Greetings, dear reader, from the Umbrian countryside where a new country with a new snack aisle has eagerly prepared itself for my discovery. Well, eagerly might be something of an exaggeration. My first two attempts to gain entry to the local snack aisles were thwarted by the sunbaked and slow-paced time-schedule of the Italian countryside. Grocery stores, it turns out, aren’t open from 1-4:30 or after 8.
Never to fear, I eventually gained entry (when I returned during normal business hours), and the result is your inbox’s misfortune, for there are now a great many more snacks reviews deposited therein.
First, for those who missed my first masticatory update, a reminder of the grading scale, based on our longstanding database of restaurant visitation.
Let me begin, though, with two Austrian snacks I hadn’t yet reviewed.
Kelly’s Garlic Potato Chips: 2.5 stars
In my estimation, potato chips are one of the better snack foods. It’s hard to go wrong taking a potato, the world’s greatest food (yes, I’m looking forward to being in Ireland in less than a month) and cutting it to produce the greatest possible amount of surface area before sticking it in a deep fryer. The result is a nice crispy, crunchy rush of deliciousness to which additional flavor can be added if so desired. So what could go wrong with adding another great flavor to the mix? As it turns out, quite a lot!
Garlic is a great flavor. When I make mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving (a responsibility that has been mine for many years now), I am sometimes accused by my family members of putting in too much garlic.1 Nonsense, of course. There’s no such thing! Or so I thought until I tried these chips. The garlic positively overwhelms the potato chip. It’s like biting into a potato-chip-textured bulb of raw garlic, a sensation the packing itself does little to mitigate!
Pringles Sizzlin’ Spicy Chorizo: 3.5 stars
Per the recommendation from a loyal reader of the Grand Adventure (and someone who knows much more about food and has much more refined taste than I do), I was alerted to the different flavors of Pringles sometimes available in other markets. I don’t love Pringles, but I like them enough to buy them on occasion in the US (usually either original or cheddar cheese), so, having struggled a bit with the Kelly’s snacks, I thought I’d give this unfamiliar flavor of Pringles a try.
To my surprise these chorizo-flavored Pringles were actually pretty good. In a just world, they might get a 3.75, but the whole point of arbitrarily classifying things is to arbitrarily classify them, so a 3.5 (good) it is – a 4.0 (very good) is simply not justified. While actually tasting a little bit like chorizo (but not enough to totally put off Gelsey), they also had a nice flavor to them. And, to our immense relief, actually a (very) little bit of a kick. (I’m sure these must be thought to be vindaloo-level spicy by the Austrians.)
Pringles, Pizza: 2.5 stars
Italians certainly love their pizza, evidently enough that “Pizza” was one of 4 flavors available in the tiny supermarket down the street. I wouldn’t have naturally begun with an American product, but the snack aisle was remarkably sparse, and I quickly exhausted the other novelties (more on them below).
Pizza, regrettably, does not live up to its Sizzlin’ Spicy Chorizo cousin. The overwhelming taste is of artificial tomato sauce. I’m not sure I should have expected something much different, but that taste is definitely not one I can imagine most people seeking out. I don’t get anything cheese-like or pizza-dough-like in the flavor.
When we returned hungry from the store, I ate quite a few of these, so I can’t go lower than a 2.5, but given normal appetite levels, they are to be avoided.
Conad Brand Potato Chips, Pepe Rosa e Lima: 4.0 stars
This is a potato chip as it should be, with a strong flavor of potato and carrying some added flavor. In this case, the added flavor bears some elaboration.
The lime part translates well enough (as you can see from the photo), but what is pepe rosa? Pink pepper? As it turns out, sort of. Pepe rose, evidently, refers to the fruit of Schinus Molle, a coniferous tree native to the Peruvian Andes. It did taste of pepper and lime – just like advertised! I see more of these in our future.
Fonzies, Gli Originali: 1.5 stars
I must be honest. I forgot there was a 1.5 star rating available. Surely one wouldn’t need to distinguish too much between “poor” and “very bad,” but here I am dishing out a 1.5-star rating, and, well, it’s totally deserved.
I’m not sure what Fonzies are supposed to be, but I can’t imagine the inventor had that taste in his mind. The first flavor is unmistakably the worst fake cheese flavor I’ve ever tasted (and I recently reviewed Furiosi!). I was at first relieved that this flavor soon acquiesced to the underlying substrate of the snack, but this flavor turned out to be worse.
Fonzies, evidently, are a corn snack. Here, I might note that corn is not a food native to Europe.2 It was domesticated first in Central America (present-day Mexico, specifically) and subsequently more broadly in the Americas. Europeans remained unfamiliar with it until the Columbian Exchange.
Every one of the roughly 10,000 years Europeans have lagged in cultivating and using corn was apparent in this flavor. It tasted, without exaggeration, like pouring a bag of frozen corn out of the bag and directly into one’s mouth. I am not a cow; this was not for me. I haltingly ate a second one to see if, perhaps, I had simply found “a bad one” with my first bite. Alas, no, they are simply bad.
It can’t quite get a 1.0 because it did have one redeeming feature: decent crunch. But it definitely can’t get a 2.0 – it was worse than disappointing. So, 1.5 – bad, it is.
NB, this has, at times, prompted me to ponder the possibility that my relatives are mildly vampirical, but their normal-sized incisors and lack of noticeable bloodthirsting has, for the time being, caused me to rule out this otherwise most likely explanation for their trepidation about my potatoes’ garlickiness.
So, it should be noted, is the potato. But Europeans seem to have far less of an issue with that.