Lay's Flavor Swap proves new isn't always better

There can be only four winners.

OK, foodies, you've had enough time to try Lay's slate of four new flavors under its "Flavor Swap" fresh-chip-versus-existing-chip competition.

Now it's time for me to weigh in. The timing of this isn't as easy as it sounds, you know. You need time to try the chips and make up your mind in case you want independence from my editorials. But I want to get my thoughts out there before voting closes March 21.

This time around, my thoughts aren't just informed by my palate. The official wife of Rick's Food Critique (who used to be the official fiance of Rick's Food Critique, who used to be the official girlfriend of Rick's Food Critique) sampled the slate of chips to offer an additional perspective. Perhaps surprisingly, we agreed more than we disagreed.

If there's one theme to this Flavor Swap, it's that new is not always better. Now without further ado, here's the full rundown.

Heat Flavor Swap: Lay’s Flamin’ Hot vs. new Lay’s Fiery Roasted Habanero
Theme or no theme, new ends up being much better here. Neither of us were sure how Flamin' Hot has made it as a Lay's flavor, owing to its monotone heat, bitter aftertaste and satanic neon red color. Fiery Roasted Habanero was a little less hot but compensated with a nice, sweet habanero tone.

Cheese Flavor Swap: Lay’s Cheddar & Sour Cream vs. new Lay’s Smoked Gouda & Chive
The stalwart wins here, as it's virtually impossible to beat sour cream and cheddar. The challenger chip wouldn't have been too bad if not for an overpowering smoke drowning out everything else. With the smoke cloud looming over the chip, the Gouda could have been any cheese.

Barbecue Flavor Swap: Lay’s Honey Barbecue vs. new Lay’s Korean Barbecue
My wife and I split on this one. I preferred the Korean Barbecue owing to its semblance to pork belly, while she found more soy sauce than Seoul. Neither of us thought it too accessible as a flavor. On the Honey Barbecue side, we both thought it a generic, mild chip with some sweetness. She just ranked them differently than I did. But we both agreed it was a close call.

Spice Flavor Swap: Lay’s Kettle Cooked Sea Salt & Cracked Pepper vs. new Lay’s Kettle Cooked Olive Oil & Herbs
Olive oil wins big here. It makes the chips heavier in grease while still adding some lighter tones, and it pairs nicely with a blast of oregano and thyme. Just don't look for basil, because you won't find it. You won't find much of note in the Sea Salt and Pepper chip bag, either. They're fine, but they basically taste like regular potato chips with an unevenly distributed blast of seasoning that comes out every chip or two.

Lay's Flavor Swap starts Monday

This box contains eight tiny bags of potato chips.

Do you have a favorite Lay's potato chip flavor? It might be on the chopping block.

Lay's is trying out four new flavors. But it's pitting them against four existing flavors in high-stakes elimination contests. And it's requiring you, the chip-eating public, to vote on what stays and what goes.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it draws heavily on the "Do Us a Flavor" contests Lay's has run in years past. Loyal readers will no doubt recall Chicken and Waffle Potato Chips as a high point in that recurring competition, which had Lay's putting four new flavors up against each other in public votes.

This time around, eaters will be voting for winners in four different chip pairings in something called a "Flavor Swap." Each pairing includes an existing chip and one supposedly chosen from flavor trends. Here's the lineup:

Heat Flavor Swap: Lay’s Flamin’ Hot vs. new Lay’s Fiery Roasted Habanero
Cheese Flavor Swap: Lay’s Cheddar & Sour Cream vs. new Lay’s Smoked Gouda & Chive Barbecue Flavor Swap: Lay’s Honey Barbecue vs. new Lay’s Korean Barbecue
Spice Flavor Swap: Lay’s Kettle Cooked Sea Salt & Cracked Pepper vs. new Lay’s Kettle Cooked Olive Oil & Herbs

Lay's says voters will "help decide" which flavors stick around, so something tells me the classic Cheddar & Sour Cream could be staying no matter what voters say. But there are some interesting new flavors on the list worth trying. Korean Barbecue and Fiery Roasted Habanero caught my eye in particular.

Voting starts Monday and runs through March 21. The chips should be on store shelves by the time the polls open.

The good folks at Lay's were nice enough to send me a box of the different flavors early. I'll be doing reviews of each for the start of voting.

Guinness Potato Chips form a lasting memory

Better to eat Guinness chips late than never.

It's still March. That means I can write about St. Patrick's Day food without being behind the times, right?

Even if I am a week or two late to the party, I found one shameless Irish tie-in this year that's worth mentioning a little after the fact. The tie-in is Burts Guinness Thick Cut Potato Chips. Which, last time I checked, is Gaelic for heaven.

Before going any further, it's important to back up and explain how much of I sucker I am for St. Patrick's Day. Green milkshakes make my heart melt like I'm the CEO of a food dye company. Don't even get me started on shepherd's pie or corned beef and cabbage.

Guinness chips, on the other hand, seemed like a stretch. Give me bacon mac and cheese chips, give me mango salsa spuds, even give me chicken and waffle tater slices. But beer? Dublin-brewed black gold? It seemed a stretch.

