Taste test: Kettle style potato chips

Kettle style potato chips for our taste test.

What’s the best kettle-style potato chip? Time for a taste test. According to food scientist Harold McGee, kettle-style potato chips are harder and crunchier than “regular” potato chips because they are cooked longer and at varying temperatures, allowing starches and water in the potato to interact. Kettle-style chips are cooked in batches that are added to hot oil; the temperature drops then gradually increases. Regular chips are fried at a higher, consistent temperature for a shorter time, so they come out crisp rather than crunchy.

The kettle-style potato chip was invented right here on the shores of Saratoga Lake. So naturally our test included Original Saratoga Chips against Sea Salt Chips from Kettle, the eponymous and maybe best known brand. For variety we added a couple of local house brands then threw in a bag of regular chips as a ringer. Tasters tasted blind, comparing chips from baggies that were labeled by letter, and rated the chips by preference. Votes were tablulated on a weighted scale: 1.0 for first choice, .75 for second choice, .5 for third choice, .25 for fourth choice, 0 for fifth choice.

Hannaford Kettle Cooked Chips.

The winner: Hannaford Kettle Cooked Original Potato Chips. Hannaford is a supermarket chain headquartered in Maine with a strong produce game. Tasters liked these chips for their well balanced flavor, consistent size and texture and satisfying crunch. Still, this was a surprise to your correspondent who was put off by the fishy residue of canola oil (which may be a personal tic, much as some people think cilantro tastes like soap). Combined rating: 3.25.

Original Saratoga Chips.

Second Place: Original Saratoga Chips with Himalayan Salt. George Crum certainly never heard of Himalayan salt when he was frying potatoes lakeside in the 1850s, but it’s a gimmick that neither adds nor detracts from the flavor and crunch of a classic kettle style potato chip. When these are tasted side by side with the Hannaford chips they are almost impossible to distinguish. Saratoga Chips lost by a single D vote for “not enough flavor” for a combined rating of 3.0.

PICS Original Kettle Chips.

Third Place: PICS Original Kettle Chips from Market 32. Not a lot of love for our personal favorite of the batch, from a chain based in the Capital District formerly known as Price Chopper. Score probably would have been lower if tasters knew these are made with genetically modified potatoes and are imported from (gasp) Canada. A significant drop in preference from the top two with a combined score of 1.75.

PICS Original Potato Chips.

Fourth Place: PICS Original Potato Chips from Market 32. Same Canadian frankenpotatoes as the PC kettle chips, but sliced thinner and fried with the consistent-temperature method. We thought they would be laughed off the picnic table, but they came in right behind their kettle-cooked brethren with a combined score of 1.5.

Kettle Brand Kettle Chips.

Fifth Place: Sea Salt Kettle Brand Potato Chips. A disaster. Nobody rated them higher than third and most scored them dead last. The salt balance was off (not enough) and the chips lacked potato flavor. These were also hardest to find at retail, by the way, with less shelf space than other brands and several varieties out of stock. Quite a let down for what was once a category leader. Combined score: 0.5.

So there you have it. Unless you’re near a Hannaford, original Saratoga Chips are the way to go. Of course we’d say that anyway but now we have stats to back us up. We also think the vote may have been skewed slightly since the Hannaford Chips were in bag A, perhaps causing people to taste that chip first then rate others against it. Also, some forensic evidence as in our Chicago Style Hot Dog taste test: bags A and C (PICS Kettle Chips) had more chips missing than the other bags, suggesting people might have liked those flavors enough to double dip.