The World's Most Expensive Potato Chips And What They're Made Of
The next time you open a pack of chips and mindlessly chow down while watching your favorite series, you can think about the set of potato chips that were sold for nearly $60 a pack. The collection of five — yes, you read that correctly — individually packaged chips was limited, and only 100 were sold, each chip delicately placed into a black box with certificates of validation from the company, St. Erik's. Though paying over $10 for a single potato chip may sound like a ridiculous luxury, the novelty boxes, in fact, sold out quickly.
St. Erik's recommended that interested customers save for the splurge, promising that the price tag represented the quality of ingredients packed into each crispy chip. Together with Sweden's National Culinary chefs, St. Erik's set out to develop a chip that offered a luxurious snacking experience by using rare and difficult-to-find ingredients such as Ammärnas almond potatoes — found only on south-facing hills — and onions from Leksand — grown only during the exact dates of May 18 through August 10. Matsutake mushrooms, truffled seaweed, India Pale Ale wort, and crown dill added to the list of luxurious ingredients, resulting in a snack claiming the title of the most expensive chip ever sold.
Luxurious snacking for a good cause
Each potato chip was made by hand by Chef Pi Le, and the ingredients that were collected to make the pricey snacks were taken from different districts in the Nordic region. Truffle seaweed was plucked from the remote Faroe Islands, crown dill was taken from Sweden's Bjäre Peninsula, and the matsutake mushrooms were gathered in Sweden's northern forests by cotton-gloved foragers.
Having brewed craft beer since 1859, poured pints consumed by royals, and powering a brand easily recognized throughout Sweden, St. Erik's has been no stranger to some of the finer things when it comes to gastronomic pleasures. "A first-class beer deserves a first-class snack, and this is why we made a major effort to produce the world's most exclusive potato chips," one brand manager stated, via Elite Traveler. The exclusive chips were meant to be enjoyed with a chilled glass of St. Erik's India Pale Ale, and to ease the sting of a lighter pocketbook, the company declared that all proceeds from chip sales were to be donated to charity.