Cheetos – Crunchy Ketchup
I sometimes wonder why ketchup was once considered a Canadian flavour. Ketchup is such an ubiquitous product that you would find it all across the world, a staple and mainstay in every restaurants pantry, as well as dining room tables. Similar to all-dressed, ketchup became one of the de-facto Canadian flavours. Weird when you consider how much more ketchup those yanks down south probably consume. While this has changed a bit these days, it still baffles my mind how companies have been doing this for so long.
The iconic Crunchy Cheetos flavour has largely been a classic cheese based product. While they have started to branch out into other flavours like Flaming Hot and Jalapeno Cheddar, they don’t tend to introduce very many new flavours in North America. I guess when the OG flavour does so well, there isn’t a huge desire to branch out.
That changes now, with the introduction of a ketchup flavour. Obviously ketchup is tied very much to the Canadian market for some strange reason, so for the time being this looks to be a Canadian flavour.
The texture is that classic crunchy cheese stick that Cheetos is most known for – they sticks are like snowflakes where no two pieces are the same. They have a general shape to them but for the most part it has a nice distinct crunchy exterior, but not hard or firm enough to put up much resistance. The initial crunch is relatively soft and the stick sort of melts away after that making it very good balance between crunch and being light and airy.
The flavour is unabashedly ketchup. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about what this flavour is. Similar to other flavours the surface area of each stick leaves lots of room to soak up the seasoning so these are caked in the ketchup powder. It has a nice sweetness to it, and the vinegar is a bit more in the background which I appreciate. This is very similar to ketchup flavoured chips. It’s like if you took a naked corn stick and dipped it in a thing of ketchup and ate it like a french fry.
Sure it’s a deviation from what has historically been mostly cheese, but these are done quite well and I would do it again. I do wonder now, what a ketchup and cheese flavour would taste like. Maybe a ketchup grilled cheese flavour? Please?
