Something Old, Something New, Something Blue: Old Dutch Salt'N Vinegar Potato Chips

While it is certainly true that I do not want for salt & vinegar chips, I do find it odd that some brands don't offer the flavor. For instance, the beloved chip of my youth, Jays, does not. However, since they make those paprika-laced Hot Stuff chips that burn my tongue just perfectly, I can't complain. Too much anyway. Old Dutch offers salt & vinegar kettle chips, as we have seen, but they have never sold their regular chips with the precious flavor. Until now.

It happened when I was at the supermarket in the early spring. I was making my way down one of the main aisles when I noticed an end cap display of chips. I always look at them and always see the same flavors yet I still inspect them every time. This time as I am perusing the shelves when I see a deep turquoise bag that looks blatantly unfamiliar. Had those wily Minnesotans finally made lutefisk chips? Nope. I stood there agog as I read "Salt'N Vinegar" on the bag and thought to myself, "I can't believe those bastards finally did it." A new salt & vinegar chip and I didn't even have to leave my neighborhood to find it.

Considering they already had a salt & vinegar chip in their portfolio, I wonder why Old Dutch added another. Did someone in the marketing department have an epiphany that they could innovate by making a pivot from sour cream & onion and leverage their existing salt & vinegar chip infrastructure to take it to the next level?

Let us find out what these shiny, new chips are all about.

As I've noted before, most salt & vinegar potato chips don't smell of vinegar. Usually I smell oil and potato and in that order. While I could not smell any vinegar, the order of smells was reversed here as these chips had a subdued oil aroma with the potato taking pride of place in the olfactory realm. As is the norm, I could smell a hint of vinegar if I put my nose right on a chip and took a big whiff.

The first thing I noticed after grabbing a handful for testing purposes was just how many large chips there were. It was impressive that so many of them survived packing, transit, and being put on a shelf without being reduced to smaller, less breakable shards. Once I had gotten over the size, I noticed that they seemed to be of a slightly darker yellow hue than is normal with scattered brown spots. I am unsure if they were cooked longer or if perhaps there were more sugars present to get that almost golden color.

I found these to be just a touch saltier than average and I liked how the typical regular chip crispness veered towards kettle crunchiness. The vinegar tang was really odd with these chips. When eating them, my tongue detected a medium-light bit of sourness which left me wanting more. And when I indulged, I found that my lips started to tingle even though my tongue wasn't registering dangerous levels of vinegar as I'd expect. This happened at different times so I don't think it was my tongue.

They finished with a sweet earthiness – these chips have lactose and dextrose.

I posit that we have here chips that are in the top 2 of all time for texture. I loved the crunchy crispness. Less thrillingly, they tasted sweeter than their kettle counterparts and less sour too. I will definitely try them again because I am flummoxed at the vinegar irritating my lips (in a good way) but not my tongue.

"We've Got Those Desert Blues" playlist

What we have here is the playlist for episode 23 of the Time Enough At Last podcast which I do with my pal Old Man Schuck. It's called "We've Got Those Desert Blues" and features:

"I Got Drunk (Live)" - Uncle Tupelo
"The Voyeur (I Like to Watch) (Live)" - Fish
"Tzenni (Live)" - Noura Mint Seymali
"Eguetmar" - Noura Mint Seymali
"Tzenni" - Noura Mint Seymali
"Soub Hanallah" - Noura Mint Seymali
"El Mougelmen" - Noura Mint Seymali
"Political World" - Carolina Chocolate Drops

Time Enough At Last Episode 23: We've Got Those Desert Blues

It's been a while as I've been dealing with some home remodeling/asbestos concerns but back we are with a new episode. And we've got the desert blues!

Old Man Schuck is happy that school is back in session in Stoughton but less thrilled with the impending invasion by Starbucks. I note some of the latest construction changing the face of Madison. Well, this was a month ago so it's not really the latest news anymore. This leads to a b*tch session on how State Street just isn't fun anymore. That is, it is losing/has lost its 1990s vibe as venerable local businesses leave and human-scaled buildings are replaced by 10+ story ones.

