bags? Hell no, these are just potato chips, not a damn textbook. Okay, welp, looks like we’re not going to get a chance to see if this one is as good as people are saying, because that’s absurd.
Ruffles Deep Ridged Classic Hot Wings Potato Chips
Philosophically, many of you might have an issue with meat-flavored-not-meat-things. We can understand the consternation. Everyone who eats meat finds it delicious, and everyone who does not eat meat can get the hell off of our site and out of our lives ya damn hippies. If you asked us, “What’s the best part of meat” we’d probably respond “the fact that it is made out of meat.” That means that making a meatless food to taste like meat through a combination of seasoning, chemicals and, presumably, ancient voodoo rituals might serve as a fool’s errand. The hubris of Icarus, whose wax wings melted when he flew too close to the grill.
But, just like barbeque as a potato flavor exists in a different realm than barbequed meat as a flavor we know in the real world, so too do meat-flavored potato chips escape our ire, because we know, deep down, that a hot wing flavored potato chip will not taste like an actual hot wing, it will taste like “um…spicy sauce and umami? MSG and salted potatoes? Really good after a few beers?” All of these are good things! As an added bonus—apparently these chips contain chicken fat, chicken broth and “chicken powder” which is probably ground-up bones mixed up with one of those ramen seasoning packets, but hey, that’s enough to make this one of the rare non-vegetarian-friendly chips out there, which we find almost as hilarious as the fact that “enough chicken to disqualify this as a vegetarian food” is lower on the ingredient list than “yeast extract” and “monosodium glutamate.”
Oh, shut up, potato chips are delicious and if you thought they were just made out of potatoes, oil, salt, and the labor of a satisfied and fairly-paid workforce, you’ve got to learn to accept that you’re in the real world and just be thankful we’ve not started putting spiders or something in there as a filler yet. Anyway, meat potato chips. Get on board.
Herr’s Kansas City Prime Steak Flavor Potato Chips
The marketplace has seen various potato chips flavored like steak in the past few years, ranging from a limited edition Ruffles that was probably-if-we’re-being-honest-better-than-the-Herr’s-brand to a Dutch Crunch chip that could only be found in about five states, but we’ve been left with Herr’s Kansas City Steak potato chips as our sole representative of the steak-as-potato-chips movement, and dammit, we want to talk about the steak-as-potato-chip movement. Steak flavored chips need to exist more often. For those of you poopooing the idea, remember, these don’t taste like steak. They taste like somewhat meaty salt crunches. If that flavor doesn’t appeal to you, then we highly doubt that you’d like most potato chips. These chips don’t even try to put steak in there, they just list “natural flavors” and, presumably, “lies” on their ingredient list to account for the vaguely meaty taste the chips acquire.
The only downside we can find about this chip? That each limited edition steak chip apparently tasted better. And we’re not going to spend $35 to get a dozen 7.5 ounce bags of chips unless they’re filled with diamond dust. So, you know, Ruffles? Feel free to bring back your steak chips. We’d buy them.
Cape Cod Roasted Garlic and Red Pepper Potato Chips
Oh wait what the actual fuck. Yes, roasted garlic and red pepper potato chips sound like they’d be delicious. And not even the regular “I know this is awful for me but goddamn it my body craves a salty snack” kind of delicious that potato chips strive for, these look actively fancy-delicious. But $160 bucks for twelve small bags? And shipping isn’t even including? Amazon can fuck right the hell off.
Who’s Your Daddy Bacon Potato Chips
Here we have a non-mass-produced potato chip that was sold for $5 a bag back in 2010. We don’t think that it exists anymore, which might be the saddest thing we’ve had to write all week. Damn. Come back, Who’s Your Daddy. If you look closely enough you can see there are actual bacon bits on some of the chips. We’d easily pay five bucks for that, we’d not even question it. “Here’s a $20, gimme gimme gimme” we’d say, and then we’d wake up with swollen bellies and grease-stained shirts. But some dreams are too beautiful for this world.
As it stands, the closest flavor we have to this majesty exists in the form of Kettle Brand’s Maple Bacon, which we guess we’d try, though we’re not at all thrilled about the sweetness of maple being added to a savory potato chip. But, Kettle at least knows how to make things up to us by providing us with this final gem.
Kettle Brand Cheddar Beer Potato Chips
Cheddar beer Kettle Chips thankfully do not cost a car insurance payment to procure. Would we spend $30 for fifteen bags of potato chips? Eh, that’s a bit steep…but when that chip tastes like beer and cheese, then get the fuck out of our way, internet, we’re going to buy all of it all of it. Even outside of the general fact that anything involving cheddar and beer automatically gets a rave review from AFFotD staffers, potato chip logic dictates that, for whatever reason, thick and savory soup flavors and potato chip flavors go together surprisingly well. Chili cheese? Yes please. Loaded baked potato? Shut up, we know that loaded baked potatoes exist outside of soup, but it’s a great soup flavor too. Broccoli cheddar? Okay, well that doesn’t exist, but it totally should, we don’t care what you say.
But really, why are we still justifying this flavor? We made our point very succinctly when we typed out those bold words that said “cheddar beer potato chips” and then you all ran out to the streets to buy out every store that stocks this brand, and burn the ones that don’t to the ground. We know that’s what most of our staff is doing right the hell now. There’s no time to pay! It’s not looting if it’s about something delicious! Get out there, America! Do it!
