Tuberous Connections: Avocado Oil Malt Vinegar & Sea Salt Kettle Style Potato Chips by Boulder Canyon

Back in 1968 or so a certain English bluesy/jazzy kind of band with a singer who played flute on one leg were christened "Jethro Tull". In those early days the group's name was constantly changing in an effort to land gigs and, in a cruel act of fate, the one that stuck was that of an agronomist of some note who lived from 1674-1741. For their part, the band members were not particularly happy with such an unhip name but it was the one giving them work. Ten years later they were much more at ease with the moniker and recorded Heavy Horses, an album about English rural life including a large dose of farming.

Some 40 years later a deluxe version of the album was released with unreleased songs dragged kicking and screaming from the dusty vaults. Amongst those songs was "Horse-Hoeing Husbandry", which was also the name of the name of Jethro Tull the agronomist's book describing one of his inventions – the horse drawn hoe. Tull's invention apparently made the lives of farmers much easier as it did a swell job of breaking up the soil and bringing up weeds.

Tull worked on methods to cultivate the potato and helped promote root vegetables generally, a worthy endeavor indeed. Staying in the British Isles, only moving a bit west to Ireland, but fast forwarding to the mid-1950s, we come to Joe "Spud" Murphy. He was the owner of an Irish potato chip, er, crisp, company called Tayto and he apparently grew weary of crisps seasoned only with salt. Tayto ultimately figured out how to season them and changed the world forever when he introduced cheese & onion seasoned crisps. Salt & vinegar soon followed.

My guess is that Tayto used the tried-and-true method of spraying vinegar onto a food starch such as maltodextrin, drying it, before finally making it into a powder suitable for putting onto crisps. Now we cross the Irish Sea and fast forward again to 1968 when a Canadian food scientist named Jim Connell was in England on assignment. His mission changed to inventing a new way of seasoning salt & vinegar crisps and he did so. He invented sodium diacetate, a mix of sodium acetate and acetic acid, the latter being the tangy part of vinegar.

Moving ahead 10 years, Jethro Tull the band were out touring the United States in support of their Heavy Horses album and on 7 November they played the McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado. Our final fast forward takes us ahead 16 years and 25 miles or so outside of Denver to Boulder where Boulder Canyon, maker of malt vinegar & sea salt chips fried in avocado oil was founded.

I have previously reviewed a different iteration of these chips. However, that was almost 16 years ago and those were not fried in avocado oil.

These chips are "Canyon Cut", i.e. – ripple cut, something I don't recall having run into before on the salt & vinegar trails, even the cousins of these chips. They smelled like potatoes and oil but, if I took a really deep sniff, I caught a little vinegar. They are "kettle style" but you'd be hard pressed to know this without reading it on the bag as they possessed only a little of the kettle crunch.

For my taste, these were a bit saltier than the last couple brands I've tried but there were by no means overly salty. The malt vinegar taste was really good but also rather weak. You'd think a ripple cut chip would have more surface area to accommodate vinegar dust. For their part, the potatoes had a really nice, earthy taste that was less sweet than the previous few chips I've sampled.

I'll be honest here and say that I do not know what frying in avocado oil is supposed to bring to the table. Will it give chips fried in it a distinctive taste, even if it's not strong? Or is avocado oil in some way "healthier"? I guess I need to do more research into frying oils.

As with many other brands, Boulder Canyon's chips taste good – I really like the potato flavor – but simply need more vinegar tang.