Oh, those chips were so inviting, on the beach at Waikiki: Salt & Vinegar Potato Chips by Trader Joe's

Several of these chip reviews ago I lamented that I had seemingly exhausted the local supply of new salt & vinegar chip brands here in Madison. What a fool I was. (Still are. - ed)

I also noted a review or 2 ago that I am quite parochial when it comes to grocery shopping. Woodman's east is my main source of food although Jenifer Street Market is where I generally buy coffee. I also make an occasional trek to the Willy Street Co-op. But there are plenty of other places at which you can get your grub and, as I've learned, some of these joints have hitherto unknown brands of salt & vinegar chips.

Not too far from home, Meat People Butcher opened fairly recently in the Lake Edge Mall. While it sounds like the name of a cookbook to me, I summoned the courage to go check it out recently. In addition to cuts of beef that I was totally unfamiliar with, they had bags of Lillie's Q Hot Pepper Vinegar Kettle Chips. I am undecided if these qualify for a review here. Should I institute a Reinheitsgebot for potato chips? They're salt and vinegar it's just that the vinegar has been infused with chili goodness. I've already decided not to review Pringles because they're not slices of potato. And I have opted to forego non-potato salt & vinegar snacks like plantains despite plantains being extremely tasty. We shall see…

Another one of these places is Trader Joe's. It didn't even occur to me that there may be tubera incognita there awaiting my eager maw. This is likely because I don't think I've ever so much as stepped foot in a Trader Joe's. Thankfully my Frau has and she kindly brought me a bag of their Salt & Vinegar Potato Chips from her last trek out there.

The bag says these are "Hawaiian Style" but I am not sure what that means. There was no mention of ham nor of pineapple anywhere to be found. And I didn't even notice those words on the side of the bag until I went to take a photo of the it after I'd eaten most of the chips already. They are unpeeled and the bag says they're cut thicker than your average potato chip so maybe those are the criteria.

These chips surprised me with their aroma. Usually, chips smell of oil and potato in that order. These, however, smelled mainly of fried potato. Aside from bits of skin, they were a darker shade of yellow with mostly uniform coloring. If they were in fact sliced more thickly than your average chip, it must have been around a micrometer because they didn't appear to be particularly thick.

The bag indicated these chips were cooked slowly and this, perhaps in concert with a little more girth, definitely made for some kettle crunchiness. Salt was applied moderately while the vinegar tang rated medium to medium-high. What distinguished the flavor was the lemony zip owing to some citric acid. I found these chips had a nice earthy potato taste on the finish.

Overall I found these to be very good chips with a good sour taste from the vinegar and they got a few bonus points for the added citrus sour flavor which made for something novel.