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!

French Fry Diary 489: The Onion Chips

There were some similar potato chips in the bag o' rare chips The Bride got me for Christmas from Anchor Food Finds. In this case, there were three bags of much the same theme - onions.

Deep River Sweet Maui Onion - this would be my second bag of Deep River chips from the bag o' rare chips. These were really not as good as the first bag. No great aroma, no great flavor. All in all, a disappointment.

Grippo's Sweet Bermuda Onion - this was by far the biggest bag of chips in the whole bag o' chips at three and a half ounces. It also had the tightest expiration date, so I probably should have opened it first. No worries, they were still good. However as a regular "Hoarders" viewer, I do feel the need to point out that expiration dates are NOT just a guideline.

Grippo's is a company that's been around for almost a century. They started off making cones for ice cream, moved on to pretzels, then chips, and now make a lot of stuff, including dips, seasonings, and even BBQ sauce. They have an intriguing variety of chip flavors including Hot Dill Pickle and Cheddar Cheese with Jalapeño.

The chips themselves are heavily seasoned, and not flatteringly so. The chips look like you might have to shake it off, there's so much. This is not a happy onion flavor but it's there, and lingers for a while. And saddest of all, it kinda masks the potato flavor of the chip as well. Another disappointment as I really was looking forward to trying these.

Mister Bee Sour Cream & Onion - Mister Bee is a regional family run company recently purchased by the West Virginia Potato Chip Company. Careful inspection of this blog will reveal a complete lack of reviews or even mentions of the popular potato chip flavor sour cream and onion. Easy answer: I don't like them.

That's why I wanted to hand this bag off to The Bride, not in an ungrateful way, but because she likes that flavor. However, The Bride not being around at the moment of writing this entry, I bit the bullet, er, um, chip.

There was a good(?) aroma of sour cream and onion when I opened the bag. The chips however had the same grainy and overseasoned texture as the other Mister Bee's chips I have encountered. Ick. Not a good flavor, and not a good chip either, in my opinion.

Sadly, this was not a good batch of chips this time.