Organic potato crisps seasoned with paprika, from Go Pure — organic potatoes, fried, salted and dusted with paprika, and not much else.
Paprika is not a blend, which surprises people. It is a single ingredient: dried, ground Capsicum annuum — the same species as the sweet peppers and chillies in a greengrocer's. What changes is which cultivar, how ripe it was, whether the seeds and placenta (where the capsaicin lives) were removed, and how it was dried. Sweet paprika is a mild cultivar with the heat-bearing parts taken out; hot paprika keeps them; smoked paprika, pimentón, is dried over oak fires in Extremadura rather than in the sun. One pepper, four completely different spices.
Paprika is also fragile. Its colour comes from carotenoids, which degrade quickly in light and heat, and its flavour turns bitter if it is cooked hard. That is why a jar of paprika left on a sunny shelf fades to brown and tastes of dust within months — and why paprika on a crisp is dusted on after frying rather than cooked into it.
Now the honest part, and it applies to every potato crisp on earth. When starchy foods are cooked above about 120 °C, the amino acid asparagine reacts with natural sugars in the potato to form acrylamide — the same Maillard chemistry that produces the colour and the flavour. The European Food Safety Authority concluded in 2015 that acrylamide in food potentially increases cancer risk across all age groups, and the EU introduced regulation in 2017 setting benchmark levels and mandatory mitigation measures specifically for crisps and fried potato products.
Being organic does not change this. Acrylamide is a product of cooking chemistry, not of farming, and an organic crisp fried to the same colour contains the same sort of thing as a conventional one. Darker crisps contain more; paler ones contain less. We would rather say this plainly than let “organic” imply something it does not: these are a treat, and organic certification means better farming, not a different snack.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
Lady Joseph
LA SABLESIENNE
Go Pure
Clearspring
