Rio Grand Platanitos Chili Lime Plantain Chips

[caption id="attachment_190" align="alignnone" width="225"] Look at the lecherous chili pepper on the bag. He's leering at the lime.[/caption]

So I decided to make bolognese. What's wrong with that you may ask. Plenty. It smelled good and it made me hungry.

In my hunger I managed to inhale a bag of plantain chips. Now I have to remember what they taste like. Were they good? Were they bad? Were they mediocre? I'm not really sure. I ate them that fast. I'm pretty sure they were not bad. I leaning more towards mediocre. I kept eating them. I didn't run around the living room yelling about how good they were. So they had have been mediocre.

What I do remember is the chili lime seasoning was distributed unevenly. One chip had all of the seasoning.

Like most lime flavored chip type foods, you really don't taste the lime. It's more of just a sour sensation. It assaults your tongue.  There may have been some chili flavor. The chili had no chance against the lime. Nothing had a chance against the lime. There was so much citric acid.

The rest of the chips were a bit stale and needed some salt. Wow, these must have been bad. I wonder why I ate the whole bag. It's not like there was nothing else to eat.

They do have a crazy short ingredient list. Plantain, (Palm Oil), Lemon, Citric Acid E3330 adn Spicy

I'm not entirely sure what adn Spicy is. Any ideas?

 

Utz Hot Cheese Curls

[caption id="attachment_141" align="alignnone" width="225"] Utz Hot Cheese Curls. Bob's Burgers may or may not be playing in the background.[/caption]

I love Utz, almost everything they do is pure junk food goodness. Even when they do something wrong, its edible. This is one of those times.

Basically these are a Flaming Hot Cheetos knockoff. A puffy cheese curl that is also supposed to be "hot". It's a one dimensional hotness like a young Mary Miles Minter. Maybe it is nuanced and worldly, we just will never know. It's never allowed to show it's true form. It's just hot. Because Utz is a Pennsylvania company and Pennsylvania isn't known for spicy food, the hotness isn't very hot. If you are spice intolerant you will find these well, hot.

It's not the heat or lack of heat that is the problem. It's the fact they taste like Funyuns. The predominate taste is onion powder. It's not bad, just not expected.

Oh Utz, this is as close as you get to being bad.

Great Value Loaded Baked Potato Flavor Dip

[caption id="attachment_113" align="alignnone" width="300"] Why? Why? photo from walmart.com[/caption]

I have no words to describe this. No words. In fact Wal-Mart has no words to describe this either. The jar is devoid of any indication of the flavors the dip is supposed to have. The Wal-Mart website has no real description. Under the item description it has two words: Great Taste. That gives me no idea what it's supposed to taste like. There could have been some nice prose about artisan cured bacon and handmade cheese. But there isn't. It's almost like Wal-Mart knew this was awful. They didn't want to get our hopes up.

Going by the picture on the front of the jar I believe it should be a mix of sour cream, bacon, onions and cheddar cheese. It should be great, or at least edible. I like all those things. And I'll be dipping deep-fried potatoes into it. It should all work. It doesn't.

The "bacon" is tiny pieces of chewy fake meat like substance that tastes vaguely like canned chili. It just has that cumin and liquid smoke flavor. The texture is horrible. If you were to soak bacon bits in water for a couple of days, I imagine they would take on this texture. I just shuddered while typing that.

I assume the actual dip base is supposed to taste like sour cream. I'm not sure what it tastes like, but it's not sour cream. I just can't place the flavor. The "bacon" is the predominate flavor. The onions and cheese are nowhere to be found. Really this is awful.

Like I said, this could have been great.

Diana Jalapeños

This is what my bag looked like.                               New packaging?

photo from planetacatracho.com                           photo from diana.com.sv

 

These were an impulse buy at the local H Mart. But then again almost everything I buy at H Mart is an impulse buy. I went in for steak and some vegetables, I swear. Look I was hungry and it was rush hour. I figured the last 6 miles home would take an eternity. They didn't thankfully.

Diana Jalapeños are a basic tortilla chip made by Diana Todo Mundo. The chips are thicker and smaller than American chips and have a nice balance of flavor. The jalapeño flavor tastes like actual jalapeños  . There is a bit of fruity sweetness to these. A truly impressive feat. There seems to be another flavor component to the chips, I think it may be cheese. It neither adds to or detracts from the jalapeno flavor.

Over all the chips were good. Not overly seasoned so you could actually taste the corn and not too salty.