Tunisia has a passion about harissa, as well as a passion for potato chips. The passion for harissa is obvious if you walk into any grocery store in Tunisia, with at least one full isle of groceries dedicated to the spicy paste. For those unfamiliar harissa is a spicy red pepper paste often added to stews, but also sometimes just used straight as a dip for flatbread. I have yet to have a harissa that I can really tolerate heat wise. I’ve had it in stews a few times where the heat didn’t blow my socks off, but that’s only because they were homemade stews and I added very little. It’s very spicy, but that’s how they like it in Tunisia.

The passion for potato chips is a little stranger. All I can say about it is that having lived in Tunisia, it seems that during certain holidays people eat a lot of potato chips. I’ve seen it both on the streets and in the grocery stores. Carts full of fresh made potato chips on the streets, and lineups at grocery stores to buy chips during certain holidays. I’m sure there’s some kind of story behind it, but I have yet to figure it out. That’s why these chips make a lot of sense on paper. The package is a proud Tunisian person and the flavour is also Tunisian.

This seems like the perfect snack on paper, but there’s a couple of problems that make this a little more difficult for me. The first problem is what makes these chips not designed for me in the first place, I don’t like harissa that much. I find the flavour to be lacking, except for a bitterness and the heat. The bitterness I can deal with, but the heat is always way too much for my liking. I ate 3 of these chips and decided to call it quits for one sitting.

The second problem is one I’ve discovered a few times in Tunisia, these are not really potato chips. They’re round, crunchy disks of potato starch compressed and they deep fried. While I’m sure there’s actual potato in the ingredients, the potato flavour and essence is all gone. There are a few brands of real potato chips in Tunisia, but I’ve also discovered a number of these fake potato chips too. While I can’t blame the folks at Oriental Snacks about the flavour, the “chip” design really drags this treat down a few points.