“Pork Rinds…Gakkkk!!”  I still remember the scene in “Big” with Tom Hanks. Perfect comic timing with that can of silly string.

Driving across the state of Missouri, you see a lot of strange, unappealing, offbrand snacks in service stations. (I am not prejudiced against offbrands ok. Some of my best friends are offbrands.) Anyway I was sure buying these flavored pork rinds would be another of the many mistakes. However (and this all depends on whether you would buy pork rinds in the first place) this Chili-Lime flavor of the Turkey Creek Fried Pork Skins were excellent. It took reminding myself of what I was eating in order to stop crunching. My animal instincts were in full force. ‘Twas the right amount of heat and citrus for any snack. To many, pork rinds are disgusting. And part of me is in that camp. Still, I can eat them just like I can eat bacon occasionally. I think the ingredients in this bag could definitely be a little better (based on my memory of the label). I haven’t compared this brand with others so it might be in line with the standard pork rind process.

This is the flavor for this snack. While Spitz Dill Pickle is THE flavor for sunflower seeds, from now on Chili-lime is hereby the official flavor for pork rinds. Others either cannot properly mask the gameyness or they just burn your face off. (Update: They have a Salt & Vinegar version. We may have a contender here, I’ll see if I can get some.)

A word about the packaging. My opinion, they are undermining their snack ideas with subpar packaging. The design is too obvious with the outlined pig, lime and pepper illustration on the transparent bag. Maybe they are targeting people who really love pork rinds, but as a pork rind skeptic, I almost didn’t buy these due to the cheap design. Perhaps they could experiment with an opaque light brown or white packaging, putting some thought in the typography and pointing out the uniqueness of this flavor. Also the Turkey Creek bag logo needs some help. They are paying a lot of money for the full color logo to be shown and it doesn’t work on the bag well. Maybe I will eventually develop brand affinity for them, who knows.

Pringles are kind of fun, until you realize they are pretty much empty of any nutrition (I’m speculating based on my knowledge of the food label here.)  So if I’m going to eat Pringles, they have to be fantastic enough to override my inner need to ingest food of some inherent value. The flavors of Cheese, Pizza, Sour Cream, and may of the other novel flavors are terrible and I never eat them.

Finally I’ve found a flavor I enjoy enough to spend money on a can. The Pringles Sea Salt and Pepper, at least in this Japan edition have met the criteria. They do not have an overwhelming pepper taste, though you can see plenty of pepper grains on the chips. This is good because some snack chips with pepper do overwhelm. I hope I can find these stateside sometime again. Pringles are fun every few months or so  in moderation.

Oh cool, pretzel waves. Seems like a good idea. A wave is like an oceans way of saying “Hello, hope you like salt up your nose.”
If I were to drag you across Mexico and leave you for dead in the desert, you might be thinking that the experience was a little like the last time you bit into a Rold Gold Garlic Pretzel Wave. No amount of added water will ever balance them to make them edible.  I actually think that these bring a choking risk with them because they are so dry. The garlic coating was no help. The flavor was boring and I couldn’t get over the dryness.

But I think it was a good try. Crack open one of these in your hands and it creates a new layer of atmosphere where no life can exist. You have been warned. Don’t fret Rold Gold/Frito Lay, I still love your snacks, but I must ‘wave’ goodbye to this particular one forever.

My bag of these Archer Farms Wasabi-Mustard Chips from Target is tattered and torn up so forgive me for not posting a picture. I’m way too lazy, and this snack is just not good enough to for me to make the effort. Not that these are terrible chips, they just make me say “meh.” I like kettle-style chips but this flavor is quite tiring. I love wasabi, but the mix here is too sweet and it ruins the experience. I’d rather just get the wasabi burn without the honey, or whatever is in there. If I wanted the sweetness, I’d get mesquite barbecue flavor. Blech, I hate barbecue chips.

I encourage Archer Farms to keep trying and innovating because I’m happy overall with the things they are doing in the snack world. My advice for you snackers is spend your money on a salt and vinegar kettle chip, which burns just as well and has a purer and less childish flavor.

Wasabi, as you may have noticed, is becoming more popular in snacks. Wasabi Peas were the first snack that gave me the burn that I wanted. Many other snacks just don’t do it right. A while back, I first tried Blue Diamond Smokehouse almonds and I can say they have wow factor. But they’ve done better with not one, but two new flavors.

The Wasabi and Soy Sauce flavor, like the other flavors basically amount to a salty concoction stuck to each almond. But don’t let that description cheapen the taste. They come in, from what I have found, three popular sizes. The family size can, the individual can, and the smaller one serving packets. I’m too lazy to give you the .oz here. Depending on the store, these almonds can be pricey. Try to pick them up at Target when they run two for $5 for the smaller cans occasionally. You can find the packets at some gas stations.
I like to buy both the Wasabi Soy and the Lime ‘n Chile flavors at the same time and switch back and forth. This is one snack that you won’t get tired of. And being almonds, you’ll feel pretty good about them. I just wish I would start seeing the packets available in vending machines. It’s a perfect fit.

