The Chip Quest of Unknown Brands: Deep River Sea Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips

And here I thought that I'd exhausted my salt & vinegar potato chip options in Madison and was resigned to either going out of town to seek out new chips or wade into the world of alternative salt & vinegar snacks like almonds and plantains. Truth be known, I have seen baked salt & vinegar potato chips but those just don't seem right. I mean, my tongue can be tempted according to nature or against nature. And it is not of the latter disposition. If you ascertain my meaning.

I made a visit to the Jenifer Street Market and noticed a new brand – Deep River. They came into view after I turned away from a shelf of bags that claim to hold the strongest coffee in all of Christendom. I looked the other way and there were Deep River snacks at the end of the adjacent aisle. Their chips may have been in that end cap for months with me simply being oblivious to it or it may genuinely not have been there the last time I came a-huntin' and a-gatherin' for the Precious. I hope for the latter.

I am quite unfamiliar with Deep River never having eaten their snacks previously. As I write their website has been down a few days and they stopped using Twitter in 2018 so we'll forgo company bio though I'll note they donate 10% of their profits to charity and wonder if this company exists anymore. Maybe they were bought by venture capital and were driven out of business.

The brand is named after the Connecticut town where the company is/was headquartered. Pictures of it show a quaint New England town – just like in all of those H.P. Lovecraft tales so you know that some horror lurks beneath the surface. These photos don't show many Deep Ones, er, Deep River dwellers which makes me wonder if they perhaps have narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes. The town is not far from Lovecraft's Providence. Hmmm…

On the ingredients label I noticed cane sugar. Now, I'm no food chemist but, when I see sugar used on salt & vinegar chips, I get suspicious. It's not unreasonable to think that the sugar is for something like enhancing color or some such thing but I instinctively assume it's to take the edge off of the vinegar tang.

I opened the bag and stuck my nose inside to find an aroma that was mostly oil – maybe a hint of spud. They looked good to me, that is, the color was more or less uniform with perhaps a bit of skin here and there.

These were kettle chips and they were definitely crunchy instead of being crispy. However, some of the chips had what I can best describe as an uneven crunchiness. It's difficult to explain and I fear the best analogy I could muster isn't very good. But here goes: bits had a texture that reminded me of unfried shrimp chips, those pastel-colored snacks you find at Asian grocery stores. Cooked, they're poofy but raw they are kinda thin with a smooth surface and rock hard. While the Deep River chips were not rock hard, they had a texture that was more solid than usual. Kind of like rigid leather but not chewy.

I warned you.

It's not that every chip had this texture but it was more than one. Not necessarily horrible, but oddly distracting.

Other than a nebulous crunch factor, they had a gentle saltiness and, unfortunately, a gentle tang. I've had chips with less vinegar, but Deep River certainly went easy on the acetic acid. There was a little sweetness but it seemed that the aforementioned cane sugar didn't so much add it as enhance the pleasant sweetness of the potatoes themselves. It just brought that flavor up in the mix. And so you get a potato taste that is both earthy and sweet but favors the latter just a tiny bit.

The eldritch texture on some of the chips and the paucity of vinegar were disappointing. But they did not render the chips inedible as my empty bag will attest.