Rating: ©-3/4 chips (return to sender)
Comments:
All right, now we have officially seen it all. The chip industry, will never be the same. It is one thing for a rap or country star to endorse some chips, and it’s no big deal for a race car driver or comedian to have their own line of chips, but when a globally renowned yoga guru decides to release her own line of chips, we just can’t believe it?!?
Apparently, according to Wai Lana’s website bio page, “it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone as influential as Wai Lana in bringing yoga to the mainstream. Her internationally aired TV series continues to attract a huge audience and has played a key role in yoga’s skyrocketing popularity. Famous for making it easy and effective, Wai Lana excels at making the ancient art of yoga a life-enhancing experience for anyone who practices along with her.” (www.wailana.com).
To be completely honest, prior to these chips, we had never heard of Wai Lana, and her ginormous yoga brand, but as you all know, our hobbies consist of eating and writing about chips, followed closely with pumping iron and running miles, but not yoga. However, with the release of these Barbeque Cassava Chips, Wai Lana is trying to bring the two disconnected interests closer together. Do the two belong together? Not this time!!
According to Wikipedia “Cassava is the third most important source of calories in the tropics, after rice and maize.” In other words, cassava are more popular than potatoes in many parts of the world. Wonder why we don’t see more cassava chips then? Wai Lana’s cassava chips are not like traditional cassava or potato chips that are simply fried and sliced cross sections of a cassava. Instead, Wai Lana has opted for the lighter and healthier popped version of the chip. How this popping of the chip is executed is still beyond us? What it does texturally to the chip is expand and puff its body, making the chip lighter, and more airy, and we think more crispy and crunchy. We don’t necessarily love the chips’ texture, but they were easy to eat, and would make a perfectly acceptable vehicle for delivering loads of flavor into our mouths….if, that was the case, but sadly it is not.
Right away, the first thing we notice is that these chips are very, very fragrant, and they smell like some uniquely familiar combination of herbs and spices, that definitely DO NOT remind us of any barbeque we are familiar with. Flavor wise however, they are very mild. A subtle taste of spices simply tickled the backs of our throats, but nothing really ever hit our tongues. Does barbeque in Hawaii mean something different??? We don’t taste any of the usual suspects….no tomato, no brown sugar, no vinegar, no mustard, no chile flake, no, no, no. Instead we taste (smell – more precisely) notes of curry, turmeric, and many other seasonings that we associate with Indian food – not BBQ.
Sorry, these just didn’t work for us. They were deceiving, and poorly executed. Luckily, we are not going to have to worry about getting in a bunch of yoga and burning off very many calories, mainly because we didn’t eat very many of them!
As always we would love to hear what you think. Agree or disagree. Let us know.
Chip Ratings Scale:
(1/4 increments)
© – return to sender
©© – tolerable
©©© – notable
©©©© – lip-smacking
©©©©© – “A” list
Chip Review 