In this installment
Zingerman’s Pickle Potato Chips
Zingerman’s Barbecue Potato Chips
Ann Arbor Tortilla Chips
Fundidora Salsa Fresca
Zingerman’s Pickle Potato Chips
We’ve partnered with Great Lakes Potato Chip company in Traverse City, Michigan to make the chips. We also got a lot of help sourcing the perfect spices for the chips from Montreal’s Epices de Cru. There’s also something to be said for using freshly ground spices for your chips instead of the industrial bulk variety. Take it from me: superior spices paired with small batch potato chips are really, really good.
The Dill-icious Dill Pickle Potato Chip is briny and herby with plenty of dill pickle flavor. When we were first designing this flavor, I thought the punch of pickle would be too much for folks, but then everyone started drinking shots of pickle brine at bars and it suddenly became cool to be pickled! So maybe we were onto something after all.
Zingerman’s Barbecue Potato Chips
So all of the above is true (made in partnership with Great Lakes Potato Chip Company, Epices de Cru spices) for the chip, but for this flavor we wanted a “barbecue” that was more than just sweet which seems to be the potato chip default. We designed this chip to be much more complex, with hints of heat and some unexpected notes from the wider array of spices. It stands out and that’s what we were hoping for.
Ann Arbor Tortilla Chips
You can’t make great cheese without great milk, great salami without great pork, and you can’t make great tortilla chips without first making great tortillas. That’s just how it goes.
The funny thing is Lupe Quetglas didn’t set out to make great tortilla chips when she opened Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory with her family back in 2007, she just wanted to make great tortillas.
Lupe has spent the majority of her life in Michigan, but her early years were spent in El Salvador. The civil war of the Eighties forced her to immigrate to the US on a student visa. She came to study, fell in love, started a family and put down her roots in southeastern Michigan, but the flavors of her native land never left her mind.
“She started the company, in a way, because my mom couldn’t find the foods she wanted in the stores where we lived.” Her son Francisco, explained. A young man in his late twenties, he runs the factory and manages the nine member crew. “She didn’t like the tortillas around here so she decided to make her own and she figured there were other people like her that would want them, too.” Francisco searches for the right words. “But that didn’t really turn out to be the case.”
They decided to make Mexican-style tortillas, which were slightly larger than the ones Lupe grew up eating in El Salvador. They traveled around Mexico, visiting tortilla factories to see how they were made and what equipment they used. “It’s crazy because a lot of those factories are still using the same machines they installed back in the 50s.” Francisco said. “So my mom bought the same ones. They make great tortillas.”
Unfortunately, sales of the rustic, thick, tasty (and perishable) tortillas didn’t take off as planned. “The people that came from Central America and lived around here weren’t used to handmade tortillas like we were making, so they weren’t that interested.” Francisco continued.
Something had to change or they weren’t going to survive much longer. “The chips were an experiment, really.” Francisco said. “Now tortilla chips are 98% of our business, so I’d say the experiment worked.”
Making a great tortilla chip starts with great tortillas that you gotta make from scratch. They start with corn grown by local farmers here in Michigan that they steep in water mixed with calcium hydroxide for 12-15 hours. This steeping is part of the traditional process of turning corn into flour. It makes it easier to grind and releases nutrients locked inside the kernels.
After grinding into flour, they mix it with water to make the dough that goes into the special Mexican-made tortilla machines. The tortillas are then baked in an oven, cooled, then cut into triangles, fried in sunflower oil, salted, bagged, and sent to happy snackers like me and you. A local treat with universal appeal.
Fundidora Salsa Fresca
There’s nearly as many salsas on the market as there chips in a grocery store. They all fall on a spectrum of quality and it’s often been my experience that the more creative the name, the less flavorful the salsa. In my opinion “Salsa Fresca” is a straight forward name that doesn’t need to hide behind any atomic fallouts or ghostly hot pepper faces. It’s fresh, flavorful, and appeals to everyone at the table, not just the tough ones who can “take the heat.” Sure, there’s a little hit, but not too much and it only accentuates the complexity of the other ingredients, giving them all a small spotlight under which to shine, if only for a moment.