If it is a stretch, it turned out to be one in the right direction. Guinness chips are savory like you wouldn't believe with an undercurrent of sweetness that flows like the suds at a Scranton St. Patrick's Day Parade. (That parade is, incidentally, the single longest line of Irish dancers, trucks and assorted church-related paraphernalia I've ever seen.) Potato chips are only good at their job if they keep you reaching into the bag for more. These chips are great at their job.

They're thick cut, too, so they have some substance. Eat a few handfuls of these and you'll feel sluggish and full. That might not sound ideal until you think about your average thin potato chip with its wispy body and lack of oomph. You eat those and you feel sluggish and hungry.

The only problems I had with the Burts Guinness chips were that the bag was significantly smaller than your average chip bag and the price was substantially higher. We won't go into exactly how expensive these things were, but it's safe to wonder how they were so stratospherically expensive in spite of the strengthening dollar.

Really, it's too late in the review to worry about little details like that, though. Therefore I'm handing out a belated four sporks out of five to these tasty treats. See if you can get some on a post-St. Pattie's Day sale, and your Irish eyes will be happy.

Wrapping up Lay's crazy chips

It's a great big potato chip world out there.

If you've done your homework this week, you know my winner in Lay's flavor competition. You've tracked the sporks, added the tines and called it game, set, match.

Cheddar Bacon Mac and Cheese is the best tasting, most well-rounded chip of the bunch. Its flavors match the words on the bag, and they work on a slice of potato. This needs to be a year-round chip. Immediately. It also needs to be in your pantry. Immediately.

Mango Salsa gave the mac and cheese chips a bigger run for their money than you might think, though. Yes, Cheddar Bacon Mac and Cheese fetched five sporks, a whole utensil above Mango Salsa. But Mango Salsa had a spring to its step that was sweet, refreshing and fresh all at once. A little more balance and it might have won or at least tied for number one.

Wasabi Ginger had a lot of potential to dominate as an offbeat contender, too. If all these chips were free, I'd have had a tough time ranking it along with the top two finishers — it's that offbeat and different from the competition. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for Lay's, the packaging is a huge undoing with those kettle chips. Don't charge me more for less and expect me to ignore it.

Finally, let's skip talking about Cappuccino. They shouldn't continue to exist, so I'm going to pretend they don't. What a letdown.

With this year in the books, I'm wondering if I should submit a flavor for a future Lay's competition. How about Pepperoni Pizza? Fried Shrimp? Everything Bagel? White Chocolate Macadamia Nut?

It's a great big potato chip world out there. And it should only get bigger.

Cheddar Bacon Mac and Cheese chips sizzle

These chips just shine.

Normally I have no extra love for the front-runner.

Whether in sports, movies or food, I've always reserved the soft spot in my heart for the underdog. It's just more fun to root for Rocky, a team that's never won a championship, or the unheard-of dish that deserves press but isn't getting much.

All of these chips in a short period of time must have given me a few extra soft spots in my cardiovascular system, though. Because Cheddar Bacon Mac and Cheese chips wormed their way into my heart in a big way.

They start out with a burst of cheddar not unlike a cheese curl. It quickly fades against a powerful smoky, meaty taste sure to send the pleasure center of the brain firing on all cylinders. That's the bacon, and it does its job: satisfy. To top it all off, there's a distinctly pasta-like aftertaste. I'm not sure how Lay's swapped these chips' starch taste from potato to macaroni, but they did it.

The cut of the chip is classic. No wrinkles or kettle cooking to distract from the main event. It's all about the cheddar, bacon, and mac. I wonder if things could have been a little better in wavy chip form, which would emulate the curls of a bacon slice. But I can't argue too much with letting the taste shine through here.

So while these chips are the obvious juggernaut heading into this year's Lay's flavor competition, I can't help but love them. Five sporks out of five. Grab a bag, if you can find any.

Mango Salsa chips are worth dancing for

Close, but not quite in focus.

Fruit can be oh so polarizing.

Depending on who you ask, grapes can be the best or worst thing to happen to chicken salad. Cranberries are the maker or breaker of trail mixes. Pineapple is the topper or tanker of choice for burgers.

At some level, the debate over fruit is about sweet and savory coming together. Some people love the combination while others hate it. I'm solidly on the love side, so it's no surprise I'm an enormous fan of today's crazy chip type under the microscope, Lay's Wavy Mango Salsa.

Mango hasn't made its way into too many supermarket foodstuffs, either because it's hard to replicate, relatively unknown or doesn't translate well. I'm guessing it can be difficult to duplicate, because while mangos are sweet, what really makes them special are their understated background flavor tones. Lay's did a decent job with these chips, as there's definitely a burst of mango on first bite.

There's also a burst of sweet that could be a little overpowering for some. But it quickly gives way to salty and heat sensations. While I could do with a little more heat, this is still a delicious chip. Don't start eating them if you want to stop.

The chips' wavy profile is also a big plus. Texture of some sort really kicks potato chips up a few pegs, whether it's the gentle undulation of waves, the sharp peaks of ridges or the rough weight of kettle cooking. Waves in this case let the imagination play. It's almost as if you can picture them trapping the chunks of a fresh mango salsa.

