March 17, 2021

Something Good #10: The Potato Chip Professor

Recently I interviewed flavour historian Nadia Berenstein for an upcoming podcast episode about the science of snacking. She said something about chips that stuck with me. “A flavourist I was speaking with once described potato chips as a kind of blank canvas for flavour innovation,” she said. “As they experiment with new sorts of flavour intensities, potato chips are this canvas you can literally spray flavours onto.”

I was immediately brought back to the radioactive-orange, mind-blowingly tangy Zesty Cheese Doritos that rocked my world as an allowance-rich junior high schooler. They tasted like nothing natural—certainly not the corn they were made from—but they waged an assault on my brain’s gustatory cortex and dopamine receptors that I have yet to fully recover from. Discovering those chips definitely marked the moment when I stopped being a skinny kid, for one, and led me on a path of craving more and more intense flavours and experiences. What crazed Otto Dix of food science looked at a bag of ground nixtamalized corn and saw it as a canvas on which to paint those glowing monstrosities?

Until I talked to Berenstein, I had never thought of a chip, potato or otherwise, as a tabula rasa for gastronomic artistry, but the truth is it’s not really self-evident that they should taste like ketchup, or spicy dill pickles, or late night cheeseburgers. Their inimitable texture, crunch and salt-load, though, provides a perfect, flattering backdrop to any particular flavour combination the mad scientists of the food industry could cook up. This infinity of possibilities is inescapably captivating.

Which is all to say I’ve been thinking a lot about chips lately. I suspect many of us are, as we take our homebound comforts where we can.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying an anonymous Instagram account called @professorchip, which has been systematically reviewing them with wit and insight, ranging from the prosaic (Ruffles All Dressed) to the exotic (Torres Selecta Black Truffle).

Trapped indoors by the raging winter weather and, you know, everything else, I felt the need to expand my boundaries, if only gustatorily. To find the Zesty Cheese Doritos of my middle years. If my ticket out of confinement had to be chips, then so be it.

I reached out to the Professor and asked for a recommendation and a chip chat, promising to honour the anonymity of their account. The Professor’s recommendation was Poulet Braisé (braised chicken) by by Bret’s, a French chipsier (that’s actually what they call themselves). I couldn’t resist also nabbing a bag of their Chèvre & Piment d’Espelette (goat cheese and Espelette pepper) flavour as well.

I consumed the bag of Poulet Braisé within moments of arriving home. They were rich, nutty even, with none of the herbal notes I expected. Not to be over-dramatic here, but these chicken chips could only be described as darkly compelling. I thought about them all weekend.

I was hooked. So I called up the Professor to discuss.

Mark: Thanks for the recommendation. I tried the Poulet Braisé, and I really liked it. I found it an interesting chip because it didn’t hit me right away, but it sort of mellowed into my tongue.

Professor Chip: To me it tastes like real chicken. Fatty, like dark meat. Whereas I find often you get these things and they taste like a bouillon cube. I’m not necessarily even knocking that—a chip like that could be tasty, but with Bret's I've found they taste like the thing they’re advertising to be.

M: I kind of expected it to have herbal notes, like the kind of herbs you usually cook a chicken with. Thyme or rosemary. But it really was quite a pure, dark kind of flavour.

PC: The Canadian Tire brand, Frank’s, has a Turkey Stuffing flavour. That's pretty good, but it’s like, you get your sage, you get the spices that you'd associate with that. And it’s good. But Bret’s, to me, it really tastes like chicken.

M: Did you ever read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a kid? There was that chewing gum that was like, a full turkey dinner. I was kind of obsessed with that idea.

PC: Yes, exactly. I think it was like a full three-course meal, with dessert and all of that1.

M: Now I’m going to open the Chèvre & Piment d’Espelette, because they really caught my eye when you reviewed them. I love chèvre, and I find that the cheese-flavoured chip is sort of rare, or at least they used to be, but I always love them.

I tear into the bag.

M: Oh yeah. You really get that goaty flavour.

PC: It’s a really distinct goat cheese flavour. And then you get a little bit of that pepper, which is a little bit earthy. They’re super nice.

M: It's not too spicy. Just a little bit of a tingle on my tongue. It reminds me of a time where I ate some goat milk caramel, and it was so chèvre-y that I couldn't take it seriously as caramel because it reminded me too much of goat cheese.

Loud chewing can be heard on the recording.

