As far as unkillable snacking trends go, surely an item that must rank right up there with bubble tea is salted egg yolk things.
When The Snackdown last wrote about it, it was earlier in the year, and even then I said McDonald’s was late to the party with its salted egg Loaded Fries. And if you recall what I said about it then, the most loaded thing about it was that it wasn’t loaded with salted egg sauce. And that it didn’t taste very much like salted egg yolk.
Anyway, The Golden Duck has decided to waddle into what is obviously a very mature market with its Salted Egg Yolk Potato Ridges. Its full name also has a “gourmet” prefix, because heaven forbid that The Golden Duck peddles—and by extension, you eat—non-gourmet salted egg potato chips.
Just what qualifies something for gourmet status is perhaps something more open to debate. If Gordon Ramsay were the one serving it to you, then certainly.
While that’s the most obvious route to gourmet-hood, it’s perhaps not the most practical, so what The Golden Duck (I realise how perilous spelling its name is, since I is right next to U) has elected to do instead is to coat its chips in what seems to be a metric arse-tonne of salted egg flavouring powder.
You will no doubt know that a metric arse-tonne is equivalent to 0.67 imperial arse-tonnes. This first one is a freebie, but for future ones you’re going to have to do your own arse-tonne conversions. Or you know, you could just learn metric.
There’s even curry leaves in there, in case you’re still a Doubting Thomas about whether or not you’re getting the good stuff.
I also strongly advise you not to sneeze or making any sudden movements while eating these chips, because I can guarantee you archaeologists from 2199 will still be able to find the crumbs.
Initial impressions are highly favourable. It really does taste like someone dehydrated some salted egg sauce and threw it onto the chips. You could reconstitute it by adding a little water… wait, WHAT KIND OF MONSTER ARE YOU?!
What’s really odd are the chips themselves, which have a really odd texture. Not bad, just odd.
Okay, say you have Pringles (which are technically made from the reanimated corpses of potatoes) on one end of the spectrum and you have something like the god-tier solidity and crunch of Tyrrell’s on the other end.
The Golden Duck chips fall somewhere 6 degrees south-southwest of that spectrum. It’s crunchy on the outside, but on the tooth, it feels hollow inside. What’s even weirder is how those chips manage that hollow feel while being so thin.
Right anyway. You know Calbee Jagabee and how those ‘fries’ are hollow-ish on the inside? Yeah, The Golden Duck chips are like that… but flatter.
Is it worth the SGD7 The Golden Duck wants for a bag? Eh, if you ask me, it’s a bit of a wash.
You do get a lot of salted egg flavouring in there, as I said earlier, almost overwhelming the chips in the 250g bag. Whether that’s a good thing or not is entirely dependant on your point of view.
The chips themselves are a bit freaky. They’re not awful, but man, would it have killed The Golden Duck to just have made them a little less hollow?
Now, is it possible for a potato chip to conceal a hidden dimension? Is it possible that the centre of those chips are concealing an anomaly in space-time? Will nightmarish creatures come pouring out of the rift if you ate them the wrong way? Who even knows, or dares to speculate.
It should also be said while eating these chips, I didn’t accidentally loose any extra-dimensional horrors upon this world. And that, well, that's a big tick in the win column for these chips.
Right?
10-word review: Proper salted egg yolk chips, pity about the chips themselves.
Best paired with: Emptying out the chips and replacing them with some unsalted Tyrrell's.
