French Fry Diary 490: The Chips of West Virginia

Usually it's my friend Marni who finds the odd and out of the way potato chips for me to write about on this blog. This time, she put her boyfriend/partner/common law husband, Bob, to work for me. He was hiking in West Virginia and picked up two different bags of WV-based barbecue flavored potato chips. Surprisingly both of these regional brands I had tried before, but not these flavors.

First up were the Smokehouse BBQ potato chips from Miss Vickie's. Believe it or not, I had encountered this brand before, pretty far from West Virginia at the Earl of Sandwich in Downtown Disney, Orlando FL. Granted, it was a different kind of barbecue potato chip at the time, but still.

The Smokehouse chips are kettle cooked and claim to be all natural. They have the weird funky shapes that mark kettle cooking yet are quite small. While built for dipping, they might indeed be too small to do so.

And although the smokey flavor is hyped on the back of the bag, the sweetness of the seasoning is overpoweringly delightful from the brown sugar and molasses in the ingredients. These chips rock, I liked them quite a lot.

Next up were the barbeque potato chips from WV's Mister Bee. A bag of the sour cream & onion were included in the Anchor O'Reilly's Food Finds bag o' rare chips that The Bride got me for Christmas. They were not my cup of tea. I hope these might be more to my liking...

But alas, that hope would be for naught. These chips, just like the other Mister Bee's, are overseasoned and grainy, and the barbeque flavor is unpleasant and overpowering. I coukd only eat a couple of them. They had so much seasoning, at least a handful of the dusting was at the bottom of the bag. These did not make me happy.

Happily I don't think they cost Bob much, or at I hope they didn't. Either way, thanks, Marni and Bob!