Bean and Rice Chips: Vegan Doritos?

When Beanfields Snacks contacts you to see if you'd like to sample their vegan, gluten-free, corn-free Bean and Rice chips, you say yes!  For one, they're chips.  Secondly, you should always be open to all things "bean". 

A short time passed and I thought they'd forgotten about me, but it turned out they were just packaging samplings for bloggers far and wide: an impressive and generous assortment of their chips: nacho, sea salt, and pico de gallo.

Of course I was most excited to try the nacho flavor because I'd been hearing that they are the healthy, vegan, Dorito. 

Besides that stunning comparison, I was thrilled to see the word "vegan" emblazoned on the bag.

I can't lie, though; part of me was disappointed that the chips were not radioactive orange: old habits die hard.  While the chips definitely have a pleasant nacho flavor, the fact that they look and taste so obviously healthy prevents me from calling them the "healthy, vegan, Dorito"; that's too much of an oxymoron!  I'd say this is the healthy, vegan alternative to the Dorito: for the matured palates of the vegan and health-conscious community.  Whether or not I fall into either of those categories is still debatable...  

As I was chomping I noticed that the packaging of the other flavors were missing the "vegan" heading, so I contacted the company to confirm before tasting.  Their reply was, "Yes - all of our chips are vegan. We only printed it on the nacho bag because most tortilla chips are vegan, but a nacho typically would be made with dairy, so we wanted to highlight that it truly was unique."  Since vegans are forever reading labels and really appreciate when companies make things easier to identify, I'm not sure I follow their logic.  But they are confirmed vegan and that's the most important thing.

Next up on the tasting calendar was the sea salt flavor.

I expected more of a salty bite; after the nacho they tasted more like "plain".

And by "plain" I mean begging to be smothered in pepperjack Daiya and other various nacho toppings... don't mind if I do.  Please note that these chips lose some of their crunchiness when heated.

I'd been avoiding the pico de gallo flavor because I associate pico de gallo with cilantro.

To be more precise, I consider pico de gallo to be salsa's evil, cilantro-laden sister: yuck.

But while this variety does contain cilantro (dehydrated), I couldn't taste it; instead, it came across as a salsa-y chip...begging for some salsa dip!

Thanks so much to Beanfields for kindly sending me their products to sample.  If you'd like to do the same and you can't yet find them in a store near you, buy them online.