Kettle-cooked potato chips are now common on grocery store shelves, and some prefer them over the classic ridged Ruffles. Kettle chips are offered as free office snacks, airplane snacks, and as a wellness product! When the chips were revived in the 1980s, they were reintroduced as artisan chips, produced through a different process from mass-produced chips. However, kettle chips are produced in a similar cooking method, just without the aid of technology. Even with the artisan appeal of these chips, are they actually bad? Eater’s Jenny Zhang thinks so:
While some might find it a sensory pleasure to chew on handfuls of spud shards that jab at their gums, I confess I do not. Kettle chips are too hard, too edged, too committed to a brutality of texture to deliver a balanced gustatory experience. No matter the flavor of the chips, the taste nearly always smacks overwhelmingly of oil. Eating a small bagful feels like coating one’s mouth in grease, almost like a salve left over to make up for all the vigorous chomping that tooth and tongue and gums had to engage in to facilitate consumption. All that work, and for what?
Classic thin chips are just as greasy, as evidenced by the shine of one’s fingerprints after reaching into the chip bag one or five or 20 times, but here, the oil is offset by the lightness of the crisp, dissolving on the tongue like a cloud of potato-perfumed air. These are the gentler cousins of the kettle chip, their ethereality of form and flavor miraculously born of industrial manufacturing. When it comes to snacking, there are fewer choices finer than a wholly intact sour-cream-and-onion chip, better yet one whose circumference is roughly that of a hockey puck, its delicate crunch giving way to an allium tang as salty as it is sour.
Image via Eater
Of course, as you say, personal preferences are still king when it comes to picking which snack you'll eat. It's like asking "is the color blue bad" when it really doesn't matter at all.