I have avoided Doritos brand chips for a long time. Even when I was just a young, impressionable consumer who was still impressed with the innovative-at-the-time concept of pizza rolls and drinks with questionably legal amounts of caffeine, my palate wouldn't let me indulge in a bag of neon orange snack food. The longest running flavor in the Doritos line is Nacho Cheese, which to me was always way too artificial tasting. I still think the heavy nacho powder generously dusting the chips is like a whole packet of cheap Mac n' Cheese minus the Mac. I'd have been happy to avoid those oblong triangles of tortilla for the rest of my days in favor of more grown-up kettle chips, or even other tortilla chips with light lime flavors or a salsa dip. That is, until a friend introduced me to some of the newer varieties.
First off, let's talk about jalapeno flavored snacks. In my opinion, this one ought to be an easy taste to replicate. Peppers dry exceptionally well and give up potent oils that provide the essence of their scent and flavor. For some reason, snack producers have deemed it necessary to smother the unmistakable joy of jalapeno with other ingredients. I don't want jalapeno ranch, jalapeno cheddar, or in the case of Doritos, jalapeno poppers. At least in principle, anyway. That said, the Jalapeno Poppers flavor is the less egregious of the two "Late Night" varieties of Doritos. 2009 is far from the first year that Frito-Lay has tried to make a taco flavored chip and it's not the first time they've failed to do so, either. It should be rather simple considering that tortilla chip + taco seasoning isn't exactly rocket science, but it just doesn't work out.
I'm a little more sympathetic to the Habanero Dorito because, like most things that have to do with habanero, it just tastes like heat. That's an unfair assessment of the real pepper itself, but I've come to accept that even the most gourmet concoctions use the word "habanero" interchangeably with the term "spicy version of whatever this is". I've had habanero beer, which just tasted like carbonated heat, and habanero chocolate, which just tasted like somewhat waxy heat. So, when I bite into a habanero tortilla chip and it just tastes like crunchy heat, I'm lenient because I knew what I was getting in to.
But somehow, maybe by sheer probability or maybe by a spark of genius, the Dorito R&D scientists Frito-Lay keeps trapped in some corporate basement made a chip that both tastes like the thing it's imitating and happens to be extremely delicious. I'm talking about the Spicy Sweet Chili flavor of Doritos.
Though we in the States haven't had access to the Spicy Sweet Chili chips for much more than a year, bags of these things have floated around other markets since 2005. Granted, Americans aren't known for being adventurous when it comes to flavors, especially in our salty snacks, but I think Frito-Lay could have brought Spicy Sweet Chili to the US market a long time ago. Why? Because they taste like General Tso's Chicken, that's why. It's remarkable to find a variety of Dorito that doesn't taste like some variation on the Nacho Cheese flavor, but more remarkable to find one that has such an interesting associative flare. After all, the popular Chinese takeout dish is little more than chicken in a sweet chili sauce.
The General Tso-esque taste of the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos is almost certainly coincidental, but I don't care. When I want a chip with a different flavor than what I usually buy, I couldn't do much better than these tortilla Frankenstein monsters.