REVIEW: Barcel Takis – Xplosion (cheese and chilli pepper)

Rating: ©©©©-3/4 chips  (lip-smacking)

Wow!  Maybe that is all we should say?!  Just leave it at that!  Boom! Wow! Xplosion!  Drop the bag, stop our chomping, and walk away!!

Truthfully, we never thought the day would come when we would actually be flabbergasted, and head-over-heals excited about a Takis product of any flavor, shape or type!  Well, that day has passed, and along came a giant new flavor XPLOSION, and we probably don’t have enough good adjectives to accurately explain our enthusiasm for Takis’ deliciously new cheese and chilli pepper rolled tortilla chips!

A little back story may be necessary to properly set up why these particular Takis are so fantastic:

The Barcel Chip Company does a few different styles of snacks, but we’re fairly certain that their Takis line is their number one seller.  Takis are a riff on the uber popular gas station delicacy, the taquito.  For those of you completely oblivious to gas station food, or Mexican cuisine (flautas), taquitos typically consist of corn tortillas filled with meat/cheese, rolled into cylinder shapes and then deep fried (delicious sounding, we know).  Barcel’s Takis are a crunchy snack variation of this item that is filled with anything, but they are corn tortilla chips that have been rolled tight, deep fried and then seasoned for our tasting pleasure.

However, where this taquitos inspired style of chip ROLLS us very wrong, is in the shape and texture!  We do not love the shape, crunch or consistency of the tightly rolled tortilla chips.  We miss our tortilla chip sides that we can run our tongues across, and lick the seasoning.  The Takis don’t have much licking surface at all (we prefer our chips to have two sides – twice the seasoning coverage!).  The crunch and consistency of the Taki much more heavy and dense than traditional tortilla chips.  By rolling the tortilla chips into little taquito shapes, layers are created, and these layers result in a lot more heavy, jaw workout, crunching.  Some people love this, but overall, we do not!  We prefer a lighter and crispier crunch and consistency.  Which is part of why we love these, please continue.

Wow!  We may already have mentioned that above, but in case we didn’t, we thought we had better let you know.  Takis’ cheese and chilli pepper combo is a tangy, funky, zippy, cheesy, and spicy flavor XPLOSION!  The flavor combo is somehow unlike anything we have ever tasted.  Seriously, the chilli & cheese seasoning has a deliciously funky cheese flavor to it!  Almost like an aged, stinky cheese?!  Then there is this sour layer of flavor that sort of tastes like lime, but is more likely just a combo of the cheese, whey, citric acid and and potassium chloride.  It is unusual, and we could see some people possibly not liking it, but to us it was magic!  Finally, at the tail end was the heat.  We did not think that there was much at first, but then the hot chilli pepper resin (that’s what the ingredient list calls it?), appears and does its job well.  We would rename the flavor to funky lime and chile cheese!

But Chip Review, what makes the texture of these rolled tortilla Takis any different than all of the others?  Because, as you have so thoroughly explained above, your main issue with these chips are their texture and design, and these appear to inhabit the same basic formation.

We don’t exactly know what to say, or how to explain it, but the texture of these Takis definitely delivers a softer crunch than any others we have tasted.  Could it be the addition of cheese?  It seems as though the enzymes from the cheese cultures have actually broken down the corn tortilla proteins, in turn removing much of the hard and dense crunch that we complain about with the Takis rolled tortilla chips!  And, if you believe any of that, than we also have a bag of chips made of gold that we would like to sell you.  And we should probably mention that we have absolutely no clue if anything we just said actually makes sense from a technical standpoint?!  But, whatever it may be, we don’t really care because these are practically perfect!

Once again, we never thought that we would actually say this, but these are amazing!  Thank you Takis for making us believers!  The Takis Xplosion have placed themselves at the top of our taquito-style snack list, easily surpassing Doritos Dinamita – Fiery Habanero, and quite possibly positioning themselves to be included on our end of the year top 25 list!!

As always, these are our thoughts, we would love to hear what you think.  Agree or disagree, let us know.

Takis discovered at Walmart; Countryside, Illinois

Barcel Official Website

Chip Ratings Scale:

(1/4 increments)

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©© – tolerable

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