I wrote earlier about the fantastic Spitz Dill Pickle flavored sunflower seeds. I still stand by that snack. It’s revolutionary for me because they made eating seeds fun again. Chili Lime flavor from Spitz is awesome too.

Looks like the David sunflower seed people, or ConAgra, their parent company are feeling a little pressured, as they came out with their own version of Dill Pickle. Well if you don’t hear this from anywhere else, I’ll just tell you, don’t bother buying the David Dill Pickle flavor seeds. They suck. They absolutely suck. The initial sour pickle taste erodes instantly to reveal the oversalted undercoating. The wizard behind the curtain. David, did you spend what, all of 5 minutes working out this flavor? And they are REALLY salty. I’m fuming having wasted the $1.29 on this useless bag of David seeds. I feel sorry for the birds that happen by these nasty seeds that will surely will be discarded on campsites across the US. I’m thinking about taking them back to the store, but it’s almost not worth the effort. Hopefully this blog, will make a difference.

Spitz has won this dill flavor war hands down. I’m gunning for you DAVID. You have dishonored me and all of the baseball fans out there with your arrogance. I almost can’t enjoy your salsa and barbecue seed flavors any longer.

I saw this bag of Spicy Thai Kettle chips the other day when I was browsing the World Market. I instantly thought, what a perfect snack to try out and even maybe write about. I should have known anything at World Market is hardly new. Still though I will compliment Kettle Foods for concocting the flavor. It was fun and much better than those awful plain Lays that have more street credit than they deserve. And I won’t get sad despite that these chips were already reviewed here and here. So I’m like a year too late. The reason I’m not getting mad is because I found a cool snack store to buy from. It’s called the Snack Aisle. I’m off to go watch this new TV show I just heard about called “Lost.”

If you like popcorn at all, your world is about to be rocked. Ok, well maybe not because this popcorn is quite elusive. I can’t find it on a few pages of google. In fact, a direct search of the snack’s title yields nothing. This means that I will have to rely on my source in Japan to get the popcorn for me. We are all used to salt and butter on popcorn, but actually pepper is the magic ingredient for a delicious snack. Pepper is very cheap and as soon as a company creates the bagged version here, or even the microwave incantation of pepper popcorn, it is going to take off. I don’t mean take off like elmo dolls and XBox 360’s, I mean really take off.

The olive oil part of this conception is good because it has a lighter taste and doesn’t have that filmy artifical butter feeling left on your tongue or teeth like a lot of popcorn will. The only downside is that there isn’t enough in a bag to satisfy me for as long as I like, which for this taste means forever. Just as well because you can’t find this snack in the United States anyway, or can you?

I’ll start out by stating something that must always be remembered in the world of snack. Things can always be improved. You know the saying ‘you can’t outdo a classic?’ Of course you don’t, because I just made that up. But even if it was an actual saying, it would be completely false. Take these Spitz sunflower seeds for example. People thought that the David brand was the top of the pops, but I disagree now. I think that spot belongs to Spitz. Here’s why:

Dill Pickle is a very cutting edge choice for a sunflower seed. The tangy light flavor makes handling a few dozen seeds in your mouth seem like less of a chore. If you liked David’s Barbecue or Salsa sunflower seeds, but tired of them burning a hole in your cheek, you definitely want to try Spitz Dill Pickle flavor. You can eat them until you choose to stop, no acid burn is going to cut you off. I rate this flavor higher than any normal salted seed too. Plain salt seeds are popular, but they give you that dry feeling on your hands like you’ve spent all day on the beach making sand castles. The Dill Pickle flavor doesn’t have that powdery salt problem. In fact, I don’t recall any annoying residue at all.

The other innovation here is the bag. Spitz has done what those before them (David) have failed to do. They implemented a resealable zipper bag for their seeds. Yes, now you can open the entire bag to fish out a handful without the spillage risk that the other companies subject you to. I always found David’s bags annoying because they would always tear too much or too little from that ripable corner.

I picked up my bag at a pretty large gas station chain called QuikTrip in Missouri, but you can get them online too. Spitz also has a few other flavors I’ll let you discover on your own.

SpitzSeeds.com

I have found Cheez-its to have rested on their laurels of late. Sure they made the white cheddar version, but that was like nine years ago. And since then, they have made the large size for some reason, and tried those disgusting little twist versions, which couldn’t possibly be made of worse flavors. But I will compliment them and recommend one of their flavors in the new “fiesta” line. (Thank goodness they didn’t call them “extreme”) The Chile Queso is definitely worth trying out. They are almost as addictive for me as the original.

What is the flavor like? Mmm, something mexican? I can’t really describe it. Perhaps I’m too distracted by their triangle shape. Actually since this is my first entry in a while, clearly I have to brush up on my influential food-writer-jargon.