Pernes Long Wasabi Potato Chips

Another SIAL goodie! This time, a chip hailing from Romania with a Japanese flavor profile, picked up in Paris by an American. So, a multi-cultural delight by proxy. As soon as I saw these, I knew I had to pick up a package of them. According to their website, they are the longest chips in the world. They follow the same format as Pringles- extruded potato snack, but are thicker and also packaged in a structure that, if switched with a similar package containing a hand-painted portrait of Vladimir Lenin in porcelain on a human tooth, would be packaged with similar care. Seriously. They are sheathed in a cardboard barrier, around a plastic-sealed foil package. Condoms go through less protocol than this and they prevent babies from happening

Once these wonder-chips are out of their shuttle, they are pungent with wasabi. And cardboard in scent, but that disappears about five seconds in. They are thicker than your average chip, but lacking oil, are consequently much more brittle. The flavor powder is applied much like the spray paint from your favorite 90's airbrushed tee. Yes, the one from Sharon's bat mitzvah with a blatant generic ripoff of Goofy on it- gradients all up in this bitch. As a result of the inconsistent spraying, the intensity of each bite ranges from sinus-clearing to weaksauce. The company also has the best website I have ever seen. There's a moveable 3D model!
The texture is bizarre. Their structure straddles the line between object and food, creating somewhat of a dissonance when snacking on them. I feel less like I'm eating them and more like I'm processing them for some wasabi-generated all-natural machine, possibly from the mid to late 90's (do I sense a trend?) when dot-matrix paper was still utilized, minus the soul-numbing frustration of visiting a parent at work. However, once you get past that, they are all too easy to eat and have a wonderful flavor. I'm surprised that I haven't seen any reviews of these- although Dave's Cupboard did write about some chips similar to these back in 2011.

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