Kotas Reviews Lay's Fried Green Tomato Chips

The Lay's Do Us A Flavor promotion for this year continues down a strange yet somehow familiar path, it seems, as we find ourselves with a primary food item being converted into a chip version. Have we gone too far this time? Is this truly the pinnacle of our horrible Frankensteinien food experiments? Or is this simply yet another in a long line of "uhhhh...what?" flavors of chips that has come before? Ladies and Gentlemen, let's get a bite of Lay's Fried Green Tomato chips.

Wavy like a Fox!

As a resident of the South, I should probably be familiar with these, but they were never a staple of my household growing up and seeing them in restaurants was always a novelty. In fact, I can't be sure, but I think when that movie I was a bit surprised to find that they were associated with Southern Cooking. My culinary journey is stilted and weird. Anycrap, we have these things from Lay's. The green packaging contrasts significantly with the picture of the red-dust coated chip, but it maintains the same level of detail and quality as other chips in this promotion, so that's good. Let's open it up.

Uh...huh. Probably won't see these at the Whistle Stop Cafe, that's for sure.

 Well, they smell quite tomato-y, though I couldn't tell you what distinguished it as "fried green". They look somewhat less flavor dust coated than the packaging would indicate, but that's okay, these things never get it perfectly right, eh? The flavor is...well, it has its own unique charm. It's got a strong dose of tomato, though it's more like sun dried than fresh (or fried. Or Green), but it also has a highly surprising spicy kick that I was not expecting. A few mouthfuls of these beauties and you'll have the makings of a sinus cleaning amount of heat. It's not a very flavorful heat though. I mean, there's the tomato flavor and then your mouth just gets...hot. It's not bad, but it's really weird as I absolutely was not expecting ANY heat, let alone a decent amount of it. I'm told that fried green tomatoes occasionally have a spicy kick depending on the recipe, so that's it I guess? Weird.

On the FACE Rating System, these get 0 Faces. I don't hate them. They taste alright I guess, if you like Spicy Sun-Dried Tomatoes, but they do not really remind me of Fried Green Tomatoes at all, and yes I have had them. It's not a flavor that I would go out of my way for, but if you really want something spicy, but are sick of all the traditional "spicy" type flavors (BBQ, Flamin', Nacho, etc), these might be fun to try. Or not. For me, they are quite "meh".