Fritos Flavor Twists Honey BBQ

            Some things in life are a tease, or allumeuse as the French would say.  They reveal just a little a bit of what’s inside, just a hint of the enticing delights floating beyond your grasp, oh so slowly and subtly.  Much as you may yearn to pry out the beautiful goods within, the tease delays, withholds, drives you mad with anticipation of the moment that they will yield their bounty to your slavering appetite.  A good tease will gloriously avail itself at the end of an opera of escalating desirous tension, a bad tease will leave one frustrated and without satisfaction.

Rotini pastsa, the obvious inspiration
for the Flavor Twists.  Though it may
look like a pile of chitinous beatles,
the little coils are wonderful for
abosrbing tomato sauce and cheese.

            Fritos Honey Barbecue Flavor Twists are good teases.  There are not a few bad teases, when it comes to chips; subtle flavorings that hint at great things to come, but never pay off because of inadequate seasoning or missing flavor notes.  But the tease-iness of the Honey Barbecue Twists is in fact rather clever; these are basically your standard Frito corn chips elongated into a twisted coiled shape very much like rotini pasta and then slathered with a sweet barbecue flavoring with notes of molasses, garlic, and tomato. 

Good tease or bad tease? In
the end, Cylon #6 will likely give
you all that you were hoping for,
but leaving you regretting it for
a long, long time.

Because the coils of the ‘twists’ are too small for the tongue to fit fully inside, you can only taste a judicious but incomplete portion (say 50 to 70%) of the tasty flavoring on the chip, and are left lusting to probe your tongue deeper to ravish all of the yummy seasoning.  An impossible task, I must confess, but the amount of flavoring already there is adequate, and by withholding a bit, I find myself always wanting more, whereas if all the flavoring had been easily accessible my taste buds would likely saturate and it would wear out its welcome.  (A similar theory applies to ‘saving yourself’ while dating, but I don’t know if I really want to encourage this line of reasoning.)

Obviously, these are not the most sophisticated fair as chips go, but they remain a tasty tease for the tongue which I like to return to when nothing more exotic (or discounted) draws my eye.  Some may raise any eyebrow at the high score, but for what they are, (a variety of Frito Corn Chip) they are nothing less than perfect.

Uninteresting Bit of Trivia: I can say with precision that the first time I tried these chips was at the recommendation of my partner while waiting next to a CVS to pick up my sister at the Columbia Heights Metro station in Washington DC in September of 2006.  How’s that for epic?

Stars: 4/4

Spiciness Rating: none

Pros:

- Excellent sweet barbecue flavoring

- Coiled shape of the chips tantalizes the tongue by holding a bit of the flavoring just out of reach…

- Frito’s corn chips are extra crunchy and satisfying in this format

Cons:

- None really, except that some will always prefer more refined chips