Saturday, February 6, 2010

Cheetos Cheddar Jalapeño

Cheetos are the a quintessential lunchbox snack, and they're always churning out new flavors. However, all the flavors are generally those that are congruent with cheesiness. Doritos corners the strangeness market, with the sour cream and the sweet and spicy chili, but Cheetos tends to stick to flavors that go well with cheese.
When I saw these in my local 7-11, I was immediately intrigued. I saw these along with the white cheddar flavor that Junk Food Betty had also recently reviewed and I had to try them. Along with the recent failure of the Tim McGraw's Fritos, also vaguely jalapeño tasting, I wanted to see if these set the bar and made an accurate realization of jalapeño flavoring.
They weren't too bad. Aside from the fact that they're blindingly orange, they aren't awful. The jalapeño is different from the hot flavoring in that it's a fresher, more peppery taste instead of just the spicy flavoring that I'm used to with the other chips. This is definitely more zoned in on the actual pepper itself. However, I really don't know if the bold and audacious Cheeto can call itself "cheddar" with this snack. I don't taste the bite or tang of cheddar cheese. Call it a really jerky accusation, but I definitely didn't taste anything really cheddary about these snacks. If anything, it was more of a creamy, subtle flavoring, in the cheesiness category of a jalapeño popper, like a cream cheese. And that makes no freaking sense! If you have the prefix "chee-" or whatever, in your damned name, shouldn't you have a little more cheese flavor?!
Chester Cheetah scores well with this one, though, aside from the egregious Schrodinger's cheese. The peppery taste makes you think about water a little harder than the average weak hot chip, and consider going out for Mexican food, and the little crunchy kibbles, or whatever they are, are always fun to munch on, but jalapeño cheddar? Foolish mortals! The big cat always wins.

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