I’m not sure why I bought these chips. I keep telling myself that I should avoid turning Candy Critic into an extreme eating challenge website. I try not to eat the biggest or weirdest foods in the world. I also try to avoid the spiciest foods, since I’m a pretty big wimp when it comes to anything hot. The thing is, every time a snack comes around that claims to be extremely spicy, I forget about the fact that I don’t like spicy foods, and that I don’t want Candy Critic to turn into a food challenge website, and accept whatever challenge is given to me. When I bought these chips, there were other interesting flavours available, I even bought a few of the other options. For some reason though, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try a chip that had the words “Thai”, “Extreme”, and “Hot”.
I will say this right off the bat, these are spicy. They’re spicier than I normally enjoy eating any kind of food. I can’t say that it’s the hottest food I’ve ever eaten in my life, but it might be the spiciest Lay’s potato chip I’ve ever eaten. I’ll also mention that I have not finished this bag of chips, nor do I think I ever will. I have some friends coming over this weekend, and I’m going to save some of these chips for them to try. I’m not only sharing these chips because I think my friends will enjoy them, I’m also sharing them because I’m fairly certain that I will not be able to handle the heat of these. The thing about the heat of these chips is that it builds. It also seems to spread to more parts of your mouth and throat as well. So, I figure that if I finished this bag of chips, I might cross over a heat threshold, and frankly I am not interested in finding out what that threshold is.
The surprising thing about these chips is the flavour. Each time you put a chip in your mouth, there’s a really nice sweet barbeque flavour that floods your taste buds. It’s probably one of the best barbeque flavours I’ve ever tasted in a potato chip. It’s sweet, but not sickly sweet, and at first bit it’s not hot at all. After a few chews the heat does set in, and the sweet barbeque flavour is lost, but for a brief few seconds these are one of the best barbeque flavoured potato chips I’ve ever eaten.
I’m not sure why the flavour works, I think if it had the flavour without the heat, I might find them to be a little too sweet. The thing is, the heat and the sweet really balance well off each other, until my mouth feels like it’s on fire.