It's been a while since I've found a new salt & vinegar potato chip. Apparently I've sampled all of the brands on offer here in Madison. Well, until a shopkeeper somewhere starts carrying a new one.
Such is the case with Lillie's Q Hot Pepper Vinegar Kettle-Cooked chips. I ran into them last year on a visit to Meat People Butcher (a rather ominous name that sounds like it's from an alien cookbook) having never heard of them previously. Lillie's Q is the brain child of Chef Charlie McKenna who caught the BBQ bug from his grandmother Lillie. He grew up and had his taste for BBQ molded in Greenville, South Carolina. But before you start getting images of gentlemen dressed like Tom Wolfe and ladies holding parasols in one hand and mint juleps in the other, know that McKenna's base of operations is apparently Chicago. He has a restaurant there which looks to be in the West Loop, one of the city's trendier neighborhoods, so, instead of well-dressed Southern gentry, we're talking people in Bears shirts. The chips' package indicates that Lillie's Q has a Chicago address though the chips themselves are packaged (and presumably made) by the Great Lakes Potato Chip Company in Michigan whose comestibles I've encountered previously.
The Lillie's Q brand is, unsurprisingly, all about trading in on Southern traditions. The chips' webpage proclaims that hot pepper vinegar is a staple in Southern kitchens. That may be but I don't recall seeing it on my ventures down South. At least not with a frequency that would make it a staple. Hell, maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Regardless, I recall looking at the bag for the first time thinking, "I love salt & vinegar. I love hot peppers. How is it that I've not seen this flavor combination on a potato chip before?!"
Now that I think about it, I can't say I've ever seen salt & vinegar paired with any other flavor on a chip beyond potato. What else would you add to a salt & vinegar chip? I put vinegar on greens but I am unsure how well collard green powder would go on a thin slice of deep friend potato. My guess is that some kind of Carolina BBQ sauce chip would be a good fit. They have some kind of sauce out there that uses a lot of vinegar to make it tangy instead of letting sweetness run amok. How about a sour cream and onion and salt and vinegar chip? I mean, the sour cream has a bit of the sour - a cousin to the vinegar tang - but its mellow fatty/dairy smoothness stands as a nice counterpoint to all of the acidulous tastes. I think you could also get away with something a bit simpler like just adding a touch of rosemary to your salt & vinegar chips.
My consulting services are available to any chipwrights out there for a nominal fee.
So let's get to Lillie's Q chips.
They were cut a bit thicker than your average chip and I saw what appeared to be traces of skin on some of them. Color was uniform and I don't recall seeing many blemishes.
These chips smelled really good. The first thing my nose noticed was a big, clean oily aroma which was followed by a modicum of vinegar zestiness and a little chili piquancy.
The bag says that these chips were kettle-cooked and they had the requisite crunch. Vinegar tang was middle of the road, for my taste, and I found the chili flavor to be about the same. You have to eat more than a few to feel any of that fine capsicum burn. But there is something to be said for keeping the flavors balanced instead of letting any one of them dominate your tongue. The oil here had a nice clean taste, as if these chips were bathed in fryers full of virgin sunflower and/or canola oil, that stood apart from the potato. I found the potatoes to have a nice earthy sweetness to them that leaned towards the sweet, perhaps because of the thicker slicing.
While Lillie's Q strove to bring a Southern twist to these chips, I honestly was reminded of the late, great Wah Kee, a Chinese noodle restaurant here in Madison that closed in 2019. Their lo mein dishes served in broth were exquisite and I miss them to this day. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better gustatory antidote to the chill of winter. And Wah Kee had bottles of chili vinegar on every table which was perfect for dumplings with it's mild vinegar bite and easy going chili taste.
While I normally prefer a bit more vinegar and chili flavor, I thoroughly enjoyed the restrained balance of those tastes here. And that fresh oil flavor topped things off perfectly.
On my most recent trip to Meat People, I found plenty of potato chips from Lillie's Q but no Hot Pepper Vinegar. Hopefully they'll return soon.
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