doritos suck now?

[coppercone2]

I did not eat them in a very long while and I noticed they gave me indigestion, and are less structurally sound.

I believe the chips are thinner, and possibly this some how leads to over cooking, perhaps too much heat gets into the thin chip and lowers its nutritional content to less then it was? Or excessive evaporation? or just digests worse because its too thin?

For $6 a bag, it seems like a rip off.

Now they can't withstand even a very soft dip, and the bag is in shambles. Plus I really do think some how they are less food like now (worse as a junk food) because of some process change.

They used to be a hearty chip, compared to paper thin pure junk food like lays chips, or pringles. Now they are similar. Lay's chips used to give me this kind of indigestion that the doritos now give me (I don't eat Lays or pringles anymore). I noticed the more 'flake like' the food product is, the worse it is. It's like eating seasoning at that point. At least doritos used to be some really sad bread substitute. Now its like flake. You can get the same 'experience' by throwing bread crumbs in the oven with seasoning lol

[BrianHG]

Yes, a number of junk food's quality (I realize this is an oxymoron) has gotten worse over the decades.  As for indigestion, as you age, you get more sensitive, exceeding more sensitive after 60yo, to junk if you haven't been force-feeding yourself that junk on a regular basis...

[metrologist]

Pringles came out with a new flavor - Chili Cheese Fries

Seriously tastes like day old vomit...

[floobydust]

Corporations demand profit as priority #1. Doritos is by Frito-Lay, owned by PepsiCo. Stock is down a lot, need to put plastic in the chips lol.
Most of the money goes into marketing. Those Superbowl commercials are expensive. Instead of putting dollars into the food quality.
It's highly processed corn with MSG added, in all their products. I dislike MSG it gives me headaches.
You could put that on polypropylene and it would taste great.

Highly-processed foods are under constant "cost improvement" and taste worse, never mind the exorbitant prices. Even Old Dutch potato chips are pretty bad now, taste terrible.

I would complain to Frito-Lay, get a coupon for free bags.

[WattsThat]

IMO the only Frito-Lay tortilla chips worth eating are the Tostitos Simply organic chips. They had a blue corn version which was better than the yellow but now appears to have been discontinued. They are thin which is one of the things I like about them. Minimal crap. But still crap.

[aargee]

Pringles came out with a new flavor - Chili Cheese Fries

Seriously tastes like day old vomit...

Do I really want to know how you can make that comparison? 😄

[coppercone2]

I don't think its age, because its now in the 'too thin to digest' category of chips that I always had. It used to be like if I ate half a bag of lays, it would make me feel... ill. Same or more doritos and while it was guilty, I felt alright.

At first I thought it was the seasoning, but everyone is saying they have less seasoning now. Is it possible that you get some exceedingly bad grease/carb ratio with the thinner chips? Or maybe a meal needs to have some minimum amount of "not totally fried" content to be suitable for being in the stomach? Or that for the same mass eaten, its just too much 'totally fried' food?

Food always cooks less in the middle. When its thick enough... it gets maybe a little 'steamed' in the interior, which is generally seen as more healthy.

I think they had a formula that went past the limit of how thin it can be to cook properly. Also moisture content would be interesting to know, maybe its excessively dehydrated.

Or it could be some 'healthy' change. Like they use some ingredient that is healthy (when its used in like a god damn loaf of bread) and thought it scales down to a chip and the way its cooked but instead it becomes like indigestible and worse. Because you can say alot of things about health foods, but the prime directive is to avoid stuff that gives you an upset stomach, because that is a acute health effect... it does not really make sense for food to have acute health effects that some how make you better in the long run (that is confusing food and medicine). Healthy food might taste bland, or be less satisfying (at first) but it never should make you feel off in a sick way.. to me that is the body saying there is already a problem at the start, let alone down the line.

