Review: Doritos Zingy Vinegar Blast

For a while, Doritos, the Amazon/Google/Microsoft of snacks, have been narrowing the traditional divide between tortilla chips and crisps with flavours like Flame Grilled Steak. I have not supported this scope creep. Things need to know what they are not, to know what they are. No one asked for cronuts, toe-shoes or Milton Keynes.

Now, the reassuring divide between tortilla and crisp has been bridged without permission by the arrival of Doritos Zingy Blast.

They’re not kidding about Zingy. The OED goes with “energy, enthusiasm, or liveliness”; trusting the experts at PepsiCo are credible lexicographers, then we ought to update the dictionary to “pummels your taste buds with like an electric eel dipped in acid”.

I’m not saying the result is bad, leaving aside the logistics of rewriting earth’s dictionaries, but I must prepare you. Unless you love vinegar, and love the feeling being dental-treatment numb for half an hour, these may not be for you. If you live for acetic acid then you will not regret wrestling with these corn triangles.

First, you can detect some salt but soon after your tongue is quickly starting to realise it’s been invited to a vinegar festival. You spend a few moments in the queue where you can sense something is afoot but then suddenly you are visited by the brute-force arrival of a vinegar Blast reversing towards you at too high a speed for you to get out of the way. SMACK! You’re being zinged left right and centre by an increasing vortex of snack acid, drilling into your taste buds like a jack hammer. You’re left wondering what happened. Amped up needing another fix but shaking with trepidation and moist eyes.

Perhaps this zing-bling couldn’t work on a potato base: a flatter, stronger plane is needed to weaponise vinegar. But no matter how invigorating and exciting, the snack world’s clear edges have forever been blurred by this experiment. This brazen incursion is, I portend, a move the Doritos management will regret—much like the A&M renegade that handed Jimmy Nail his first record contract.