Small praise for Kettle Cooked Wasabi Ginger chips

Tasty but too small.

That green paste sitting beside your supermarket sushi that calls itself wasabi isn't very appetizing, is it?

I've always considered it more garnish than anything. It's certainly not meant to be eaten. In all likelihood, it's not even made of real wasabi.

Fake wasabi, incidentally, brings me to the topic of today's review: Lay's Kettle Cooked Wasabi Ginger potato chips. They're made with "wasabi ginger seasoning" that contains a host of ingredients including yeast extract and horseradish, according to the back of the bag. The ingredients list does include actual wasabi at its very end, but even so, these chips are far from traditionally flavored.

Somehow, though, they work enough to keep you reaching for more. It might be the kettle cooked crunch or the lingering sweetness at the end. It might be the 140 mg of sodium or 8 grams of fat per serving. It might be the simple fact that, despite what was surely every grocery store shopper's immediate reaction upon first laying eyes on this Lay's variety, wasabi ginger chips are not inherently disgusting.

No, they're actually pretty good. If we were only talking about flavor here, I'd be handing out sporks like it was Christmas morning in the cafeteria.

Sadly, Lay's saddled its wasabi ginger chips with one massive drawback when it sent them to store shelves. They come in 8 1/2 ounce bags, a full ounce less than the other three competitors in this year's Lay's crazy chip face-off. Yet they were priced identically.

Three sporks out of five. Find me the missing ounce, and we'll talk about more tines.

Actually, we'll be talking about more tines tomorrow with the next review in this series. Get ready.