Over the years, I have tried countless varieties of "cracked pepper" flavor potato chips. I love the taste and smell of coarsely cracked black peppercorns, and it has long been a quest of mine to find a truly good Cracked Pepper potato chip. But for some reason, not a single one of the major chip brands I've tried - and that includes Cape Cod, Utz, Herr's, Boulder, you name it - not one makes a black pepper chip that isn't loaded up with a bunch of other crap. There's always whey powder, or garlic flavoring, or torula yeast, or who knows what else along with the pepper. And the other flavors always overwhelm the pepper flavor and make the chips taste like some kind of bastardized dried soup mix. I had almost given up on finding the ideal cracked pepper chip.
But then, at Ocean State Job Lot, I found Good Health brand Olive Oil Potato Chips in cracked pepper flavor, and finally found the chip I had been looking for. Potatoes kettle-cooked in 100% olive oil, salt, and cracked black pepper, and that's it.
Hot damn, these chips are incredible. I kind of expected an olive-oil-fried chip to be kind of heavy, but they're not. They've got just the right amount of salt and they're generously seasoned with black pepper. When you open the bag, the rich and fruity smell of cracked pepper rises to your nose completely unhindered by unwanted odors. The chips are fresh-tasting with lots of kettle-cooked crunch and bold black pepper flavor accompanied by black pepper burn.
Seriously, there is only one question here: GREAT potato chip or GREATEST potato chip?
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I was once on the same quest, looking for a good black pepper potato chip. Like you, I tried a number of brands. Mostly I found the flavor of pepper to be underwhelming. One day, at work, I bought a brand out of a vending machine. Poore Brothers Salt & Cracked Pepper. I was so hooked I bought them by the crate from the factory. These were consistently good with lots of pepper flavor. The company has gone through some changes and the last bag I was able to find had lost much of it's signature pepper flavor. I hope they didn't change the recipe and that maybe I just had an "off" bag.
ReplyDeleteThose look so good! Have you tried their avocado oil chips? I want to, but I'm worried that they won't taste like enough avocado...sigh.
ReplyDeleteJess - you might be right - at http://www.grubgrade.com/2009/08/04/snack-review-good-health-natural-products/ (scroll down), Ryan says the avocado taste doesn't carry over.
ReplyDeleteAs for the black pepper and sea salt chips, I like 'em too, but would like them more if they eased off the black pepper just a little. They went a bit crazy with it. But Dave would probably disagree. :)
Also love their regular olive oil chips and wrote a short blurb of them on my blog. Very hard not to eat the whole bag.
Olive oil is perfect for chips, or for homemade oven fries.
ReplyDeleteI love the peppery flavour of these natural chips.
I also had a kind of nasty natural paprika chips from an other company..yuck..salty, greasy...so salty and sharp in an unkindly way you needed buckets of water for your thirst.
Wish they would be available more often where I live