We proceed to talk Madison dive bars before running down what we've been streaming lately. We finish with a review of Tzenni, the album by Mauritanian griot Noura Mint Seymali.

The Corona Diaries Vol 13: Vernal Musings

March 2021

I have been consuming Chicago-related media lately. The Frau and I watched Judas and the Black Messiah recently.

It's a movie about Fred Hampton and William O'Neal. As you can imagine, it was a very intense story and it featured some wonderful performances. I don't know a whole lot about Hampton and I’m sure the film took many liberties with the historical record, but it was still a great watch.

I will admit to being taken out of the story a few times when street scenes just didn't look like Chicago. Later I discovered that it was shot primarily in Cleveland.

The other bit of Chicago entertainment lately is the impending release of season 2 of Bronzeville, a radio drama set in 1940s Bronzeville, Chicago.

When it premiered a couple of years ago, Laurence Fishburne was the only lead actor whose name I recognized. It's a lot of fun with characters trying to get by. Some are involved in the underground lottery while others go the straight route. There's racism, corrupt cops, and just plain human drama.

I am planning on listening to season 1 again in preparation for the new episodes.

********

About this time last year I figured that I had reached a certain age and income level and thought it was the appropriate time to commission a piece of stained glass. Besides, I thought, the people who makes stained glass could probably use a boost with everything being closed and the pandemic building in strength. So I hired a woman named Kristy at The Vinery. It was finally finished in December – I guess they weren't hard up for work, after all – and I recently hung it in one of my windows.

The Green Man is highly appropriate here in the early days of spring. I am looking forward there being some leaves in the tree outside this window for extra green. In a couple weeks or so I will be getting a new cat tree that I'll place beneath it so that our cats can take in some fresh air and enjoy the view of the birds building a nest just out of reach of their sharp and highly dangerous claws.

Hopefully the Frau and I will be able to get to England sometime soon where we will tour a church or two that have some Green Man architectural ornaments. Plus I'd like to pretend that I remember more than a couple bits of trivia from those medieval church lectures I attended. I will dazzle the Frau with my commentary – "Here we are in the narthex!" and "Let's have a seat on one of these here misericords." Afterwards we can retire for an ale at a pub called The Green Man. I understand that they exist outside of movies like The Wicker Man.

My wanderlust has been stoked this month by a couple podcasts. Two weeks or so ago we got a few inches of snow. While shoveling, I was listening to an episode of the Ideas podcast from the Canadian Broadcasting Company called "I Travel Therefore I Am: The Philosophy of Travel". It was hard not to dream about being somewhere else as I cleared the sidewalks of what will hopefully prove to be the last snow of the season. There was a lot about travel broadening the mind and the like discussed. Not long after this another podcast I like, The Medievalist Podcast, had an episode called Travel in the Middle Ages which only made my desire to hop on a plane more intense.

I suspect this is why I've been drinking English style beers lately. A friend of mine who spent time in London during his college years adores their ales so we are always on the lookout for a fine mild or bitter. Or porter, for that matter. He lent me his City Walks: London cards and I've been looking over them lately.

There are 50 cards in the set and they each describe a walking tour of an area of London. They're 4"x6" and you get a map on one side and a description of the walk with nearest Tube station locations on the other. Pretty neat.

But since London is still on the back burner, the Frau and I are planning on going to the Upper Peninsula this summer. We'll be staying at a hotel called the Fitzgerald on the shores of Lake Superior. Plus we'll be down in Chicagoland as well in 2021.

I took a day off in the middle of this week and did a little walking. On my trek at the Acewood Conservation Park, I saw a smattering of mallards and lot of Canada geese.

I also spied a robin but failed to get a snap. I heard red-winged black birds but didn't see any. They all appeared to be high up in the trees and I didn't have my binoculars.

