Deep Dish Pizza Cheese Curls - Ollie's Bargain Outlet $1.89

 Deep Dish Pizza Cheese Curls - Ollie's Bargain Outlet $1.89

Ollie's had a trio of novelty Herr's products in stock and the prices were so low I couldn't resist buying them all! Even the flavors I was skeptical of! There were these Deep Dish Pizza curls, giant bags of Jalapeno Popper curls, and (the one I was most skeptical of) Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup curls. My pantry is overflowing with neon orange puffs, so lets see if these are worth hanging on to.

They may be a smaller brand, but Herr's has released it's fair share of interesting flavors-of-the-week products. I lean towards chips as my salty snackfood of choice, so in the past I've had summer sweet corn and sloppy Joe themed potato chips from Herr's, but it seems their cheese curl line has quite a lot to offer.

Flavor-wise, I think Herr's does a good job keeping up with it's competition (like Lay's), but design-wise...they're trapped in a bizarre time-warp. This bag looks like 90's Fresh Prince-style graffiti slapped on top of a 1980's pizzeria painting. It seems bizarre, but that pretty much sums up Herr's aesthetic. A lot of their bags have this weird 80's-90's hip-hop look to them that I just don't understand.

We've got big blocky cartoon letters and a fairly monotone color palette. It has it's own unique charm...but it's still pretty bad. That being said, this isn't a bag I gravitated towards because of it's looks and I think it's stylized packaging is holding it back from getting more attention nationwide. 

The first thing I noticed when I opened the bag was that these curls aren't really curls at all. Actually, I don't know what to call these. Tubes? They're definitely not stick-straight, but these are not 'c'-shaped curls either. Their shape doesn't effect their snackability for me, and I don't hold it against them, but I've never seen such un-curly cheese curls before and wanted to make a note of it. Maybe it has something to do with the flavoring process?

Once opened, the snacks inside smell like standard cheese curls coated in the shaker cheese from a boardwalk pizza join and a healthy dose of garlic powder. At first sniff, this is giving me flashbacks to the Cheesy Garlic Bread chips from the first ever Lay's Do Us A Flavor contest. It's definitely an appealing aroma, but it lacks the tomato-notes I would expect from a pizza-themed product.

Visually, the curls are a bright orange color with flecks of green herbs. (I think it might be parsley or oregano.)

I popped a cheese...tube? into my mouth, and you know what? These are pretty good! Artificial, but good. I can taste dusty orange cheddar, Romano cheese (fast food shaker quality, definitely not freshly grated by any means), sweet garlic powder, and an herb-like finish that reminds me of pizza flavored Combos. Not as good an a slice of actual Deep Dish Pizza, but you can definitely taste that it's pizza inspired.

There are a lot of pizza flavored snackfoods on the market, but not all are created equal. I would say this is on-par with one of my favorite guilty snack-food pleasures, pizza Combos, only much lighter, and far superior than pizza flavored Goldfish (which I think are weak-sauce, but I've never been a Goldfish cracker fan). These are cheap, tasty, and satisfying.  

 © Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net

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