Tohato – Black Emperor Pepper Potato Ring Snacks
While I’m not proud of it, I’ve gone through most of my life not paying much attention to brands of products or who owns them, and just kind of enjoy it at face value. Maybe it’s a side effect of getting older, or maybe it’s just how the world is going, but I find brands and ownership as important as ever to provide context. Back when I was a kid, brands were a lot more straightforward, and you didn’t have one or two big conglomerates owning everything, or eventually buying the smaller brands.
Perhaps not the most relevant point to bring up, but it does make me more cognizant these days of who makes what snacks. At least in my experience, Tohato is most known for their Caramel Corn snacks, which are corn puffs that are usually sweet and slightly savoury and their potato ring snacks which are essentially a variation of what we in the North know as Ringolos. I personally love Ringolos, and they’ve always held a special place in my heart. As a kid I loved the novelty of eating ring shaped snacks off my fingers. I quickly outgrew that part of the experience, but not the actual consumption of them. Something about the shape and texture always kept me going back. The biggest gripe I had with them though, is how fragile they were and how a broken ring was worse than a broken chip. It also didn’t help that they only ever came in BBQ flavour. Thankfully Tohato knows better than to limit it’s flavours to just one.
Today’s flavour caught my eye mostly because of the packaging. It wasn’t until I took a closer look that I realized these were black pepper. It was only after looking past what appears to be a very angry looking sentient peppercorn that I noticed that the rings themselves were black. Now, I’ve been on this earth long enough to have a general idea when something is artificially coloured or not, but I can’t help but sate my curiosity and try these out.
These smell very similar to a bag of Ringolos – of salt, fried potato and flavouring. The only real difference is these have an added black pepper kick to them. Visually, they look very black. If I were to guess these were probably coloured with either charcoal or squid ink. I’m hoping its one of those two, otherwise I have no idea what darkness I’m consuming here. While the chips themselves are in the shape of rings, it seems that they are more oblong and stretched out. While Ringolos are much more circular in shape, these look almost stretch out, and don’t seem as fun to put on a normal sized finger.
The black pepper flavour is pretty straightforward and simple. If you like black pepper, you’ll get a kick out of these. You know, until you’re about 10 to 15 rings in and it kicks back. The pepper doesn’t really hit you immediately and is definitely a creeper – it sort of sneaks up on you slowly until you feel this pervasive heat build up. The potato flavour of the rings themselves is also very similar to Ringolos, and has that distinct fried potato mash sort of taste to it.
The texture is very crisp and snappy – it’s quite brittle and breaks apart easily but still provides a nice texture. The one thing I’d say about these is they absorb moisture pretty quickly, so if you leave it in your mouth for any amount of time it will quickly get soggy and soft, and the crunch is gone. These are a very light snack both in relative weight and texture, so it’s dangerous if you leave these with someone unsupervised. Seriously, before you know it you’ve crunched down an entire bag and you’ll still feel the need to be sated.
Realistically, my only complaint is that the bag is too small, though I think this might be a cultural thing. I’m used to big bags when I have Ringolos, so seeing these in the tiny bag that they are makes me sad when I realize I’m all done with the bag so quickly.