Even though bagged potato chips will never be consumed fresh, Lay's has a fresh flavor idea with mango salsa. Four sporks out of five.

Tomorrow I'm covering the final of four Lay's Do Us A Flavor chips, Cheddar Bacon Mac and Cheese. Come back, because like my blood pressure this week, that review is sure to be through the roof.

Cappuccino chips aren't my cup of tea

It's a croppy chip.

There are plenty of things in this world that are better in concept than in reality.

New Year's resolutions. Yoga. The Godfather: Part III. Coconut milk. The Atkins diet. Vegetarian diets. Diets in general. Two-hand-touch football. Polar plunges. TV timeouts. The City of Dallas. How I Met Your Mother. Puggles. Leisure suits. Windows 8.

The list could go on and on. But the point is that we don't need to keep adding to the collection of  things that sound better than they actually are. And that's why Cappuccino Lay's Potato Chips are a shame.

It's a great concept, isn't it? Take delicious potato chips, add in the addictively amazing taste of coffee and sprinkle in a dose of sweetness to emulate cappuccino. What's not to like?

It would be simpler to ask what there is to like. Pick your platitude: the whole is lesser than the sum of the parts, some things are better left undone, there's no accounting for taste (at least the taste of the people who made these). This idea just doesn't work.

On first bite, the flavor is too much cinnamon and not enough coffee. At end, the taste is too much potato and not enough coffee. The smell is too much sugar and ... well, you get the idea.

Even more aggravating, the chips are just the right balance to keep you coming back for more even though you don't like them. You just keep waiting for that magical moment when that next handful of chips reaches flavor momentum and turns delicious. It just keeps eluding you.

Let's look for positives though. The ingredients list says these chips contain milk ingredients, which makes them more legitimate imitations of cappuccino, I guess. So there's that.

Enough of this. I'm ready to move on to a better flavor tomorrow. One spork out of five. Sorry, Cappuccino.

Lay's crazy flavors are back

As hard as it is to believe, it's been well over a year since Chicken and Waffle Potato Chips first graced our nation's store shelves in a flavor competition.

That competition, which saw Cheesy Garlic Bread shockingly unseat Chicken and Waffles and Sriracha to make it to Lay's list of permanent offerings, is long since over. But Lay's is back with another round of outlandish flavors, and we're all winners.

This time we have four flavors with which to ply our tongues and pad our waistlines: Cappuccino, Wavy Mango Salsa, Kettle Cooked Wasabi Ginger, and Cheddar Bacon Mac and Cheese. Note that we now have kettle-cooked and wavy varieties going up against the classic potato chip form. A flavor competition wasn't enough. We get textures squaring off, too.

At great risk to my cholesterol levels I've lined up a bag of each of these competitors, and I've been sampling them in different ways for quite a while now. I've had each flavor alone, back to back with others and as part of different snacking situations. Now, over the next five days, I'm going to release the results of my testing.

Why five days, you ask? Aren't there only four types of chip about which to pen personal essays? Well, for a flavor event of this magnitude I'm not going to merely write about each single flavor. I'm going to post once about each individual flavor and then do one additional rundown picking a winner! I might even go to www.DoUsAFlavor.com, the website Lay's set up for this whole competition, and vote for my favorite.

It's hard work reviewing potato chips, but somebody's got to do it. Stay tuned.

Chocolate-frosted old fashioned doughnuts have downsides

The argument for this doughnut has a hole.

While it's labeled with a couple of different names, the old fashioned or sour cream doughnut is just about the most perfect doughnut in the whole world.

It packs a dense, cake-like consistency. Its top is ridged for optimum flavor delivery. It comes with an actual donut hole, not unnecessary cloying yellow or white cream filling.

The old fashioned sour cream donut is also often prepared with a glazing so thick it borders on frosting. You can get them unglazed, too. But the best option is usually that heavy glaze that combats the donut's only weakness, a propensity to come off a little dry.

So imagine my surprise the other day when I discovered a chocolate-frosted old fashioned sour cream doughnut in a Baltimore-area Wegman's. Replacing the classic near-buttercream glaze with an actual top of frosting is decidedly not old fashioned. It's new and edgy and worth a bite.

It's worth as many bites as it takes to finish the donut, in fact. After that, though, I'll be sticking to the classic preparation.

You see, the chocolate icing is a nice attempt at changing up that classic formula of doughnut goodness. On paper it's a match made in heaven: take two good things, combine them, and come up with a better thing. In this case, though, the whole concoction is less than the sum of the confectionery parts. The chocolate icing adds a depth to the donut without being as sweet as traditional glazing, but its cocoa tones only amplify the dryness problem.

So eat these things with milk, if you're going to eat them. Four sporks out of five.

Hook Honey Bun Goldfish if you can

These Honey Bun Goldfish Grahams must not have made enough of a splash to stick around.

Production of the honey bun variety of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Grahams may have already dried up, but I think it's important to write about them for the fossil record.

I found a few packs swimming around on the shelf of a Pepperidge Farm outlet in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I haven't seen one anywhere else since then. The Honey Bun grahams are also conspicuously absent from the Goldfish Grahams product site, which currently only lists Vanilla Cupcake, Fudge Brownie, Cookies & Cream and S'mores varieties.

