Saturday, April 30, 2016

Gotta Get At This: Lay's Peru Apasionados Por Nuestros Sabores Competition Papa a la HuancaĆ­na and Lomo Saltado

Peru is running a fun flavor contest called "Apasionados por nuestros sabores" aka "Passionate for our flavors". It seems to be a voting competition between 2 typical Peruvian flavors: "Papa a la Huancaina" and "Lomo Saltado".
"Papa a la Huancaina" is a dish that derived from the Peruvian Highlands; a cold dish of yellow potatoes, served with Huancaina sauce which is a cheese based sauce. The potatoes are usually served on a bed of lettuce and come with Olives on top.
"Lomo Saltado" is a yummy dish of stir fried steak strips with bell peppers and onions, that comes with thick cut french fries on the side.
I love that both of these flavors come with potato on the plate; that is usually a good sign of a successful flavor in the bag.
The contest started running this month, so both bags should be available now in Peru.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Lay's USA Kettle Cooked Olive Oil & Herbs

MEH

Here's Kettle Cooked Olive Oil & Herbs, a bag in the current US Flavor Swap competition.

It's not good.
The bag smells powerfully of Olive Oil, and the first chip or two has the Olive Oil flavor, but the other seasonings overwhelm the subtlety of Olive Oil. The herbs are there, but more potently you get a LOT of Garlic powder. I could feel it on my finger tips and I could taste it accumulating on my palette. The more I ate, the less this bag tasted of Olive Oil. It began to have almost a cheesy taste to it. But it was just too much Garlic powder. The bag is also over salted.
I complained that Spain's Olive Oil bag could have benefited from some salt to enhance the flavor of the potato... but this skews in the complete other direction. Too much Salt, too much Garlic.
On top of that, the chips are not cooked well AT ALL. I always have been appreciative of the cook on all the chips in the Kettle Cooked line, but these ones fail terribly. They are more like stale thick cut chips than the usual kettle cooked.

I don't know what went wrong here. I anticipated this being one of my favorite flavors, but in my opinion it's a wasted opportunity.

BOOOOOOO