Some of those healthier/new age food types are IMO way harder to cook right. Some of the weird flours. Super easy to burn em IMO, and very sticky. If you wanna use those you need to practice cooking quite a bit.

[floobydust]

Pringles came out with a new flavor - Chili Cheese Fries

Seriously tastes like day old vomit...

Do I really want to know how you can make that comparison? 😄

Pringles chili cheese fries reviews are absolutely brutal:
"... These are by far the most disgusting, foul, stomach wretching chips I’ve ever had. It’s hard to explain the flavour but it definitely was not Chili Cheese Fries. It tasted like when a dog eats too much dry dog food and then throws up and you have to clean up the vomit. That smell is what these chips tasted like..."
https://www.reddit.com/r/chips/comments/1artrs2/by_far_the_most_disgusting_chip_ive_ever_had/
25 chips = 15g of fat, 340mg salt

Both these are an "extruded food" and I think cooked that way too. Thinner could change many things.
I thought they were injection moulded 

[Halcyon]

I just think most flavoured potato or corn chips suck. The only exception is Kettle Chilli (it's literally just potato chips with a bunch of chilli seasoning and salt). I don't even qualify Pringles as chips, they are like the "Subway Sandwich" of chips; They all have that similar, boring, baseline, processed taste.

Give me plain old potato or corn chips, I'll provide the flavourings, if required.

[John B]

I did not eat them in a very long while and I noticed they gave me indigestion, and are less structurally sound.

One of the big criticisms of these types of food is the highly refined carbohydrates, including additives like maltodextrin, and how they can negatively affect your digestive system microorganisms. It would be a possible reason for you indigestion.

[coppercone2]

are you sure they did not change the grade or something. Like a cheaper particle size, less screening, etc. Because powders are like that in big industry. They always change shit up and it has massive consequences after a cost saving effort for some replacement or modification to something that is sure to absolutely not effect anything. Or isomers, cook times, rest times, dry times, temperatures, ratios, etc. When you work on ultra volume 'component level' industry that it comes from... the ground... you start to see these problems show up. Someone new from the place where the air is thin has a very downgraded model/understanding of the process and think they are basically just bullshitting to cover excessive markup, but in actuality its very complicated and small changes lead to big problems.

Kinda like if Weyland Yutani suits gave their off the cuff opinion on atmospheric processor settings about ppm humidity in some heat exchanger to some guy that is scared of them after giving them some cost saving speech that came from the board 


Alot of people say bread is complicated chemistry. Very sensitive. This is severely bastardized bread. Eating a beginner bakers bread projects is never fun. Or if they switch flours. Tapioca flour enhanced sour dough 

[floobydust]

But how do you know if it was only a bad batch, just a bag or two - compared to "they've cheapened the product too much" and it tastes forever crappy now?

[coppercone2]

Well I read about it online and people seem to agree within the last year that something is going on. And we are in complete agreement that they are fragile/flimsy now.  It's not a chip suitable for dips anymore, unless you wanna fish in your salsa with a spoon. 10 years ago it could do cool cheese dip OK.

It like a shovel changed to a plastic head and it can barely handle a sandbox.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Walmart's house brand, Great Value, has been hitting them out the park lately wrt chips. At least here in Quebec. Since it's a house brand, who knows who actually makes them, so it may be different elsewhere. The taco ones by far surpass anything Doritos has been putting out IMO

https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/Great-Value-Taco-Zesty-Flavoured-Tortilla-Chips/1VGNO5TC70EH

[floobydust]

Think like a CEO. Make the chips as thin as possible, so the bag still looks plump and fool the consumer, shrinkflation is our goal.
If they are breaking in dip, then add cheap "structural" food equivalent to concrete and rebar to stop that 
We need profit! Pepsico stock is down! Imagine the greedy bastard MBA's forgetting the requirement is... to make a tasty snack.

I saw tiny Dorito bags for $2.50 at Walmart and they looked like a total ripoff.