From an evolutionary standpoint, I can understand why these particular crackers may have died out. Goldfish Grahams, for anyone who hasn't seen them, are shaped like the swimming cheese snacks loved by children everywhere, only they're graham crackers. I've previously sampled the Vanilla and S'mores varieties, reviewing the latter. It netted an impressive four-and-a-half sporks out of five.

The Vanilla version, while not making this particular blog, was almost as good. But it no longer exists, apparently having given way to the fancied-up Vanilla Cupcake version. And that's where we come back to the subject of today's discussion, Honey Bun grahams.

The Honey Bun flavor is good, but it's not that different in taste from regular Vanilla. Since Vanilla seems to have had to evolve into the whiz-bang "Vanilla Cupcake" to survive, it stands to reason that plan old Honey Bun just wasn't cutting it on store shelves. Still, if you see a pack in an outlet or online somewhere, it might be worth shelling out a couple of bucks to grab a piece of history.

There's just a trace of honey that lingers after every bite. It combines with the standard flavor of graham crackers to drive you back for another handful. You also might want to have a glass of milk handy, because the eating process is bound of leave you thirsty.

Overall, these fish are worth eating, even if they are a rare breed. I'm a big supporter of sustainable seafood, but this is one fish that we can't (and shouldn't) preserve. Any bags of Honey Bun Goldfish are quaint relics of time at this point, but they're moving closer to suffering as fish out of their historical waters.

Enjoy them while you can. They're worth four sporks out of five.

What's a pretzel without salt?

An adjective, as you may know if you remember grade school English class, is a type of word that tells you something about a noun. It's the color added to a sentence. The spice sprinkled on a dish.

It's also where a lot of food companies get themselves into trouble.

I bring this up today after trying out Snyder's of Hanover Sweet and Salty Pretzel Pieces. The packaging plays up two major adjectives: sweet and salty. And you can probably guess that I'm taking issue with that collective description.

Did anyone try these before naming them sweet and salty?

Before we get into that, let's take a moment to describe the snack I sampled. Snyder's Sweet and Salty line comes in two varieties. There's cinnamon sugar, which I tried. Then there's salted caramel, which wasn't available at the rather limited vending machine I accessed (the life of a food critic is a glamorous one).

Either way, the basic formula is chunks of sourdough pretzels blanketed in flavor. In my case, the tastes on tap were cinnamon and sugar, both present in abundance. Both sweet.

But neither of them lived up to the latter part of the "sweet and salty" labeling. In fact, not one thing on my sourdough hunks provided anything approaching a salty kick to the taste buds. Despite a significant 290 milligrams of sodium listed on the nutritional information — 12 percent of your daily value — there was nary a hint of NaCl to be found.

It's a shame, too, because the pretzel is a blank canvas that can successfully hold a wide variety of flavors. They classically include chocolate coating, hot sauce and honey mustard. They also include cinnamon and sugar.

These Snyder's of Hanover pretzels are darned tasty. They just aren't darned salty. So bring your table shakers or go find a salt lick if you want sweet and salty cinnamon sugar pretzels from this package.

I'm holding out hope that the salted caramel variety better lives up to the branding. In the mean time, I'm left with a good munch that was completely mislabeled. While it's tempting to be more harsh, a highly palatable snack leaves me willing to sprinkle three sporks out of five in this case.

When a corn chip isn't a corn chip

Sweet corn potato chips. We live in strange, exciting times.

For the first time in my life, I ate a corn chip that was made out of potatoes. And it was incredible.

I speak of Herr's Fire Roasted Sweet Corn Potato Chips, a limited-time offering from the Nottingham, Pennsylvania snack company that I just happened to spot in a gas station during a road trip. Open the bag and you'll find seemingly standard crinkle-cut potato chips. Take a whiff and you'll smell something reminiscent of ears of corn roasting on the grill — perhaps eerily so.

Bite in and that eeriness continues. The texture is just what you'd expect from a potato chip. It's crunchy, and then a bite of salt kicks in. After that, though, the corn flavor overpowers everything else. If not for the difference in medium, you'd think you were on the back porch enjoying corn on the cob on a warm summer evening.

Speaking of warmth, these chips finish with a nice current of heat. I guess it's the fire-roasted aspect taking hold. In truth it tastes a lot like red pepper, and it makes you want to dive back in for the salty-sweet start a new bite holds.

These chips are very, very good. But they're strange, and they bring up all sorts of existential questions. We need to delve into that for a minute.

I'm no opponent of strange potato chip flavors. If anything, I support them, as evidenced by my feelings on Lay's Chicken and Waffle chips. These sweet corn chips, however, cross a starch line few would have ever thought to traverse before.

Surely, if you set out to design a sweet corn chip, you would have made it out of corn. It seems like the easier route, not to mention the traditional, less confusing one. These chips from Herr's shuck that path, instead taking potatoes and dressing them up in a way never seen before. As the consumer, they leave us in a maze of foodstuffs, unsure of what we're eating. The only thing that can be said for certain is that we like it.

