We'll go down to Traverse City: Bold Sea Salt & Vinegar Potato Chips by Great Lakes Potato Chip Co.

The Great Lakes Potato Chip Co. is in Traverse City, Michigan. Whenever I see "Traverse City", I immediately think of Warren Zevon's Transverse City album and picture a futuristic scenario with neon vistas and laser lights ablaze as street corner Jerry Garcia holograms play the solo from the title track. But Traverse City does not look like it came out of Blade Runner and, when I visited there many years ago, it was an average-looking but quite nice small city on the shores of Lake Michigan. (We're talking lower Michigan all you map averse coasties.)

I found my bag of Great Lakes' Bold Sea Salt & Vinegar chips at Jenifer Street Market. From my experience, it's the only grocery store in Madison to carry them but it's not like I have shopped for salt and vinegar potato chips at them all. Seeing "Bold" on the bag made me feel rather sanguine after the Late July chips and their paucity of vinegar taste.

Allow me to go on a brief tangent here.

Several years ago, I was involved in an online debate with someone who wanted the City of Madison to ban plastic grocery bags outright. Part of this person's argument was that they were made with oil and, since the use of oil is bad, the argument went, plastic bags were also bad. Q.E.D., right? Well, I poked around and found that plastic bags are generally made from natural gas and not oil. This revelation did not change my interlocutor's mind on the issue but it introduced me to the idea that natural gas has utility beyond being lit aflame for heat.

I was reminded of this recently when I discovered that you can use it to make white vinegar. Pure alcohol can be synthesized from natural gas which, in turn, is fermented into the stuff that cleans coffeemakers, that pickles live in, and is made into dust for putting on potato chips. However, it seems that vinegar makers use natural gas as a vinegar starter very infrequently.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I gleefully opened my bag of Bold Sea Salt & Vinegar chips and took a whiff. They smelled like fryer oil. There are worse things to smell like, I grant you, but I was rather hoping to smell potato and/or vinegar. Was this a function of the type of oil(s) used? Is sunflower oil more aromatic than canola oil? Did something go wrong with the frying process?

These chips were sliced a bit more thickly than normal. They had a bit more crunch than delicate crispness to them. As with the last few brands of chips I've sampled, restraint was used in the application of salt. Truthfully, I am becoming a bigger fan of this. Here, it allowed a really nice, sweet potato flavor to shine through. Unfortunately, I did not find these chips to be bold. Instead, they had a rather timid vinegar flavor. Not bad, mind you, just lacking. Maybe the "Bold" referred to something else.

Although their salt & vinegar chips aren't bold enough for me, I am interested in trying their Michigan Cherry BBQ chips. Michigan leads the nation in cherry production and the Traverse City area is Montmorency Central. Sounds like a tasty, regional treat.