Snack Review: Deep River Asian Sweet & Spicy Chips

 

Deep River chips and snacks have been the “Snack of the Day” on the Rachael Ray Show, and magicianPenn Gillette called them a “damn good chip,” ranking their Rosemary and Olive Oil Chip third on his list of Top 10 Best Potato Chips.

With such endorsements, I thought I’d give Deep River a try. Besides, I’m a fool for quality kettle chips; I just can’t get enough. When I dug into the bag of their Asian Sweet & Spicy chips, I admit I was skeptical. Would these chips taste like cheap and greasy Chinese takeout? What do Rachel Ray and Penn Gillette know anyway? Apparently, they know a lot.

Oh Grasshopper. These were fresh and delicious.

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Snack Review: Kettle Brand Chips

The enlightened snack purveyors at Snackaisle.com sent us a huge box of assorted treats. It was a wonderful thing they did, but it transformed the Snackerrific Review Lab into a feeding frenzy of snack sharks. Chip dust everywhere, dry-roasted edamame husks on the desks, Lara Bar wrappers strewn all about - oh, it was ugly.

Based in New Hampshire, Snackaisle is an online source for tons of all-natural, low-fat, low-sodium, gluten-free snacks, too many to mention now. We’ll be reviewing many of them here over the next few weeks.

Kettle Brand Baked Salt & Fresh Ground Pepper Chips
It was only a 4 oz. bag, but the contents disappeared (during the aforementioned feeding frenzy) in about 10 seconds. I snagged enough chips for myself to know that they’re simply the tastiest potato chips I’ve eaten in years. It was all I could do to keep from licking the inside of the bag.

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Snack Review: Wheat Thins Toasted Chips

The folks at Nabisco/Kraft are mighty crafty. And I don’t mean cunning or guileful, but rather smart. At the introduction of their new toasted chip line, they’ve jumped on the eco-friendly “green” bandwagon with a gymnastic and graceful flourish.

One bag features a wispy sepiatone photo of a mountainside, while the other shows a little girl in a sun dress smiling radiantly down at healthy stalks of wheat. If their product were subpar I’d chide them for a blatant attempt at riding the conservation tide. But these snacks are lip-smacking good! Go, Nabisco/Kraft, go!

Still, I wonder why they refer to them as chips when they sure seem like crackers to me.

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Snack Review: Japanese Snack Three Course Meal Roundup

Maybe it was just that I couldn’t stand the idea of going out in the cold and rain again to go grocery shopping. But the box I got from our good friends at jlist.com looked like it contained all I needed for a balanced meal. I had a spicy main dish in these Tohato habanero flavored crackers, a vegetable in asparagus Pretz, and my starch and dessert all rolled up into one in Meiji Usuyaki rice crackers coated in white chocolate. What could be more efficient?

The Tohato crackers are very neat little rings with a reddish-orange color that warns of their heat, if you hadn’t already gotten the message from the evil grin on the drawing of the pepper on the front of the bag. My Japanese isn’t up to deciphering the ingredients, but I am guessing this is a wheat cracker. It kind of doesn’t matter, because whatever it is, it’s just a vehicle for the spice. They’re either baked, or fried really brilliantly, because they’re not the least bit greasy.

These are a really fun snack if you like hot food. They are hot enough to wake you up - good idea in this cold rainy weather, as it turns out - and the heat lingers but not so much that you can’t eat more of them.

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Snack Review: Medora’s Corners

A few evenings ago, I arrived home to find a UPS notice adorning my mailbox. Apparently, somewhere in the course of the day, a mysterious package had come for me. My first reaction was confusion, followed by fear. As my 25th birthday nears, I fear presents from my family almost as much as I long for them - after all, I’ve not been the most dutiful relative. My current situation, combined with general economic anxiety and my natural extreme frugality, do not allow me to purchase extravagant gifts for anyone. I appreciate the gifts, but I feel guilty about the possibility of never being able to reciprocate.

That being the case, I was fairly relieved the next morning to discover my package’s origin lay not with a relative or relatively-wealthy friend, but with Medora Snacks. Since reviewing some of their other products last fall, I’d found myself craving Medora’s tasty and wholesome snacks. Medora’s Pogos, Pucci and Sotos left me, both literally and figuratively, with a wonderful taste in my mouth. I wondered with the small, upstate New York-based company had sent me this time.

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