When’s the last time you chose your potato chips? The answer is: never! You don’t choose potato chips! Potato chips choose you. They come for you at some point around the first of your grandma’s annual Labor Day barbecues that you remember and then you’re drawn, moth to flame, to the same [redacted, crunch-less bite-sized paper bits] each time you find yourself in the chip aisle.
*Whispers* It doesn’t have to be this way… The world of potato chips is vast and nuanced. You can change things for your children by making better choices/picking up a different bag of chips for this year’s gathering. Be!! The change!! You want to see!!!!! In the world!!!!!!
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
And so, out of this deep-rooted sense for public service, the Serious Eats team recently pulled together nine brands of original-flavor (a.k.a. plain, unflavored, but not unsalted) potato chips you’re likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of it…while complaining throughout that we should’ve made tuna melts to go with these piles of chips and also that salt & vinegar is a better time than plain chips!
The Contenders
- Cape Cod Original Kettle Cooked Potato Chips
- Deep River Snacks Potato Chips, Kettle Cooked, Original Salted
- Hal’s Original Flavor Chips
- Herr’s Potato Chips, Crisp ’n Tasty
- Kettle Brand Sea Salt Potato Chips
- Lay’s Classic Potato Chips
- Siete Sea Salt Potato Chips
- Utz Original Potato Chips
- Wise Potato Chips, Golden, Original
The Criteria
A good original potato chip is—and let me be the first one to say this—crunchy. Yeah, I said crunchy before I said “potato-y!” The crunch and the salt matter more than the potato of it all!! You’ll know you’ve encountered a quality potato chip when the following series of events occur, exactly in this order:
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
- You and the person across the table hear a crunch upon first bite.
- You immediately know that chip won’t be your last in this sitting.
- You see or feel no need to wipe your hands of grease before you reach for a second chip.
- You eat the second chip; you let slip involuntarily, from the bowels of something deep and unknown inside of you: “Oh god, I’m in love with these.” The person across the table from you confirms: “Oh god, I know, same.”
- You unwittingly slap at a pile of napkins after chip four to clear that delicious afterthought of grease.
- You find that 12 fluid ounces of a soda in the vicinity quenches you exactly of your thirst.
Anyway! To level the playing field of ALL AVAILABLE CHIPS, we zeroed in on original flavor, non-ridged potato-only chips. No other veggies, no other flavors—just potatoes and just salt (and the oil the potatoes were fried in, of course). If you end up liking this particular batch of nonsense, we will move on to other (better) flavors and textures. Just say the word, my angry, DM-happy sweets!!
A few notes on our overall findings before we get on to the rankings: This group had a very clear-cut preference for a kettle-cooked, sea-salted chip. While I’ve listed the ingredients for each brand, I couldn’t correlate any particular frying oil to “a better chip,” though it’s worth noting that the only instance of avocado oil in the whooole bunch landed itself at the very bottom. I found nostalgia played less of a role than it seems to have in previous tests, which was fun!! Maybe everyone is generally feeling better about things? Hahahahahah!!
OK. Whatever. The chips!
The Rankings
Kettle Brand Sea Salt Potato Chips, 4.16/5
Imagine a potato chip being so bold as to taste like a…potato! Et voila: these!! Each taster remarked on the pervasive-in-a-nice-way potato flavor, oftentimes noting in subsequent options that that same crucial flavor was lacking. These kettle-cooked chips were substantive, slightly greasy (Amanda said she’d expect to want to wash her hands after a handful of them), and LARGE. The latter prompted Genevieve to write in her notes: “These are practically the size of my palm! (Is this Kettle??)” Classic Genevieve. Classic potato chips!
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oils (canola and/or sunflower and/or safflower and/or soybean), sea salt.
Hal’s New York Original Flavor Chips, 3.83/5
Perhaps the only instance in which the immediately notable presence of oil felt correct rather than icky. They were “oily, but together with the super crispiness, it’s not a bad thing,” wrote one tester, while another called the oil “just right.” Now that I’m rereading these notes, I see no comments in the realm of saltiness or flavor, so…we’re going to call Hal’s (also kettle-cooked!) a fantastic option for those who like to ruin people in the vicinity’s lives via satisfying crunching and also don’t have time for more than a quick hands-to-pants wipe.
Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower oil, sea salt
Deep River Snacks Potato Chips, Kettle Cooked, Original Salted, 3.61/5
Our first heavy-weight contender! These chips, also kettle-cooked, didn’t melt after the first snap–they were substantial enough that you had to chew a little bit. They were appropriately salty, impressively crispy, and, again, pretty thick (…to the point that it was the only reason I could pinpoint these not ranking higher). Even still: This was the only chip of the bunch editors remarked they kept coming back to.
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one of more of the following: corn, cottonseed, sunflower, or canola oil), sea salt
Herr’s Potato Chips, Crisp ’n Tasty, 3.56/5
Distinctly savory, these morsels!! Like, to the point that “They barely remind me of a potato?” Kelli wrote. Genevieve even compared the experience to eating a cured egg yolk, which reflected in just about everyone’s numbers. Herr’s (again again again: kettle-cooked!) are a more interesting and nuanced option for those looking for flavor above crunch and grease. This is also the first appearance of regular old salt in the batch; the top-seeded picks called out “sea salt” on their labels.
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (corn, cottonseed, sunflower), salt.
Lay’s Classic Potato Chips, 3.16/5
You can take a horse to water, but…nope, that’s not it. You can teach a person to fish, but…woof, no, not that one either. How does the saying go? “You can think you’ve put enough potato chips in front of a group of absurdly detail-oriented food nerds that they won’t be able to ID Lay’s, but…they will see right through your ruse because Lay’s was the golden-ish yellow, oil-slicked, snackable sog of their youths?” Yeah, that’s the one. (OK, in all seriousness: Here we enter not kettle-cooked territory, as well as a distinct absence of sea salt!! They’ll both make a return toward the end, but…we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.) (Nailed that last one!!) Aside from clocking these as Lay’s right away, the group didn’t have a lot to say about these in their tasting feedback sheets.
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (sunflower oil, and/or corn oil, and/or canola oil), salt.
Wise Potato Chips, Golden, Original, 3.15/5
These tasted like Lay’s, but like if Lay’s had made a last-minute decision to throw the craveable-yet-manageable greasiness of their product out the window? More helpfully, Amanda wrote: “These tasted like a processed food that a ‘90s health PSA would warn against.” Helen noted an overwhelming oily aftertaste. This makes sense, as this was the chip with the most potential oils involved, per its ingredient list (“one or more” of no less than five different oils).
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: corn, cottonseed, sunflower, soybean or canola oil), salt.
Utz Original Potato Chips, 3/5
To look at these is to think you’ve laid eyes on the Utopian Ideal of Potato Chips. And…they were very nice!! I think we all just hope that when we are re-defining “the perfect potato chip” (after society collapses and we begin rebuilding again, etc., etc.) that we will want said chips to taste fresh! And salty!
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: cottonseed oil, corn oil, and/or sunflower oil), salt.
Cape Cod Original Kettle Cooked Potato Chips, 2.83/5
The group’s tasting notes for these nearly identically mirrored those of their Deep River ones. The distinction was that these (which are kettle-cooked, btw!) were even thicker, which helped crystallize that our preference is a thinner-cut chip! I would go ahead and copy/paste everyone’s pithy lil notes from this one, but they all can be boiled down to: “Wow! Crunchy! Wow! Too thick?”
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oils (canola and/or sunflower and/or safflower and/or soybean), sea salt
Siete Sea Salt Potato Chips, 2.56/5
Contrastingly, the kettle-cooked Siete chips were so thin they practically melted, prompting everyone to comment on their sogginess. There was a prominent grease to the whole experience, enveloping an otherwise very nice potato flavor. This is the only one of the batch that used avocado oil. Related: I’m adding “avocado oil taste test” to my Q3 pitch list. 🙂
Ingredients: Potatoes, avocado oil, sea salt
Our Testing Methodology
All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