M: Something that’s interesting about this brand is that it’s French. Which is a country I don’t really associate with chips. They even call themselves “les chipsiers français.”

PC: I first had them last summer. I'd started the Professor Chip thing and a friend came over for a socially distanced backyard hangout, and brought these Bret’s chips, which I’d never heard of before. They brought the camembert and the steak flavours, and the camembert chips really tasted like camembert. It was like, wow, I’ve never even heard of these and they’re amazing.

I've been seeing them more and more around and picking them up when I have. There’s a lot of flavours and yeah, they’re fantastic. I don't think France is a place that I've ever thought about as a chip country, but it turns out that I might’ve been wrong about that.

M: It’s really interesting to see the flavours of chips that you find in different countries. I spent a month in Thailand a few years ago, which is one of the best snacking locations in the world. You walk into a 7-11—there’s millions of them there—and they have these incredible chips. Lemongrass, shrimp, all these flavours, and they’re all great. And so I find it really interesting how a country or a culture expresses itself through its chips.

PC: When you emailed me you mentioned how Canada was known for its weird flavours. But every place has its own distinct flavours.

In Canada, you have things that you don't see elsewhere. Ketchup chips, dill pickle, all dressed. A couple of years ago, I was in upstate New York and I went to the chip aisle in the supermarket, and it was, like, all ranch-flavoured chips. Like one out of every two bags was ranch-flavoured. Which to me was a little bit weird, but that’s what the tastes are like there.

I lived in the U.K. for a few years and they have salt and vinegar, salt and malt kinds of things. But you’d also get a lot of meat flavours. Walker’s lamb and mint sauce, oven-roasted chicken with thyme. Prawn is a very popular classic flavour there.

So yeah, every place seems to have its own sort of distinct kind of, I don't know if it’s like a chip culture, but their own chip flavours.

M: I was in England once and I noticed that Cool Ranch Doritos are called Cool Originals over there. I mentioned it to a friend and he was like, “We don’t have ranches here.” Then I only realized years later, recently actually, that “Cool Ranch” was referring to ranch dressing. I had just thought it was this sort of imagistic, like almost impressionistic idea that you’re on a ranch and the sun is going down and you’re eating these chips. It had never occurred to me that they were just ranch-flavoured, because ranch isn’t a big part of my life.

PC: Yeah, despite all the cultural similarities between the U.S. and Canada, I don’t understand why, for example, ranch isn’t so big here, or why in the U.S. ketchup chips aren’t a thing. They’re some weird Canadian speciality, which doesn’t make sense if you think about it logically. But I think it’s kind of neat that there are these different chip cultures, if you will.

M: Because I grew up with ketchup chips, they’re the most natural, normal thing in the world to me. But viewed objectively, they are a bit weird. I was reading once that they somehow originated as grape chips or something?

PC: Yeah, it was Hostess that did it. They had grape and orange and stuff like that.

M: And somehow ketchup chips came out of that project.

PC: I’d kind of like to taste the orange and grape ones. I don’t think they sound very good, but I’d be willing to try them.

M: It's an interesting time for chips because this book is coming out by this New York Times writer about how the snack food industry uses science to addict you. They just ran a piece on it called “The Science Behind Your Need for One More Potato Chip.”

It's not a very pro-chips article, and it made me a little sad reading it. It basically says we’ll one day look at the snack food industry the same way we do Big Tobacco, the companies that hooked the world on these really unhealthy products.

Do you ever put any thought into that when you eat chips?

PC: I mean, I try not to. I like eating chips and and if there wasn't a pandemic on, I'm not sure the project would have sort of taken off as it has. Because, you know, we're all stuck at home. I think it resonated with people because of that. Like, there's that New York Times article recently that was a celebration of chips in pandemic times.

I don’t think that Frito-Lay is looking out for the health of people who are eating their chips. So I see that, but at the same time, they’re an easy, enjoyable, addictive snack. I think in moderation, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Bonus ASMR (did I use that term right?): If watching Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory browse the Criterion Collection’s DVD library would be as good for your mental health as it is for mine, see below:

Bonus track:

Thank you once again Rachael Pleet for another wonderful illustration, this one of last week’s elevator/canine/Czech Republic story. I will cherish this.

Don’t forget to follow the good Professor on Instagram. You can find Bret’s chips at venerable St-Laurent provisioner La Vieille Europe, should you happen to be in Montreal. If you see them anywhere else, please let me know.

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