I'm not suggesting these are for everyone. The traditionalists with their meat-and-potato sensibilities will want to stay away. Most people in the country won't have a choice but to avoid the chips anyway. Herr's is only distributed in 19 states.

Still, if you're in one of the states with Herr's, or if you're willing to special order them, I recommend you dig up a bag. It's a four-and--a-half-spork experience.

Maple Bacon chips

Good news: I'm back after an extended gastromalaise that kept me from reviewing anything for the better part of nine months.

Better news: Maple Bacon Kettle Brand Chips snapped me out of said extended malaise.

The best news: The kettle chips are just a warm-up for the new Mount Everest of cheap food reviewing, which comes out later this week. That would be Taco Bell's upcoming Waffle Taco, which I'm anticipating as eagerly as anything in my storied fast-food-reviewing history.

Taco Bell is scheduled to bring the Waffle Taco out Thursday, and I'll have something on it as soon as possible. In the meantime, let's talk about these Maple Bacon Kettle Brand Chips, which I decided to pick up last week when I learned March 14 was National Potato Chip Day.

This photo had to be cropped aggressively because my messy fingers found their way into the picture.

Kettle Brand chips have been on my radar for a while now. Not only did they seemingly manage to co-opt the copyright for the best name in potato chips, they're using it to roll out fascinating flavor after fascinating flavor. There's Spicy Thai, Sweet and Salty, and even Cheddar Beer.

Kettle's website says the company works to pioneer "bold, unique flavors that people really seem to love." It also says the company started selling chips out of a van, which really gets my motor going.

It was tough to decide whether to try Maple Bacon or Cheddar Beer, but one bite told me I'd made the right choice. Maple Bacon starts out with this sugary punch that never devolves into too much syrupy sweetness. Then the bacon undertones start to creep in. They grow stronger and stronger as you eat on, but that maple is just powerful enough to make sure the meat doesn't hog the scene.

This is a dangerous combination. There's no other way to put it. You could finish the entire bag in one sitting. I managed to stretch it to three, but only after exhausing far too much willpower.

Required willpower is one of the few drawbacks to these chips. Another is that they get your fingers messy. Good luck doing anything other than eat them while you're eating them.

Those aren't terrible drawbacks for potato chips, though. So I have some great news for Kettle Brand chips. Their Maple Bacon variety gets five out of five sporks.

And I'm ready for the Waffle Taco.

Doritos Locos Tacos chips

Here's the second of my two promised posts on freebies I received at the grocery store last week. It's not going to be too long, though, because typing the name of today's food is absolutely exhausting.

It's Doritos Locos Tacos Nacho Cheese and Crunchy Taco Flavored Corn Chips, according to the official Frito-Lay website. What a mouthful.

The name is enough to drive you loco.

I do understand why the chips have such a massive name. For starters, they're piggybacking off of the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos. They're chips inspired by tacos inspired by chips. How meta. It's as if reality is pretzeling around these things.

Second, each bag contains two different types of chips. And those two types each need to be spelled out in the name -- because there are two distinct pairings of Locos Tacos chips. Nacho Cheese and taco is one. Cool Ranch and taco is the other.

I received Nacho Cheese and taco for free, so those were the ones I tried. As for my verdict ... they're Doritos. They all kind of taste the same.

Technically there was a slight difference between the cheese-flavored and taco-flavored chips. If we're splitting hairs, I liked the taco ones better, as they had a somewhat savory undertone.

But realistically, you have to work extremely hard to tell the difference between two different types of Doritos. It's even harder to discern them when they're in the same bag, allowing the flavors to meld in their glue-and-foil-sealed confines.

If you're trying to tell the difference, you're missing the point of Doritos, anyway. They're meant to be shoveled in by the mouthful.

Mouthful. Just like the name Doritos Locos Tacos Nacho Cheese and Crunchy Taco Flavored Corn Chips. Three sporks out of five and we'll leave it at that. My fingers are exhausted.

Lay's Chicken and Waffles Potato Chips

Ever wonder how Lay's decided to pluralize things and call these chips "Chicken and Waffles" instead of "Chicken and Waffle?"

There's really only one thing to say about Lay's Chicken and Waffle Potato Chips. One word, actually.

We won't get to it just yet, though. It's important to set the tone before revealing this one word to rule them all. Otherwise it won't have as much impact. Plus, the analytics sites would massacre me for a mono-term post pushing readers away after mere seconds

Look, I know I'm late to the game writing about these chips. They've been around for a while, part of one of those obnoxious "vote for the flavor you like" competitions that food producers keep propping up on the Internet. This one pits Chicken and Waffle Potato Chips against Sriracha and Cheesy Garlic Bread under the clever headline of "Do Us A Flavor."

You can only vote on Facebook or by texting, even though the competition is the headline at the URL http://www.fritolay.com/lays. Something's wrong with the Internet or your marketing when you're shoving people from your brand's home page to Facebook, but I digress.

The whole "vote for your favorite option" trend in food was fun a few years ago. Really, it was. Now, though, I'm just ready to know that the snacks I see on the shelves will be around for more than a month or two. Otherwise, I'm loathe to try them. It's too hard to fall in love only to see something delicious washed away on a wave of popular opinion.

