Best Tortilla Chips and Potato Chips for Your Dip

We realized immediately that classic potato chips were not up to the task. Don’t get me wrong, I can eat Lay’s Classic Potato Chips all day, any day, on their own (the Utz were right up there, too), but they’re too fragile for dipping even the moderate dips and too salty and oily for the salsa and queso. The kettle potato chips and ridged potato chips performed better to varying degrees.

The tagline for these chips is “Xo Thin. Xo Crisp. Xo Good.” We tend to agree, especially those of us who don’t want to work too hard at chewing our chips. Lime is an ingredient here, but they’re not lime-flavored, and we don’t taste it. The Xochitl chips have a good amount of salt and shatter upon entering your mouth. When there’s a thin coating of salsa on said chip, it’s like a literal flavor explosion. In other words, this chip’s da bomb.

However, because the Xochitl is the thinnest tortilla chip of the bunch, it doesn’t hold up to thicker dips very well. Flavor-wise, we love it with the bean dip and guac, but it cracks under pressure.

If your household eats a lot of chips and salsa or you’re throwing a party, you might like to know that Xochitl tortilla chips are the best-value chips we got, at $6.29 per pound ($1.43 to $5.33 less than other tortilla chips), but we haven’t seen this brand come in bags any smaller than 12 ounces.

These thick, coarse chips have a nice, rustic texture and beautiful golden yellow color. They provide substance and bite to offset the buttery mouthfeel of queso. The corn flavor doesn’t get lost in the queso’s punch but instead rounds it out nicely. The chips are suitable for nearly all the other dips, it just works especially well with the queso, which was surprisingly difficult to find a match for. It’s also worth noting that this is one of the most expensive tortilla chips we tasted.

Christopher Simons, PhD, associate professor of sensory science at The Ohio State University, helps explain why this pairing works: All the tortilla chips we tasted have the same matrix—as in, they’re all chips—but flavors can be released differently depending on the type of corn and texture. “With the more coarse types, you may be able to feel that texture through a thick queso that you may not with a thinner chip or a less rustic style chip,” he says.

There are no standard definitions for ridges, ripples, and waves in the world of potato chips, but we gathered in our assessment that waves have larger curves, ridges/ripples are finer, and Ruffles is a name brand. Whatever you want to call them, these types of potato chips are suitable for dipping, says David Douches, PhD, a professor and potato breeder at Michigan State University. “I’m not a big dip guy, but if I’m going dipping, I’m going for the ridges.”

“Chips with ridges are essentially reinforced flat chips,” says Jim Nanni, a director of testing at CR. “They will be slightly stronger than a flat chip to resist a bending force applied perpendicular to their surface.” But make sure those ridges are pointed up and down when dipping, not parallel to the dip’s surface.

We found the rippled chips pleasant to eat on their own but a bit wimpy against the dips. The waves were better. Our sour cream-onion dip was the only dip where a tortilla chip was out of place. And kettle chips were too muscly for this delicate dip. Wavy chips were just right. The grooves give the dip a little traction to cling to, but the most remarkable part is how the Utz chips, in particular, provide a fluffy mouthfeel when eaten with the dip. It’s the comfort food equivalent of snuggling up under a large down blanket. 

These baby tortilla chips are perfect for scooping up medium-thick dips. They’re well-salted and allow for the perfect ratio of dip to chip without needing to bite a chip and get crumbs all over your lap. The smaller size means more dipping leverage, too. “A small radius, whether that’s looking at a piece of steel or a tortilla chip, is much more rigid compared with something that has a much larger radius,” says Simons.

“When you’re dipping with bite-size circular chips, you’re also able to reinforce it more with your hands than if it was an irregular shape or a larger shape,” adds Ashley Soldavini, program manager at The Ohio State University’s Sensory Evaluation Center.

Most tortilla chips risk making a mess of chunky salsas. Those slippery bits always manage to roll off your chip’s smooth surface. It seems as though Tostitos Scoops were invented specifically for chunky salsas, and they do their job very well, giving you a little salsa liquid with each bite, too. “The cups are much more rigid, and the structural integrity is stronger than flatter chips just because of the shape, says Simons.” The only downside is they’re too delicate to scoop our thicker dips.

These kettle chips (which were one of the priciest chips we bought) taste worlds apart from the other potato chips we tried, in that they taste fresh and like real potatoes. Douches says it could be the regional potato the company uses, or it could be their oil mix. “Some oils impart more flavor than others,” he says. “Sunflower oil is one that has a very mild flavor and brings out more of the potato flavor.” However, many of the potato chips we tasted also list sunflower oil in the ingredients.

Chips that are kettle-cooked—fried at a lower temperature for a longer period to achieve a highly crunchy chip—tend to be thicker and sturdier than classic potato chips, Douches says, making them more suitable for scooping heavy dips. We think they are especially ideal for dips with flavorings more suitable for a potato chip than a corn chip, such as spinach-artichoke dip and buffalo chicken dip.

Choosing a kettle chip for a hearty dip might also make it more satisfying to eat. Soldavini says kettle chips make it more satisfying to eat based on the sound they make when you bite into them, making them seem more crunchy than thin tortilla chips or ridged potato chips, which give off a higher pitch that’s more on the crispy end. “There’s something about that kettle crunch that people seem to really like,” she says.

These chips aren’t our favorite on their own—they taste like frying oil—but work well with dips, especially the thick and heavy ones. The seven-layer dip is a formidable contender for any chip. Some of the other thicker tortilla chips managed clumsily, but Green Mountain Gringo’s long and skinny strips gracefully slip into the dip, cutting through all the layers, and are long enough to pluck out all those layers in one big dip-filled bite.