Cheddar and sour cream Ruffles recipe

About 12 years ago, my partner and I decided to wow our friends on Thanksgiving by ordering a heritage-breed turkey from a small farmer in Pennsylvania. For weeks we watched the turkey — our turkey — on the farmer’s webcam, a cluster of pixels frolicking inside a chicken-wire enclosure. It was butchered and shipped overnight (the FedEx shipping cost nearly as much as the bird) and when it emerged from the oven, mari­nated and basted decadently in butter, the turkey tasted so unspeakably bland that much of it was left on our friends’ plates, camouflaged awkwardly under brussels sprouts. The feel-good narrative of our lovingly raised, hormone-antibiotic-and-G.M.O.-free certified-organic turkey became supplanted with a more ambiguous one. We felt both duped and morally abject: Not only were we out nearly $200, but our ethical gambit put an end to the bird’s bucolic life.

What had we been looking for, exactly? This question visited me ear­lier this summer, unbidden, brushing my consciousness with its wings. It happened in a Stewart’s convenience store off the Adirondack Northway. My friend Trish was buying cigarettes, and I was halfway through a 2⅝-ounce bag of Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles.

Stewart’s is no foodie emporium — this one kept the chips on a wire carousel between a basket of shrink-wrapped peanut-butter-and-butter-on-a-hard-roll sandwiches and a crockpot labeled Chicken Wing Soup. So when Trish handed me the Ruffles, she intended it as a mildly ironic token of affection. But here’s what happened: The sensory experience of the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles so diverged from my mental narrative about what I was eating — what was I eating? — that it short-circuited my discursive thinking and emptied my mind. Everything I believed about eating was left in disarray.

About that sensory experience: Technically speaking, Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles are flawless. The chips are pleasingly thick, but not excessively so. Through superior engineering, they eliminate the two most common drawbacks of packaged potato chips, namely greasiness and staleness. And while they don’t taste strongly of potatoes, they have a flavor that food scientists refer to as high-amplitude, meaning that every note is knitted together to produce a distinctive bloom, like Hellmann’s mayonnaise or Coke or a decently aged Barolo.

These chips also excel at what brewers call sessionability — the degree to which a substance incites you to consume more of it. Consider Nacho Cheese Doritos, another Frito-Lay staple: The first few bites are blindingly flavorful, but a half-dozen chips later I begin to feel like I’m chewing on cheesy insulation. Worse yet, for me this sensation comes on suddenly, curdling into a sickening sense of shame. By comparison, Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles tolerate and even encourage overindulgence, and they bring on the feeling of satiety gradually, without undue alarm, in the manner of actual food.

Of course, what you might call the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles origin story is a lot less winsome. When I tried to delve into how they are made, a series of emails from a Frito-Lay spokesman made it clear that little about the process resembles food preparation as most of us know it. And little about it can be pinned down. Not the potatoes (“made from high-quality, thin-skinned potatoes”), not the cooking oil (“we may use canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil or a blend”), not even a place of origin (“produced in Frito-Lay facilities across the country”).

The flavoring of the chips was formulated in collaboration with what the spokesman crisply described as “the world’s leading seasoning and flavor companies.” As Eric Schlosser details in his book “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal,” this refers to companies clustered along the New Jersey Turnpike with names like Flavor Dynamics, where “flavorists” in lab coats design the taste, aroma, mouth feel and appearance of thousands of supermarket foods. The scientific wizardry behind Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles’ “proprietary blend of real Cheddar, other cheeses and real sour cream” is reduced on the ingredients list to the phrase “natural and artificial flavor” — it is entirely possible that if all the ingredients were listed, their number would balloon from around 30 to more than 100. And growing scientific consensus tells us that processed foods should be eaten, well, hardly ever.

But to enjoy Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles is to revel in the human-made, in the old Enlightenment project of our scientific conquest of nature. The marketing of so-called artisanal foods has traditionally prioritized narrative; the stories of our food have become so paramount that fussing about flavor is coming to seem almost gauche. Ruffles, by contrast, invite a purely aesthetic appreciation. The “Cheddar” and “potato” on the bag are mere starting points. The chips’ magnificently artificial flavoring is not a simulacrum of nature but an improvement on it, as fantastical and engineered as an unmanned satellite. They are perfect, fully realized objects, requiring no context or elucidation. They promise nothing except sensory gratification, and I like that about them. They embody what William Carlos Williams wrote that poems should aspire to — “no ideas but in things.”