In some sort of meaningless protest, I stayed away from the chicken and waffles chips' competitors, sampling my target in a vacuum. Several vacuums, actually -- because I tried them, bought them again, and continued to try them.

Through it all, I weighed flavor against my predisposition to smile upon audacious takes on potato chips. I considered the balance of chicken against waffles, the strange looks I received while carrying the bag and the fact that I couldn't put them down. All to reach one word.

Finally.

Yes, the word for these potato chips is "finally." Finally we in America have a potato chip flavor as outrageous as everything else we do. We're the country that put a Hummer in front of every McMansion, only to scrap the Hummers and replace them with Toyota Priuses (Priui?) in order to be less wasteful. We're the people who fell in love with Mr. T, saw Arnold Schwarzenegger become a governor and who currently wear sunglasses six sizes too big for our faces. We're the nation that produced the KFC Double Down, for goodness sake!

And now, we've finally caught up with outlandish potato chip flavors in the rest of the world. In Britain, you can get prawn-flavored potato chips. So it was a travesty when choices here were limited to such mundanity as "barbecue" and "sea salt."

None of this is to say Lay's Chicken and Waffles Potato Chips are a spitting flavor image of real chicken and waffles. They emulate a version of chicken and waffles using syrup, rather than the far-superior one that employs gravy. And that syrup largely overpowers any semblance of poultry on the potatoes.

Still, they're nothing to spit out, either. In fact, I quite like them. The syrup flavor makes for a nice sweet-and-salty chip with just enough of a chicken-fried hint to keep it interesting. I couldn't put the things down on a recent car trip, finishing a whole bag in two days.

Therefore, when it comes to our five-spork scale, there's really only one number to assign. Four.

Watch out for Wheat Thins during March Madness

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed received a special sneak peek of today's review a week ago. It came in the form of the following picture, which I blasted into the cybersphere from the NCAA Tournament site of Dayton, Ohio.

We visited a stop on that so-called road to the Final Four. The box may say Atlanta, but we were in Dayton, Ohio.

It was my first time taking in tournament games -- Deb, the official fiancee of Rick's Food Critique, and I watched as Temple beat North Carolina State and Indiana topped James Madison -- and I was pleasantly surprised with the venue, University of Dayton Arena. Also pleasantly surprising was the concession stand. It dished out free samples of Wheat Thins.

As you can see from my washed-out photography, one of the flavors offered was Chili Cheese. The other, which is obscured in my picture, was Honey Mustard. You've probably seen them on grocery store shelves yourself, at this point.

If you were to pick up just one of the flavors from said grocery store shelf, I'd recommend going with Honey Mustard. It's much more in-your-face than its Chili Cheese counterpart, and it probably leans closer to the "honey" component than the "mustard." Still, it was hard to leave Deb her share of the Honey Mustard crackers by refraining from reaching for more. They have that elusive eatability factor that leaves you digging in for more before your mouth is even done chewing.

Chili Cheese proved to be tasty, too. I just didn't find it to be as flavorful as its partner in trial packaging. The chili's not a hot chili, and the cheese isn't a smelly one. Together, they create a taste that's pleasant, if a little generic. Personally, I look for more heat from my chili, though. I like it to be able to melt the hair off a yeti.

I'd say the Chili Cheese Wheat Thins merit a solid three sporks out of five. Their Honey Mustard brethren, on the other hand, must have a higher rating, a very solid four sporks.

You could do much worse when looking for something to snack on during this weekend's games.

Moose Munch

I meant to write this review at the beginning of February.

My intent was to post it sometime after Groundhog Day, when Punxsutawney Phil inevitably sees his shadow, predicts more winter, then scampers back into his hole, leaving us mortals to face the prospect of suffering through the longest 28-day month on the calendar. February can be a brutal time, and I had just the thing to cheer everyone up.

Moose Munch. A little piece of Christmas, held over.

I had to position the Moose Munch far away, out of arm's reach, in order to make it last long enough for photographing.

As you can all see, that plan never came to fruition. A new job came calling -- I haven't figured out how to pay the bills as a full-time food critic yet -- and I had to throw my efforts into moving to a fresh state in an unfamiliar region of the country. Hello, Midwest! Hello, Indiana!

The move is going to be good for reviews, methinks. It's opened a whole new world of Steak'n Shakes, White Castles, and Krogers. Before we get to all of that, though, I have a holdover to write about: the Moose Munch.

Moose Munch, in case you're unfamiliar, is a caramel corn/chocolate/nut mix from the mail-gift company Harry & David. Harold and his buddy Dave pack it in a bunch of gift baskets along with pears, crackers and whatever other foods you can imagine the postman bringing. I associate it with Christmas, because, honestly, when else do you get gift baskets?

Truth be told, you can order from Harry & David year-round. Right now they're pushing Easter gifts on their website. But only in the Christmas season do you see Moose Munch cropping up in grocery stores.

Which is where and when I picked up my small package of Moose Munch. Small packages are my recommended way to buy it, as it's impossible to stop eating once you start. If you bring home a large package, you'll find yourself sitting in a pile of crumbs, wondering where the last hour went and where it took the snack you'd planned to nibble upon all week.

