When they eat the Old Dutch, that's them crunching

Old Dutch chips come courtesy of our Mud Duck neighbors to the west in Minnesota. Suburban Twin Cities, to be more specific. Roseville to be exact. And the friendly folks offer salt and vinegar chips, of the kettle variety. As I get older, it seems that more and more things trigger memories and I have good ones of eating Old Dutch chips as a kid. And this despite growing up in Chicago where Jay's were my local favorite. (And still are, truth be told.) I also have more melancholy ones as my father bought me a bag of their dill pickle chips for our drive when moving him down south not too long before his death. Who'd have thunk that humble pieces of fried potatoes could be so fraught with memories?

Speaking of memories, you might recall that in my previous S&V chip review I learned that the kettle preparation involves frying oil temperature, namely, starting on the cooler side and gradually turning it up just like in the Tale of the Boiling Frog. This method causes starch to get into the potato cell walls making them rigid and your chips extra crispy.

Shortly after writing that review, I heard about a scientific experiment involving how potato chip crunch affects our perceptions of tastiness done by a gastrophysicist named Charles Spence.

In 2003, Spence decided to investigate the sonic appeal of chips in a formal setting. To keep a semblance of control, he selected Pringles, which are baked uniformly—a single Pringle doesn't offer any significant difference in size, thickness, or crunch from another. He asked 20 research subjects to bite into 180 Pringles (about two cans) while seated in a soundproof booth in front of a microphone. The sound of their crunching was looped back into a pair of headphones.

After consuming the cans, they were asked if they perceived any difference in freshness or crispness from one Pringle to another. What they didn’t know was that Spence had been playing with the feedback in their headphones, raising or lowering the volume of their noisy crunching [PDF]. At loud volumes, the chips were reported to be fresher; chips ingested while listening at low volume were thought to have been sitting out longer and seemed softer. The duplicitous sounds resulted in a radical difference in chip perception. It may have been a small study, but in the virtually non-existent field of sonic chip research, it was groundbreaking.

Now there's a career!

Mr. McGuire: I want to say three words to you. Just three words.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Sonic chip research.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in potato chips. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Now, I haven't exact tried to replicate Spence's research but think about it. How do you perceive soggy potato chips? As defective? Will you think about it?

As one would expect with a kettle chip these Dutch Crunchers were indeed very crunchy. The label says they were fried in sunflower and/or canola oil, which both seem to be common oils for potato chips. It's also common for chip makers to not have the ability to tell you what kind of oil was actually used. I wonder why this is. Whichever variety is cheaper at a certain time? Can Redditors mess with canola oil futures and push the price of potato chips up to $10/bag?

I found these to be light and crisp and to have a pleasant middle of the road vinegar tang. This means that it is considered an extreme food in its native Minnesota where Norwegian-Americans recoil from anything spicier than melted butter. The chips registered a bit less on the saltiness scale and they had a nice potato flavor - earthy and a little sweet.

These were very tasty chips.