I feel comfortable sharing something rather controversial with you all: I can’t stand Cheetos, crunchy or puffed. (Feel free to express your outrage in the comments.)
As the tastebuds of my peers developed to handle Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, I was envious that there wasn’t a Flamin’ Hot food for me to call my own. Luckily Frito-Lay began to add the seasoning to other munchies, and I could finally join my friends in doling out some bright red high fives. The newest snack to stain my fingers is the Ruffles Flamin’ Hot Cheddar & Sour Cream Potato Chips.
The bag says the flavor is by LeBron James and it features a large photo of him and some inspirational words that tie into Ruffles’ “Own Your Ridges” campaign. I’m not sure if the flavor was LeBron’s idea or if he just supports Ruffles Flamin’ Hotting its cheddar and sour cream potato chip, but with the popularity of Flamin’ Hot snack foods in Los Angeles, a partnership with the Lakers star makes perfect sense.
In the bag, the chips smelled very similar to the regular Cheddar & Sour Cream but with an added vinegary tang. They had that same richly colored Flamin’ Hot powder that coats other chips and puffs, and it was a generous covering that made the not hot version seem under-dusted by comparison.
True to the name, these tasted like a Flamin’ Hot version of the Cheddar & Sour Cream Ruffles. Cheese and sour cream have long been standard accompaniments for spicy foods, and the pairing made just as much sense on these chips. The Flamin’ Hot powder felt comfortably at home with the cheddar and sour cream dust, but also switched things up a bit. Unlike the regular Cheddar & Sour Cream, which is very cheese flavor-forward, the acidic coating on the Flamin’ Hot version really brought out the sour cream, which was a welcome change for this fan of sour ‘n’ spicy foods. Additionally, Ruffles are robust chips and really hold their own when given the Flamin’ Hot treatment. I loved the substantial crunch and full potato taste of the chip underneath all that zesty seasoning.
Like other Flamin’ Hot snacks I’ve tried, the spice level disarmed me by being minimal at first but then building after a serving or two. Even then, these chips never noticeably burned my mouth or stomach, and I only realized they were getting to me once my nose started to run. Others may wish these Ruffles were more picante, but I feel like they had the right amount of heat to allow one to eat them by the handful without a night of heartburn.
On that note, it seems I almost finished the entire bag as I wrote this review. Bright red high five to whoever can tell me the best way to get Flamin’ Hot Cheetle out of a laptop keyboard.
Purchased Price: $3.49 (on sale, originally $4.79)
Size: 8 oz bag
Purchased at: Ralphs
Rating: 8 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (28 grams/about 13 chips) 160 calories, 10 grams of fat, 1.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 190 milligrams of sodium, 15
grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fiber, 1 gram of sugar, and 2 grams of protein.
Letter of Recommendation
- Aug. 17, 2016
About 12 years ago, my partner and I decided to wow our friends on Thanksgiving by ordering a heritage-breed turkey from a small farmer in Pennsylvania. For weeks we watched the turkey — our turkey — on the farmer’s webcam, a cluster of pixels frolicking inside a chicken-wire enclosure. It was butchered and shipped overnight (the FedEx shipping cost nearly as much as the bird) and when it emerged from the oven, marinated and basted decadently in butter, the turkey tasted so unspeakably bland that much of it was left on our friends’ plates, camouflaged awkwardly under brussels sprouts. The feel-good narrative of our lovingly raised, hormone-antibiotic-and-G.M.O.-free certified-organic turkey became supplanted with a more ambiguous one. We felt both duped and morally abject: Not only were we out nearly $200, but our ethical gambit put an end to the bird’s bucolic life.
What had we been looking for, exactly? This question visited me earlier this summer, unbidden, brushing my consciousness with its wings. It happened in a Stewart’s convenience store off the Adirondack Northway. My friend Trish was buying cigarettes, and I was halfway through a 2⅝-ounce bag of Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles.
Stewart’s is no foodie emporium — this one kept the chips on a wire carousel between a basket of shrink-wrapped peanut-butter-and-butter-on-a-hard-roll sandwiches and a crockpot labeled Chicken Wing Soup. So when Trish handed me the Ruffles, she intended it as a mildly ironic token of affection. But here’s what happened: The sensory experience of the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles so diverged from my mental narrative about what I was eating — what was I eating? — that it short-circuited my discursive thinking and emptied my mind. Everything I believed about eating was left in disarray.
About that sensory experience: Technically speaking, Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles are flawless. The chips are pleasingly thick, but not excessively so. Through superior engineering, they eliminate the two most common drawbacks of packaged potato chips, namely greasiness and staleness. And while they don’t taste strongly of potatoes, they have a flavor that food scientists refer to as high-amplitude, meaning that every note is knitted together to produce a distinctive bloom, like Hellmann’s mayonnaise or Coke or a decently aged Barolo.
These chips also excel at what brewers call sessionability — the degree to which a substance incites you to consume more of it. Consider Nacho Cheese Doritos, another Frito-Lay staple: The first few bites are blindingly flavorful, but a half-dozen chips later I begin to feel like I’m chewing on cheesy insulation. Worse yet, for me this sensation comes on suddenly, curdling into a sickening sense of shame. By comparison, Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles tolerate and even encourage overindulgence, and they bring on the feeling of satiety gradually, without undue alarm, in the manner of actual food.
Of course, what you might call the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles origin story is a lot less winsome. When I tried to delve into how they are made, a series of emails from a Frito-Lay spokesman made it clear that little about the process resembles food preparation as most of us know it. And little about it can be pinned down. Not the potatoes (“made from high-quality, thin-skinned potatoes”), not the cooking oil (“we may use canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil or a blend”), not even a place of origin (“produced in Frito-Lay facilities across the country”).
The flavoring of the chips was formulated in collaboration with what the spokesman crisply described as “the world’s leading seasoning and flavor companies.” As Eric Schlosser details in his book “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal,” this refers to companies clustered along the New Jersey Turnpike with names like Flavor Dynamics, where “flavorists” in lab coats design the taste, aroma, mouth feel and appearance of thousands of supermarket foods. The scientific wizardry behind Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles’ “proprietary blend of real Cheddar, other cheeses and real sour cream” is reduced on the ingredients list to the phrase “natural and artificial flavor” — it is entirely possible that if all the ingredients were listed, their number would balloon from around 30 to more than 100. And growing scientific consensus tells us that processed foods should be eaten, well, hardly ever.
But to enjoy Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles is to revel in the human-made, in the old Enlightenment project of our scientific conquest of nature. The marketing of so-called artisanal foods has traditionally prioritized narrative; the stories of our food have become so paramount that fussing about flavor is coming to seem almost gauche. Ruffles, by contrast, invite a purely aesthetic appreciation. The “Cheddar” and “potato” on the bag are mere starting points. The chips’ magnificently artificial flavoring is not a simulacrum of nature but an improvement on it, as fantastical and engineered as an unmanned satellite. They are perfect, fully realized objects, requiring no context or elucidation. They promise nothing except sensory gratification, and I like that about them. They embody what William Carlos Williams wrote that poems should aspire to — “no ideas but in things.”