Making a potato chip taste like a sandwich is kind of a tall order. Not to be overly pedantic, but the thing about sandwiches is that they have a lot of elements—bread, meat, condiments, probably some vegetable toppings. It’s a lot of flavors to cram into a chip and, frankly, I wasn’t sure Lay’s could pull it off with their three new summertime flavors, all of which are inspired by very specific sandwiches: BLT Sandwich, Baked Buffalo Chicken Sandwich, and Wavy Cuban Sandwich. See, these are all sandwiches with a lot of different flavors and a lot of…stuff. We tried them to find out whether eating these chips would make me eat my words.
These are totally solid Buffalo sauce-flavored chips. If you like the tangy, hot saucy flavor of Buffalo sauce, you’ll like them! But, sadly, they don’t taste like much besides Buffalo sauce. I don’t get chicken or pickles or melty American cheese (I wouldn’t have necessarily expected the cheese, but that’s the way they show the sandwich on the bag). The fact that they’re baked also works against them. Why would you flavor a baked chip like a fried sandwich? Buffalo chicken sandwiches are greasy as hell and Baked Lay’s are among the driest materials known to man. Nice tang, solid Buffalo flavor, but not a sandwich in a chip by a long shot.
Two of the three main ingredients in a BLT are pretty subtle, so I suppose it’s not surprising that BLT Sandwich Lay’s mostly taste like bacon. As flavors go, it’s a big boy. And, honestly, I’m not positive anyone wants chips that taste like lettuce. All the same, that’s what was promised and these don’t really deliver. These mostly made me want to eat the exact BLT that’s pictured on the bag (but with, like, 100 times more mayo), but they’re still getting 8/10 Sporks because they are potato chips that taste like bacon and that is clearly a good thing.
Of the three flavors, this should have been the hardest to pull off. There’s so much going on in a Cuban sandwich: pork, ham, mustard, pickles, Swiss cheese. Somehow, Lay’s goddamn did it. These chips are a miracle of food science. Everything is there. You get smoky pork, you get tangy yellow mustard and briny pickles—I swear I even taste the creamy nuttiness of the Swiss cheese. We all lost our minds when we tasted these. “The others are good, but this is a ‘rush out and buy it now’ chip,” editor-in-chief Justine Sterling said. I agree. Go out and buy these immediately. Stock up so you can share them with your future children. These chips rule.
Gwynedd Stuart, Sporked’s managing editor, is an L.A.-based writer and editor who spends way, way too much time at the grocery store. She’s never met an Old El Paso taco or mozzarella stick she didn’t like.
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