Boulder Canyon Avocado Oil Malt Vinegar & Sea Salt Chips - Target: Marlton, NJ
Boulder Canyon Avocado Oil Malt Vinegar & Sea Salt Chips - Target: Marlton, NJ
That may have been one of the longest product titles I've ever typed.
I think most of you have caught onto this by now, but I'm a sucker for cheap products and saving money. Whenever I'm at Target I check out the clearance food, which is usually on an end-cap somewhere in the grocery section, to see if I can scoop up any awesome marked down items to review. Usually the end-caps are filled with random odds and ends, like flavored tomato sauces (which are somehow always there), seasonal candy, and flavored coffees, but every now and again I score something really awesome to review. Today's score are these chips that are fried using avocado oil, sounds pretty neat right? Let's check it out.
Avocado oil is actually something I have in my pantry right now. Full disclosure, I use it for beauty purposes (I put it in my hair for a oil treatment when it's really dry. Foodie beauty tips! notreally) and I honestly don't use it for cooking because to me it's a "fancier" oil that I bought just for my hair, so I'll stick to using the cheaper stuff in my pantry for food, but it's supposedly a great frying oil. I'm sure there all kinds of sites out there talking about why avocado oil is a better frying oil than others, but I'm no foodie scientist and I don't to pretend to be. I bought these because I love salt & vinegar chips, the packaging was nice, and they were on clearance.
Speaking of the packaging, this bag is pretty interesting. We have a combination of green and purple, a lovely matte finish, and some faux texturing. There aren't that many purple chips bags out there, so something like this really stands out, and it's layout is really appealing, but simple. My only complaint about anything design-wise is the typeface. In areas where the white text is against darker colors (like the purple) the font reads just fine, but when it's against that bright green, it's a mess. Even a faux drop shadow won't save it's legibility. I can read it, but it's far more difficult than it should be, and it looks out of place with the rest of the bag. I would have done a color swap and used the bag's purple for that text against the green instead, but that's really my only complaint about this overall design. Other than that it's pretty nice, and it was the fanciest looking into in the Target clearance section.
I opened up the bag, and as always there was quite a bit of air inside to keep the chips from being crushed during their travels, but for the price I paid, it was still a pretty good amount. Had I paid the nearly $4.00 full price I might have felt differently, but for less than $2.00, this was great.
The chips smell strongly of malt vinegar and oil. Avocado oil doesn't have a strong aroma, so these aren't going to smell like avocado or guacamole or anything, but this does have that oily kettle-chip aroma that reminds me of when I worked at Panera Bread. (Even now I still crave those shrapnel-like kettle chips. Before working there I hated them thinking they were way too hard, but now I absolutely love them. I crave them all the time.)
I popped a chip into my mouth, and the vinegar flavoring was very malty and pretty strong. These aren't as strongly seasoned as my favorite go-to salt & vinegar chip, but they're stronger than other popular brands I've had in the past. The chip is thick and crispy, due the the kettle-cooking process, and the taste is a bit hard to describe. I mean, it tastes like malt vinegar coated kettle chips. I'm not too sure how I can elaborate on that. They are vinegar-y, lightly salted, and very addictive.
As I ate the first few chips I thought to myself, these are pretty good, but I eat my items as I write these reviews, and the more I eat, the more I like these. The maltier vinegar flavoring isn't my favorite, but it grew on me, and as I approach the bottom of this bag I'm actually getting a little sad. Target clearance items tend to be things that are seasonal or discontinued, so this might be on the chopping block and about to disappear from store shelves, which would be a pity. I can see myself craving another bag in the near future. I checked the website and it doesn't look like these are going anywhere, so that's a relief.
If you like salt & vinegar chips, these are definitely worth checking out, and if you're lucky you might be able to find them on clearance at Target like I did.
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