Utz Sour Cream and Onion Potato Chips

While the shelves abound with exciting experiments in potato-chip futures, hi-tech flavor emulation, and thick-crunchy authenticitude (that’s authenticity with attitude), every now and then I feel a certain responsibility to report on the less glamorous workhorses of daily chip consumption.  These provide certain familiar, if unspectacular, pleasures for the mouth, and while relatively mundane in design, still exhibit certain variations that are worth examining.  After all, what good are the revolutionary vanguard without the common proletariat waiting in the wings?  Yes, sometimes one must forsake the glamour of all the organic-home-cut kettle chips made from potatos that were sung to daily by a Wisconsin children’s choir, or the lightly-braised-steak-in-onion-sauce-with-capers flavored chemical prodigies produced by the mad scientists in one of Lay’s subterranean lairs, and do some muckracking a-la Upton Sinclair, and see what we can discover wallowing in the common.

Utz’s Sour Cream and Onion chips are one of those things we will discover...and dissect!  (*Mad cackle*)

Ask yourself which you've eaten more
of: sour cream and onion dip or
sour cream and onion chips?  Then
the sad truth will dawn on you...

            Utz’s offering is conventional in most respects when compared to other Sour-Cream-and-Onion chips, including the little green specks that are supposed to remind one of green onions, although they are sparser on the Utz chips than the Lay’s variety.  The interesting difference is that they are also thinly covered with a white dandruff-like flavoring which tastes mildly sweet, like a sour cream dip.  The additional flavor layer is subtle but appreciable, making these sweeter than other chips in the sour-cream-and-onion genre, although sadly a bolder statement of the sour cream flavor would have made these chips more unique.

            Other than that, the chips are typical for Utz potoato chips: slightly smaller than Lays, cooked in a buttery oil, a little on the damp side but not dramatically.  As I said, garden variety chips, with their own slight little variation compared to others in their class.  That accomplished, allow me to note I am nowhere near done slumming with Utz chips, and down the line (though not immediately I promise you- we can only have so much Oliver Twist before we switch back to the Pride and Prejudice) I have plenty more Utz reviews to come!

Stars: 2/4

Spiciness Rating: None

Pros:

- Interesting powdery white sour cream coating adds a different element from most sour cream and onion chips

- Adequate in all other respects

Cons:

- Also unexceptional in most other respects

- There are better textured sour cream and onion chips out there