Snack Review: Trader Joe’s Sea Salt and Pepper Crisps Made With Rice
Trader Joes, sometimes you break my heart. If you’re going to make a snack that I can’t live without (Popped Potato Chips, I’m looking at you), you have to have them in stock every time I shop! Otherwise, I end up with something weird like these.
Here at Snackerrific, one of the four senses tends to be neglected. We write a lot about how things taste, of course, and there’s plenty of talk about how they smell, look, and feel in the mouth. But I am pretty sure this is the first snack I bought because of how it sounds.
Really. When I picked up the bag, it jangled in the oddest way. So I shook it, just to check. Yes, it made a sound like a sack full of light pieces of hardware, or maybe even decorative jingle bells. I’d never heard a food sound like that.
It was good that I was thinking about how they sounded instead of how they compared to my beloved Popped Potato Chips, or they would have been even more of a disappointment.
The text on the bag conveys great excitement about how they are a “brilliant combination” of a chip and a cracker. I can’t help thinking that this is a way to distract us from the fact that they have kind of an odd texture for a chip. But it’s OK, nice and snappy, if not exactly brilliant.
The basic flavor is kind of rice-crackery. But there’s a whole lot other stuff on them aside from the advertised sea salt and pepper – garlic powder, dehydrated onion, yeast, extracts of black pepper - all of which leaves a kind of unpleasant (and lingering) aftertaste.
I would not buy these again. I guess I should have realized that sounding like a bag of hardware was not exactly a great advertisement for a food product. I think next time they’re out of Popped Potato Chips, I am going to try lying down in the aisles and crying instead. At least it won’t leave a dehydrated onion aftertaste in my mouth.
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