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.