A Subtle Barbeque Experience

Potato chips have a long history of sporting pretty basic flavors. If you go to a grocery store to buy chips, you’re sure to see at least four common flavors: sour cream & onion, barbeque, salt and vinegar, and plain salted. These are the flavors people seem to like, and they’re the ones that come up again and again. Sure, you will probably see some variants as well, maybe a cheddar & sour cream and a salt & black pepper variety, but for the most part you know what you’re going to get at any place you go to.

Cheese curls (or cheese doodles, or whatever else you like to call them) have an even more limited selection. Taste comes down to cheese or, well, cheese. Sometimes you can find a white cheddar, but most of the time you’re going to find a bright orange powder on your doodles, sure to coat your fingers, your mouth, and all your clothing by the time you’re done eating. Cheetos brand snacks have added in more hot cheese flavors, like jalapeno cheddar, flaming hot, and extra flaming hot, but most of the variety you’ll find will be in the shapes of the curls (crunchy or puffy) than in the flavor of the curls.

Herr’s brand snacks, though, have been doing the work to broaden the snack aisles. For years Herr’s has had flavors that no one else is trying, both on their chips and their cheese curls, and it’s led to a flavor explosion for snack fans. I won’t say that every flavor they try is a hit, but they have been willing to go farther outside the box for their snacks than Frito-Lays has ever been willing to attempt. And with yet another flavor I’ve found from the Herr’s kitchens, I have to give them credit: these guys are doing something so right.

When last we touched upon Herr’s it was for their Herr's Jalapeño Poppers Cheese Curls, a fun snack that I find myself buying over and over again. More recently, though, I discovered their Stubb’s Brand Stick Sweet Bar-B-Q Flavored Cheese Curls (which is a massive amount of text to type so we’re just going to call them Stubb’s Curls from here on) and I had to give them a try. I love Stubb’s sauce, making it my go to whenever I buy barbeque sauce. It had a rich, deep flavor with enough kick to make it stand out when applied to meat. To get that same kind of flavor for a cheese curl, that’s an automatic “yes” in my book.

To ensure I knew what the flavor should be like, I first opened a bottle of Stubb’s Sticky Sweet Legendary Bar-B-Que Sauce. This was so I could have my baseline flavor. I needed to know what the sauce was like so I could determine if the cheese curls matched the expected flavor profile. The sauce was good. Sweet without being cloyingly sweet (this despite the “sticky sweet” on the label). It’s got a rich, deep flavor, notes of molasses and spice, and a bold, rouge color. I like this sauce a lot, and it was good to sample it on its own again for this review.

Taste test of the sauce done, it was time to dive into the bag and, well, I have to say the flavor of Stubb’s just wasn’t there. Make no mistake, these curls are damn good, but if you’re expecting something to slap you in the face with Stubb’s flavor, because that’s what’s on the bag, you’re not going to get what you wanted. These are a much more traditional cheese curl, with a subtle touch of something more bold, and if they didn’t say Stubb’s on the bag, I’d be hard pressed to even define them as anything other than a normal (albeit tasty) cheese curl.

The flavor of the curl is very cheese-forward. These are bold, orange curls with little flecks of dark color on them, looking almost like they were peppered. The first taste is strongly of cheese, although not a standard cheddar flavor. There’s something more going on, for sure, but it does taste of cheese. Coupled with the delightful crunch of the cheese curl, because Herr’s makes a fantastic baseline cheese curl, these were solid, strong contenders for the basic cheese curl crown. Not something I’d ascribe to barbeque, but tasty.

As the flavor of the curls lingers you do start to get a little more of that barbeque hint, though. It’s subtle at first, that wash of barbeque flavor as an aftertaste that then builds to a sweeter tone on the cheese curls. It doesn’t ever overpower the cheese flavor, instead acting as a compliment to the bold, salty bite of the cheese curl coating. This never truly screams barbeque to me, just more of a well seasoned cheese with an interesting (but not off-putting) aftertaste. It was good, for sure, and I enjoyed the whole bag as I steadily crunched my way through it.

With that said, I really don’t think the curls do justice to the Stubb’s brand. It feels like the Herr’s cooks really wanted to make a barbeque cheese curl and found a brand from one of their sister companies they could use on the label. The flavor is very subtle, even a bit rich and smooth, and I do like it very much. But I see the Stubb’s label and I think, “yes, this will have bold barbeque to it,” and these curls do not. The cheese is bold, but the Stubb’s flavor is lacking by comparison.

I do wonder if they didn’t add as much Stubb’s flavor as they could because the sweetness of the Sticky Sweet would have been overpowering. If that’s the case, they should have gone with a different Stubb’s flavor, like their Spicy Barbeque or the Original flavor. Either of those are less sweet which would have allowed for a little more barbeque kick on the chips. There’s something specific to Stubb’s that’s lacking, and I missed it every time I dipped into the bag to sample another of the cheesy curls.

If Herr’s had just made a Barbeque Cheese Curl without the Stubb’s name, I think I would have been fine with it. As I said, these are really good curls, ones that I would happily buy again. I just am going to look at that label every time and think, “man, if only they could have committed a little harder to the flavor that was promised.” They oversold these when they had a really good product that could have sold itself otherwise.