Lard Potato Chips Not Just for the Pork Obsessed

J. Birdsall

Pale and crisp as communion wafers.

We inhabit a subculture peculiarly steeped in pork fat. At the Ferry Building, you can lunch on a gorgeously unctuous porchetta sandwich at Il Cane Rosso, and afterwards snack on a bag of lard shortbread from Humphry Slocombe (for sale at Boccalone) -- even wash up, once you get home, with peppermint-scented lard soap (again, Boccalone). So it was only a matter of time till someone started frying potato chips in lard -- even if that someone is a company in Pennsylvania.

Boccalone recently started selling Grandma Utz's Handcooked Potato Chips ($1), made from potatoes fried in pork fat, small-batch style. They're pale and crisp as communion wafers, and by the third chip, they suffuse your mouth with a kind of intimate animal sweetness. Are they the best chips we've eaten? Hell no. But they have a pork-chop-fat allure that's ultimately hard to resist. And that makes you wonder -- morbidly, perhaps, given what you imagine to be the cholesterol wallop of lard potato chips -- whatever became of Grandpa Utz.

Boccalone One Ferry Building (at The Embarcadero), 369-9955