A bag of potato chips is one of the cheapest snacks you can buy. In 2016 a Swedish brewery decided to make the most expensive ones in the world instead, and the result was a black gift box holding exactly five chips.
Unless you opted for the extremely limited edition set of chips from Swedish Brewery St. Eriks, boxed in an absurdly fancy package, made from absurdly special ingredients.
Created as a publicity stunt that also donated money to charity, the five exquisite chips were meant to be enjoyed with the brewery’s finest beers, of course. Below are the ingredients that went into these elevated, next-level chips.
Matsutake: With a taste similar to that of mature cheese, matsutake is one of the world’s most sought-after species of mushrooms. The matsutake in the chips comes from pine forests in the northern region of Sweden and was picked by hand using cotton gloves in order to preserve their quality.
Truffle Seaweed: As the name suggests, truffle seaweed has a flavor reminiscent of truffles. The seaweed grows in the form of small tufts on the brown algae known as Ascophyllum nodosum, which is only found in cold tidal waters. The seaweed used in the world’s most expensive chips comes from the waters around the Faroe Islands.
Crown Dill: To achieve the distinctive dill flavor, the creators of the chips investigated varieties of Swedish crown dill. The crown dill used was hand-picked on the Bjäre Peninsula in southern Sweden and selected for its fresh, yet powerful flavor.
Leksand Onion: For a balanced onion flavor, we used the much sought-after Leksand onion, a specific variety of the onion family that grows just outside the small Swedish town Leksand. One reason for its excellent flavor may be the fact that the onions are always planted on the eighteenth of May and harvested on the tenth of August, whatever the weather.
India Pale Ale Wort: During the process of brewing beer, the barley malt is converted into a sweet aromatic liquid known as wort. To add a hint of sweetness to the chips, freeze-dried wort was added, of the kind normally used to brew S:t Eriks India Pale Ale.
Ammarnäs Potatoes: The potato in the chips comes from the potato hillside in Ammarnäs, a steep, stony slope in a south-facing location where almond potatoes are cultivated in very limited numbers. The slope is difficult for modern agricultural machines to access, which means that all potatoes are planted and harvested by hand.
If you wanted to get your hands on them, sadly the entire set sold out immediately, but we love the idea of something so simple be taken to an extreme level.
The five ingredients came from the north of Sweden, Scandinavia and the Baltic, and the brewery paired the box with its own India pale ale. The 100 boxes sold out almost immediately, which says something about how far a good story and a very good photograph can carry a snack. We have a soft spot for food with a history, so if this scratched an itch, read the surprising history of the Snickers bar, how Skittles conquered the world, and the long forgotten snack foods of the 1970s.