Yes, Moose Munch is that good. It's primarily caramel corn, with some chocolate-coated popped kernels mixed in. Plus, a handful of nuts swim around to change things up. Take care when first opening your package, and don't dig in right away. The different components will have settled into layers. You'll want to mix it all up for the most intense enjoyment.

When mixing, watch out for the "freshness packet." My Moose Munch contained one of those moisture-absorbing packs that carry warnings against consumption. Biting into one might not kill you, but I bet it kills your snack.

After that, I have little to say. If you can't imagine the limitless goodness presented by caramel corn and chocolate-coated popcorn, you need more help than I can give you. Your life must be one long, dark February.

Five sporks out of five for Moose Munch.

Valentine's Day with a Milky Way heart

I love it when candy scrawls sweet nothings on its surface.

The evening may be barreling toward a close, but I wouldn't let Feb. 14 slip by without sending my loyal readers a valentine. A day inflated by big candy (for the record, I borrowed that sugary term from @SeinfeldToday on Twitter) shouldn't be passed up by any semi-serious food blogger.

Since I embody the term semi-serious, let's jump right in. This Valentine's Day has the critique taking a look at an interesting sweet tabbed the Milky Way Simply Caramel Heart. The 1.1 oz. yellow package caught my eye a few weeks ago, and I've been saving it for today.

Unwrapping reveals a molded piece of caramel-filled chocolate shaped like a two-heart tombstone with the words "Be Mine" emblazoned across the bottom. It's an attractive cocoa concoction, even if it raises an important question: Is this a Milky Way heart, as the wrapper claims, or is it Milky Way hearts?

Two distinct heart shapes are clearly visible. Yet the chocolate is a single molded smooth chunk with nary a seam to be found. Maybe we can call it a hybrid, consigning it in that hazy gray zone heretofore reserved for the age at which daughters can get their ears pierced. Maybe Milky Way should have just gone with a single-heart design, rendering this an academic discussion instead of the exceedingly practical one it's become.

Biting into the hearts -- or the "Be Mine" banner -- unleashes a river of caramel that's as free-flowing as caramel can be without causing frustrating deluges. It's sweet. It's sticky. It's a miniature version of a Milky Way Simply Caramel bar, which I called "one giant gravity well of caramel" in an April 2010 review.

That bit of self-valentining narcissistic quoting aside, I can tell you that I wasn't the biggest fan of the Milky Way Caramel bar. After about three bites the time of wine and roses ended, and the eating experience turned into a slog of sugar. It was just too much caramel.

Too much is a problem the heart version of the candy solves. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by design, it's about three bites. And they're an enjoyable burst of flavor.

A quick nit to pick before it's time to assign a very-special red construction-paper spork rating. The structural integrity of the Milky Way Simply Caramel Heart needs work. Upon my first bite, the entire top started caving in. My second bite tore off the remainder of that top, leaving an exposed boat filled with caramel. Things would have been better if we had more chocolate to balance it all out.

My love isn't blind to those problems, so I'll dock the heart by a spork and a half. Three-and-a-half sporks out of five.

Super Bowl XLVII preview

Super Bowl XLVII is tomorrow, and the unofficial American holiday that is the National Football League's championship weekend is in full swing. The Internet is awash with stories previewing the big game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens.

There are in-depth strategic and statistical previews. There are two-and-a-half-minute video previews that somehow say nothing. There are even stories written with second-grade sentence structure about drugged-up reporters at Super Bowl Media Day!

I won't be getting into any of that, though. Especially the drugs. This blog strives to be more family friendly than your average Super Bowl halftime show. And unlike the Super Bowl halftime show, this blog aims to be something you can pay attention to without wanting to vomit or put your head through a wall.

To that end, today's Super Bowl XLVII preview takes a hard look at the foods I'm planning to cook for Sunday night. My idea is a simple one: put together a meal representing the cities battling for the Lombardi Trophy.

Baltimore posed no problem for this quest. The city on the Chesapeake Bay is nearly synonymous with crab cakes. San Francisco, on the other hand, proved to be a bit more of a challenge. Maybe it's because I'm on the East Coast, but I never associated any food with the Bay Area except Rice-A-Roni. And I wanted something more challenging.

Eventually, I settled on bread called San Francisco sourdough. You probably guessed its basic formula. It's sourdough from San Francisco. So, armed with printed blueprints for bread and crab cakes, I set out for the grocery store last night to purchase the required ingredients.

As is often the case in this imperfect and unpredictable life, things did not go as planned. It was all sunshine and rainbows as I made my way through the produce section, successfully purchasing scallions, a jalapeno and chives for the crab cakes. I even picked up the panko -- Japanese bread crumbs -- without issue.

Then I came to the seafood section and the sticker shock it brings. Have you seen the price of crab lately? It's enough to make anyone crabby! I think something fishy is going on with the seafood industry, where the suppliers, fishermen and grocery stores are swimming together to scale up the price of crab meat.

Buying crab will put you in a financial pinch.

