Call it a guilty pleasure of you like, but I quite like Fritos. The simplicity of the ingredients is one of the appeals, and easy to remember.
Other than good tortilla chips*, Fritos ate pretty much the only snack chip I buy, though the occasional single bag of Cheetos is nice when eaten with copsticks.
*: look at the back of the bag and look for things written in Spanish first. Calidad is my current fav.
The listed ingredients of toasted corn Doritos are corn, vegetable oil and salt. The same thing is true of Tostitos Original (another Frito Lay product). They don’t list masa or lime, just corn, which surprised me a bit. Perhaps the amount of lime is so low that the law doesn’t require them to list it. At least one brand of tortilla chip (Mission) lists masa instead of just corn.
That being said, Fritos don’t taste to me like nixtamalized corn, while most tortilla chips do.
All I can think of is that somehow the process of creating an actual tortilla from masa (mixing, pressing, cooking), and then subsequently deep-frying it, make them taste different from Fritos, which I believe are directly extruded into the hot oil and cooked (fried) the one time.
I like Fritos because they’re so salty. Low-salt chips are an abomination. Like decaf coffee or no-alcohol beer. What’s the point?
Early 1980’s? Didn’t Leno advertise Doritos in the late 1980’s?
I don’t know whether I should share this or not. Y’all might think I’m weird but here goes anyway. My favorite way to eat Fritos is using them to scoop up a big dollup of peanut butter. Chunky peanut butter. Delish.
UncleRojelio: You’re weird…but that’s a good thing in this crowd!
(On my way to the supermarket… Two guesses what’s on my shopping list!)
He looks really young in the commercial I linked. The longer hair, very skinny. Classic young Leno that I remember from the HBO comedy specials.
It may have been a little later.
He does look young. Cool Ranch came out in 1986, but I’m not sure if he was the one to introduce them in ads.
Totally agree!
Yeah, Fritos taste like corn, not cardboard.
Heh. In the WB cartoon Slick Hare, the one where Elmer has to deliver up fried rabbit to Humphrey Bogart in the “Mocrumbo” night club, writer Mike Maltese patterned the look of the kitchen after the one in the real-life Mocambo – and got in trouble for it.
Frito-Lay has come out with a recent corn chip under the name Josefina. It doesn’t say that it’s a Lay product anywhere on the package, and that they’re made in Vancouver, WA, but the parent company address is the same as Frito-Lay. Anyway, they’re great.