I then went to another conservation park – Heritage Sanctuary - nearby that I'd never been to. The trails were covered in snow but the rest had mostly melted.

The story goes that, when the area was being developed in the early 70s, a neighborhood gardening club petitioned to save some of the wooded area. It is renowned for its trove of trilliums so I intend to return in couple months as they are in full bloom in May or so says the Internet.

I saw a red bellied woodpecker on my walk but was an epic failure at trying to get a photograph.

On my way home I went by the Alexander Smith House which is only a couple miles from us. I've always known it was old as it sits on a large lot and, well, it looks like an old house. But it was only recently that I learned that it was built in 1850.

The Frau is going to Nordstrom today with a friend and it looks like it's going to reach the 60s so it's a good bet I'll be going out on a bike ride.

The bonus photo this time is of some life-sized Minecraft figures in someone's yard down the street from us. Minecraft is a video game. The youngest was totally enamored of it when he was young.

Chipsy ziemniaczane: Tom's Vinegar & Salt

I believe I noted in one of my last potato chip reviews that I'd exhausted all of my usual sources for salt & vinegar goodness and would need to look further afield for new veins of that gustatory goodness. Well, I recently took a trip north in search of Polish cuisine with a friend of mine and we stopped at that gas station at the intersection of Highway 12 and County K. I ostensibly went in to grab a bottle of iced tea but I made a pass through the snack aisle just in case and hot damn tamales, Ahab! There was a new brand. And it was priced fairly too.

Tom's are distributed by "S-L Snacks National, LLC" according to the bag. This appears to be some business arm of Snyder's-Lance, Inc. The Snyder's bit there comes from Snyder's of Hanover, the Pennsylvania pretzel experts who made the tragic mistake of discontinuing what was likely the best hard pretzel in all the land, their pumpernickel sticks.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Snyder's-Lance, I see they are the second largest "salty snack maker" in the United States and responsible for some of the salt & vinegar chips I've eaten: Kettle Brand, Cape Cod Potato Chips, and Late July Snacks. They even now own the Jays brand which was formerly a Chicago company upon whose chips I grew up on. Sad. S-L is a subsidiary of Campbell Soup Company. Good god! With all of the subsidiaries within subsidiaries and brands that are just names on paper I feel like Jim Garrison in JFK getting lectured by Mr. X. Cui bono?!

As I mentioned earlier, my friend and I were on a trip to get Polish food. Our destination was Andy's Meats up by Endeavor. It's the slaughterhouse arm of Chicago's Andy's Deli & Mikolajczyk Sausage Shop. There's an outlet store there with a healthy selection of foods Polish and a meat counter. Lots of great kielbasa, bread, dry goods, frozen pierogi, and, because it was just a few days before Easter, there was babka to be had as well.

With Polish food on my mind, I started wondering what kind of potato chips one finds in Poland. A little searching brought me to the Closet Chipsin' blog which features potato chips from around the world. Here are a couple of the flavors in the Polish category that caught my attention.

Mushrooms, paprika, and bacon are all popular ingredients in Eastern European recipes so I am not surprised at all by these chip flavors.

So how were Tom's chips?

I have to admit that I am surprised at how infrequently I can actually smell vinegar on salt & vinegar chips. These smelled like potatoes and oil. I was able to smell a trace of vinegar if I put my nose right on top of a chip. They looked uniformly cooked with no outlandish color variation.

These chips had a nice uniform crispness to them – no kettle chips here – and they tasted just slightly saltier than normal. Not like a salt lick, just a tad more saline. I was impressed by a medium-strong tartness that was pleasingly piquant. It also featured a lemony flavor but it was not strong. Sugar is on the ingredients list so I wasn't surprised at the slight sweetness that accompanied the earthy potato flavor.

Tom's chips were a wonderful surprise with flavors that are a bit brawnier overall with a firm tartness and a little more salt. And that hint of citrus added a nice complexity to the flavor was has been unique thus far in my salt & vinegar travels.

Highly recommended.