Eating seasonally was once a fact of life for humanity but I’d bet that most Americans can barely understand the concept today. I mean truly understand it, not just have the expectation of a plethora of products imbued with some combination of nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and clove come the autumn. You no longer have to wait until fall for apples because your local supermarket has them year-round. No one in Wisconsin is restricted to eating fresh strawberries in June because we can get our hands on them whenever we please. Thanks to advances in food preservation and transportation, “in season” no longer means that the fruits and vegetables in your area are ripe for the picking, but rather that they are at their cheapest and, perhaps, best quality.
As I alluded to above, I suspect that, for many, eating seasonally is about the consumption of pumpkin spice this and that in the fall. What started as a latte flavoring has spread to divers processed foods including breakfast cereals, Spam, yoghurt, candies, cookies, and so on. I became resigned to the inevitabity that potato chips would succumb to pumpkin spice madness and, when I saw the orange Kettle Brand bag and “Limited Batch” emblazoned on it just below a leaf, I figured its time had come.
But reading on, I was mighty pleased to see that these autumnal chips were not laced with nutmeg or cinnamon, but rather with apple cider vinegar. Not only had the Kettle folks defied convention by eschewing the dreaded pumpkin spice route, but they had created a salt & vinegar chip instead. Furthermore, I spied this snack during its appointed season so credit to Kettle once again for not prematurely releasing a fall seasonal around Memorial Day, an affliction of craft beer brewers.
I would have sworn that I have reviewed a salt & vinegar chip here that was made with apple cider vinegar but I cannot find any evidence of having done so.
Your basic salt & vinegar chip relies on the sharp tang of acetic acid and whatever other acids the manufacturer puts on their chips plus other flavorings such as lactose or another kind of sugar. Fairly rare are chips that use another type of vinegar.
Malt vinegar seems to be the most common alternative to the plain white stuff or pure, unadulterated acetic acid. Having been prepared from barley and perhaps other grains, it has some of the flavor of the cereals. Wine vinegars have some of the taste of the grape juice from which it was made and so cider vinegar tastes a bit like apple juice.
Apples and their juice apparently contain a lot of malic acid and so cider vinegar undergoes another type of fermentation in addition to main yeasty one. In this bonus act, Leuconostoc oenos bacteria nom on the malic acid turning it into lactic acid which is less sour. Ergo apple cider vinegar is a bit mellower than the white stuff in addition to containing appley flavors and whatever other ones Leuconostoc oenos comes up with.
Now whether any of these pomaceous subtleties will come through in a powder on a potato chip is unknown so let’s try these puppies out.
These chips are cut thicker than normal and are nicely spotted with brown giving them a more well-done appearance than usual. Sticking my nose into the bag, I find that it smells mainly of oil but with a nice dose of potato as well. Catching a whiff of vinegar requires getting all up close and personal with the chips.
As expected from the Kettle Brand brand, the chips had a big crunch to them. They went easy on the salt (Note they’re Apple Cider Vinegar, not Salt & Apple Cider Vinegar.) but there was no lack of Maillardy goodness here as the potatoes had a rich and toasty flavor plus they had a nice creaminess to them. While the apple cider vinegar was really tasty with its mellow fruity notes, I felt the Kettle folks used a light touch in applying the magic vinegar powder. More please!
Very good chips but hopefully there will be more vinegar in next year’s batch.
No comments:
Post a Comment