Date with Ikea

It’s been way too long since the last chipweb update! Since November, I have visited the vast, confusing, wonderful, horrible and thrilling world of European chipdom, and now plan on sharing what I found. I’ll start with the Swedes, and the lovable LantChips, which I did not buy in Sweden, but rather and rather conveniently in an Ikea.

All nuance aside, most decent potato chips taste at least fleetingly similar; these LantChips taste more like potatoes than any others I’ve had. The first bite triggers one of those moments in eating, rare and always unforgettable, of “oh, this is what this is supposed to taste like,” like fresh from the farm milk or the perfect Florida orange. LantChips taste like potato chips! Like a chipped potato. Unfortunately, I'm writing of the taste from memory, so gone are any adequate words I could use to describe these "Scandinavian style" chips. They were brittle, with a deep crunch, and not too salty. They simply were unique, perhaps due to the specific breed of potato used. They were “dirty” – blemishes and possibly some skins left unpeeled – they taste of the earth and of dirt. The back of the bag contains a few paragraphs about the cooking process, written with an obvious pride and understanding. I tried salted and sour cream & onion, the latter containing chips with an almost impossibly subtle dusting of flavor. A perfect accompaniment to a sandwich lunch, they are certainly exceptional, and blow out of the water most chips in this country. As their website proclaims: “The English translation is under construction.”