My epiphany was with cheese puffs - main ingredient is silicon dioxide, with cheese flavour and orange colouring. Realized I was paying to eat sand 

[jpanhalt]

Aren't chips sold by weight?

My favorite is Tostitos lightly salted, which I enjoy on Saturdays, September through November, unless OSU happens to beat Michigan and make the playoffs (last year was an exception).  Unfortunately, Frito-Lay can't help Jason Day beat Michigan.  Maybe this year...

[Marco]

My epiphany was with cheese puffs - main ingredient is silicon dioxide, with cheese flavour and orange colouring. Realized I was paying to eat sand 

Hard to believe. Cheetos did add potassium chloride here though, probably to be able to claim lower salt content.

[hfleming]

You also get older, your taste-buds are not as sensitive to some nuances as to what they used to be, and of course, confirmation bias… (for me, I can remember as a little toddler, being a city-kid, my cousins took me right to the middle of a cow-herd, running away, and leaving me in the middle of a ‘huge’ cow herd…. Even though I am 60+ years old, and live in a very rural area, my mind still tell me cows are huge, taller than horses!!!! Every time I see a cow, I still have to ask if cows are really so small… mentally I still see cows a lot taller than me…).. the same applies to food… childhood memories are always greater than adult memories…(at least, that is my experience).

[jpanhalt]

Cheetos Cheese Puffs:

[floobydust]

I can't remember the brand, I thought they were cheezies but they look like cheese puffs. Not Dorito brand.
Silicon dioxide generally accepted food additive, anti-caking agent and a few other uses like in beer? They include nanosized particles. Hmmm. I remember it was basically a filler, unless corn meal came later.

I wonder how hard it is to make your own tortilla chips.

[coppercone2]

the original cheese puff is the cheese ball, it comes in a cardboard cylinder. This one seems unchanged for a long time, its OK

Eating too many will make you sorry

[Halcyon]

I wonder how hard it is to make your own tortilla chips.

The lazy option would be to buy tortillas, cut them up, and bake in the oven or air fryer.

[coppercone2]

the thing I wonder about is those integrated probes. I like the wire ones. What happens to a folding temp probe if it falls into the oil?

[MisterHeadache]

Doritos:
1. Definitely are thinner than they were in the 80's/90's.
2. Seasonings are just not the same.  And it's not just my older palate, there are plenty of foods that still taste the same to me.
3. There's some sort of ingredient that acts as an immediate appetite suppresant.  You eat and eat and still don't fill satiated (probably deliberately).

[coppercone2]

another one I noticed is Snapple. I think they did something, it used to be like liquid crack.

Now literally the 4C iced tea powder (big ass coffee can) tastes better. And I tried dilluting the snapple too. Snapple is like not refreshing at all. I feel like I am drinking some kind of object/thing instead of a refreshing liquid.

Like right now if I wanted to junk out with snapple and dorritos I can't. Its like broken. I wonder if its being brewed with shwag tea now

I wonder if the snapple would taste better if you boil it for a while and then pass it through a very fine filter. I wonder if it could be the plastics. Perhaps they react some how with the tea molecules. I heard if you boil a liquid, any plastic content will like congeal to a filterable form.


And does anyone renember if A1 used to have tamarind in it? I swear I read the ingredients on a a1 SAUCE like.. in 2003, and it had tamarind paste as a ingredient. I remember looking it up on wikipedia because I was wondering WTF that was (its a type of fruit). I thought to buy some tamarind paste, and blend it into A1 and cook it a little next time I make a steak to see if I can get any memories. Did they swap tamarind for rasin paste? I'm like sure. The two weird lemonfruit ingredients, bergamut in earl grey and tamarind in A1. Could it be a conspiracy involving big grape? They had a whole fiasco I remember, like 20 years ago, with juice sales. That the fucking economy was gonna implode because people stopped consuming fucking grape juice

anyone maybe got a ancient bottle of A1 sauce some where ?