Kurkure Funjabi Khadai Masala

Local international groceries are the shit. Whenever I'm in a new town or even trolling around my own town, I seek out two things: international groceries for foreign snacks and different fast food restaurants. I'm sure that I have a directory of all these places in the tri-state area. So I dragged Swagger and Dillinger to the Asian grocery (one of three) the other day after a delicious lunch at Mi Tierra and made them buy me Kurkure- the Indian equivalent of Cheetos.

Between this hilariously named "Funjabi" flavor and an old standby, Naughty Tomatoes, I was torn between which to review first. I've been saving up some salacious puns for the Naughty Tomatoes, but this one looked more limited edition, so up it went.After kicking it at the gym like Ronnie from the Jersey Shore, I came home to a roomful of roommates- perfect guinea pigs for testing this new and strange snack. The package advertised a flavor of Rajma curry, cinnamon, cloves, and black cardamom. Sounds like my kind of gig. Upon further examination, I found out that rajma, both the curry spice and part of the chip base, is kidney beans. Definitely interesting.

The Kurkure were Cheeto-like, but actually had a much better, smoother consistency, with none of those little cornmeal chunks. This could have been due to the kidney beans, but might have also been the rice meal, the main composition of the dough. The flavor is unique- the perfect representation of the foods I seek! It was much spicier than I thought, with a fresh pepper flavor and a heavy curried garlic scent and aftertaste. I tasted a lot of coriander and cinnamon.

Although I didn't taste the cardamom, there was a sweet undertone to this that really reminded me of the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos that I enjoy on my rare Subway treks, but with a lot more heat. Interestingly enough, one of the lower ingredients on the list was cocoa solids, but I'm guessing those were unsweetened. They probably added an extra element of richness to the flavor, though.The strangest aspect of these was the nutrition. In a 120 gram bag, there are roughly 620 calories. This beats out even the worst of American snacks, and for reasons that I genuinely can't understand. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Overall, I loved these. I love curry and I love chips, so they were a real hit. I'm definitely going to try these again and get some more flavors on my shelf.