... Sorry about that last paragraph. It's just too hard to resist fish puns. The fact remains that I was faced with a serious problem, however. Crab meat came with a price tag of $28.99, which was awfully hard to swallow. And it was even harder to force down the gullet when I noticed the pack of imitation crab lurking a few shelves down for just $3.49.

If you don't know which option I went with, you haven't been reading this blog long enough. Into the cart went the fake stuff, and my plot for Baltimore crab cakes suddenly became one for Baltimore imitation crab cakes. The change probably won't be noticeable what with all the seasoning that goes into the recipe anyway, right?

Right?

Another problem popped up in the mustard section. I was 99 percent sure I had the Dijon mustard required for the crab cakes sitting in the refrigerator at home. Alas, that level of certainty wasn't good enough, and I had to pick up a whole new yellow bottle. (Returning home I would find Dijon mustard tucked safely in the door of the fridge, so if anyone has some good recipes that use it, I'm all ears.)

Ah, mustard! Present in the fridge, if not my memory.

Those crab cake issues were nothing compared to the challenges posed by San Francisco sourdough. I'd shrewdly used the Wegmans website to look up the location of yeast before I hit the store. It told me to search in the dairy section. Which I did. Unsuccessfully. After about five minutes of perusing, I gave up, resolving to circle back after locating the rest of the necessary baking goods.

Then I couldn't find any sourdough starter to save my life. After the yeast's refusal to rise into my field of view, this was too much. Like an overworked stay-at-home parent, I had to scrap my idea for homemade bread and turn to a box of Rice-A-Roni to save me.

Next to the Rice-A-Roni, I spied some Zatarain's, which claims to be a New Orleans tradition since 1889. New Orleans happens to be the city hosting the Super Bowl this year, so the Zatarain's went into the cart beside the San Francisco treat. A new plan came to mind, one pitting the prefabricated rice dishes against each other.

As I wrapped up my planned shopping, I realized I was going to have a lot of scallions left over from my crab cake cooking. Scallions, in case you were unawares, are similar to leeks. Therefore, I decided to do a riff on a potato and leek soup, too.
A quick phone-call assist from Deb, the official fiancée of Rick's Food Critique, gave me a list of the other ingredients I'd need. Yukon gold potatoes. Heavy cream. Buttermilk. Vegetable broth. Just like that, after 90 minutes, my pre-Super Bowl grocering was complete.

There's your preview of what I'll be eating on Super Bowl Sunday: Baltimore imitation crab cakes, Rice-A-Roni, Zatarain's and potato and scallion soup. A balanced meal it does not make, although I'd wager it will be tasty.

This is also a preview of the blog posts you can expect in the coming week. While time won't permit me to reflect upon my culinary successes and failures on this site tomorrow, you'll see new posts on each of the foods in the following days. Currently I plan one post covering the crab cakes, another swishing around the soup and a third declaring a winner between the two boxes of rice.

I hope you get a kick out of all of them. And enjoy the game!

Hanging out with dried pineapple

I'm pleased to report the long-awaited 2011/2012 Golden Spork awards look to be everything everyone expected. Ever. Anywhere in the universe.

You'll laugh. You'll cry. You might even rush out to buy foods that haven't been available for 24 months. One thing you won't do, however, is read the awards today.

See, electroplating utensils isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. So we'll all just have to wait a few more days until the sporks are ready to feed public demand. I'm targeting a post this weekend -- is Sunday good for everyone? Awards ceremonies are best on non-workdays, anyway.

If you need a snack to tie you over, I've got just the thing. It's what I've been munching as I prepare the Sporkies. It might even be one of the reasons they're late: dried pineapple.

I know it's not sexy. All those wrinkles. That pale yellow color. The dried-fruit stigma. Who wants to be seen in public with dried pineapple? People might start randomly playing guitars at you and asking if you make your own candles.

No one needs to be spotted with dried pineapple in polite company, fortunately. It's so sweet, you'll be tempted to gobble it up before you can ever take it out of the house. Try to have just a few pieces. I bet you can't. Before you know it, all of your dehydrated fruit will be gone.

That's what happened to me. I ate a 12 oz. bag -- that's nine servings -- in three nights. And most of it was gone after the first two. Only a few pieces were left tonight, just enough to start me pining for more.

You can see the damage below. I didn't even have the restraint to save enough pineapple for a photo shoot. Sorry, but we'll all have to do with a picture of the empty bag. Clear plastic isn't photogenic, but it proves my point that dried pineapple is irresistible.

The problem with photographing dried pineapple is you have to take a break from eating it long enough to get out the camera.

The pieces almost, almost disintegrate in your mouth. They require just enough tooth-pressure to give you a sense of chewing, which is, of course, always rewarding. As for flavor, you'll have a good sense of things if you take the juice in which canned pineapple swims and crystallize it.

Moving on to drawbacks, dried fruit isn't always cheap. My bag was $2.99, and that's the lowest price per pound I've been able to find. The sugar content is, unsurprisingly, pretty high, too. Plus, I'm a little worried about consuming mass quantities of the little yellow morsels. How much can you eat before succumbing to some form of gastrointestinal distress?

 A price tag below $3 and high saccharide content is hardly reason to dock sporks in a snack this good. Five out of five. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go plate more sporks.