Craving Covered Bridge chips

I may call Toronto home these days, but to be honest, I’ll always be a New Brunswicker. I grew up in New Brunswick (the province, not the city in New Jersey), and I still try to get back every now and then, and the last time I was there I stumbled upon my new favorite thing: Covered Bridge potato chips.

Aside from chocolate, coffee, and cheese, chips are kind of an obsession of mine, and mostly I can’t stand the ones you find in grocery stores here in Ontario. The majority of those big brand chips are over-salted, greasy, and not all that appealing to me. At the same time, I have a hard time spending $6 for “artisan” chips, which seem a bit pretentious to me.

When I was in the Saint John Market in October for part of my wedding trip to visit family, I stumbled on the Covered Bridge potato chips, which I basically devoured in the car ride back to Ontario, and I’ve been dreaming of getting more ever since. (I had a fix at Christmas, since Chapters was selling them, but I’m craving some of their special flavours, even though I do love their sea salt chips.)

There’s a couple of reasons I love these chips. The first big one is that I love supporting smaller companies, especially when they happen to come from near my home town in N.B. But, I’m also pretty impressed with the ingredients, which read: “russet potatoes, canola oil, sea salt”, and that’s it. The chips also have zero trans fat, and just one gram of saturated fat per 49 grams.

The final thing though is that they just taste fantastic. The chips are not over-salted, they’re light and crispy, and the flavour of the potato comes through nicely. It’s as close to a gourmet experience as I want to get with my chips, and on top of that, I love that they have some cool flavours–sea salt & vinegar, cinnamon & brown sugar sweet potato, smokin’ sweet barbecue, and the one I’ve been dying to try: sweet potato chips with sea salt. (They also make tortillas chips though, which I’m curious about.)

If you’re not in New Brunswick, you’re probably wondering why you should care about these chips, since you likely can’t buy them where you live, but there’s good news there as well. If you want to, you can buy the chips on their website (they even sell them in bulk, unseasoned bags), but on top of that, Covered Bridge chips are sold in a number of stores across Canada. You can find that complete searchable list on their website at www.coveredbridgechips.com/store_locator.php.

I’ll cut my potato rant off right there, but I really just had to give the company a shout out on my blog since I’m terribly addicted to their chips, and I’m hoping someday soon we’ll see them everywhere.