Doritos Gaucamole!

 

Product circa: 2025

Note: This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom.

Akin to most of the "meaty" chips flavors, Doritos Guacamole doesn't actually have any avocado in it.  (Which is funny, because it's the only reason I can eat it, as I am allergic to avocados.)  Instead, it has every ingredient in guacamole except for the avocado.  They really took a "kitchen sink" approach here, with your typical spices and aromatics, but also jalapeno, sour cream powder, cheese powder, and tomato powder.  The taste is reminiscent of ranch flavoring, as many of the flavors are in common with it.  But there is a tanginess on the chip that makes everything else taste light and fresh.  I swear there is cilantro in here too.  For a product that doesn't quite know what it wants to be, it's pretty impressive.

Doritos Late Night Loaded Taco

 

Product circa: 2025

I'm fairly certain that this product was released many years ago, but I can't recall if I tried it back then.

A fairly complicated mix of many different flavors.  There is no meat in the ingredients, but there is cumin, coriander, onion, and garlic, which do a pretty decent job at simulating the flavor of the type of seasoned ground beef you'd find in tacos.  There is tomato powder in this, but I don't taste it.  I do, however, get a bit of the regular cheese powder thrown in here as well.  Very good!

Doritos Late Night Sizzlin' Cheeseburger

 

Note: This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom

Product circa: 2025

Though I never posted it on this site, some 15+ years ago I recall having this same product.  It was a revelation.  Each component of a cheeseburger could be parsed from the taste of the product: beef, cheese, tomato, onion, mustard, pickle, and even lettuce.

While I commend that this product actually has beef in the ingredients list, this still doesn't quite measure up to the older version.  At first bite, the beef, cheese, and pickle immediate produce the cheeseburger "vibe".  Aside from the additional onion, and perhaps mustard, that's where this product stops.  It's still delicious, though.

Doritos Golden Sriracha

 

Product circa: winter 2025

This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom.

A frankenstein flavor that likely uses artificial flavor compounds.  The first bite is dominated by chile (not too spicy), mustard, and savories like onion and garlic.  There is a tanginess, but also a sweetness that is almost fruity, and my guess is it's the same flavoring used in the Lay's Sweet & Spicy Honey.  Like that product, this one also has a throwaway name; I suppose the presence of chile and garlic could pose as sriracha.  Not bad, but I would never buy this again.

Doritos Salsa Verde

 

Note: This is a presumptive Ephemeral Nom

Product circa: 2024, and probably before and after

I think I've seen this one around over the years, but I'm finally getting to try it.

Very salty and heavy on MSG, both of which are very high on the ingredients.  Then the flavor is very green: green chiles, like jalapeno, maybe even tomatillo, then green herbs, like parsley and cilantro.  Not too heavy on onion and garlic.  Very decently spicy.  But heavy on salt.  I wish the flavors were stronger; this snack is fairly subtle.

Doritos Baja Fiery Mango

Product circa: Spring 2024

This is part of the 20th Bajaversary, which is a joint celebration between Taco Bell and Mountain Dew.  I'm having trouble finding the significance of the year 2004 in this "anniversary".  Said to be part of this celebration is the permanent release of Mountain Dew Baja Blast products in stores, as well as Baja Laguna Lemonade & Baja Point Break Punch.

Anyway, these things are fascinating.  They start with a bright and tangy mango flavor that can't help me think of sugary breakfast cereal... maybe it's the sugar and corn crunch together that's giving that aura.  The heat then slowly shows itself, and this is some of the most impressive heat I've experienced on a Doritos product.  There's probably some savory elements in this snack as well, such as onion and garlic, but if so, they are very subdued.  Honestly, this tastes like spicy Doritos that have Kool-Aid Tropical Punch powder sprinkled over them.  Overall, a fun experiment, but not a snack that I would reach for unironically.

Doritos Flamin' Hot Mystery Flavor 2024

 

Product circa: 2024

With mystery flavors like these, I usually give it an honest effort to discern the flavor before looking up internet opinions.  In this case, my guess seems to be correct.  These are flavored like a thai coconut curry or tom kha soup.  Hot chile leads the flavors, with creamy coconut milk specifically (not coconut), and even lemongrass in the mix.  After some internet searches, it seems others have come to the same conclusion.  I don't love these, but this is a very impressive execution.  Bravo, Doritos!

Doritos Tangy Pickle

 

Product circa: summer 2024

These are Doritos with "Salt & Vinegar" and "dill pickle" chip seasoning combined into one.  For me, they are way too intense... they even literally hurt my tongue after only a handful of chips.  A bit much.

Doritos Hot Mustard

 

This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom, as it’s not clear if it’s a limited time product.

Product circa: Summer 2023

On the first bite, you’ll taste a sweetness that reminds of honey mustard. It disappointed me at first, but not for long. The flavor quickly turns into a pungent deli mustard, with the vinegary dijon-like “burn” that will really go to your head, if you’re not careful. These are tasty, but the flavor is so bold that a few chips go a long way... such that I wish I could eat more at a time. I’m inclined to rate these as “good”, but the fidelity to the mustard is so impressive, that it’s great.

Doritos Hot Mustard: NOM NOM NOM - Great
Original Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison): NOM NOM - Good

Doritos Tangy Ketchup

 

Product circa: summer 2023 (contemporary as of this posting)

This product is a presumptive Ephemeral Nom, as it is not clearly a limited edition.

While I think that most ketchup-flavored chips are very tasty, in my opinion they usually end up tasting like tomato powder and spices.

Not these. The tomato flavoring on these evokes the sweet fruitiness that tomatoes can lend to a fresh ketchup. Enough vinegar powder is added to really give that ketchup taste. You have the savory flavors lightly backing everything up, like onion, garlic, and paprika. In the end, these are the most faithful ketchup-flavored snack I’ve ever tasted. I’d rate it higher if I were a ketchup freak… but I’m not.

Doritos Tangy Ketchup: NOM NOM NOM - Great
Original Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison): NOM NOM - Good

Doritos Ultimate Cheddar

 

This limited time item is easy to miss, as its flavor doesn't necessarily seem very unusual.

First taste is intensely savory, the ingredients list revealing both tomato, onion, and garlic powder.  The cheese then takes over, but it's not intense.  Once again, the ingredients list tells that cheddar, monterey jack, and swiss cheese powders are involved here, though I don't think you're going to pick any of them out.  Honestly, the cheese flavor here is way too subtle, and left me wishing I had some original Nacho Cheese instead, with its sharp cheese wallop.  This was almost in 2-NOM territory, but I had to go low.

Doritos Ultimate Cheddar:- Passable

Original Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison):- Good

Doritos Jacked Test Flavor 855

We have another line of poll products out, and this time they're from Doritos.  It's much like other such products: there are three flavors out on the shelves, and folks can vote online for their favorite at boldflavorexperiment.com.  Doritos will supposedly further produce the winner as a semi-permanent product, but there's a catch: these possible flavors don't have names or descriptions.  It's a blind taste test which your tongue must lead.

Unfortunately, this contest involves Doritos Jacked, not the regular chips.  I earlier explained the disappointment here.

I got my hands on the red version of these test chips.  The smell doesn't offer too much past chili powder.  The flavor of them prove fairly complex, but not in a great way.  Firstly noticeable are small and equal amounts of seasoning like from Doritos Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch.  A strange combination, but pleasant.  Immediately afterward, however, these flavors are overwhelmed by what I would describe as dry and earthy powdered chile, which lingers and lingers.  The mouthful ends with a strong acidic tang, which might be vinegar, but tastes more like lime, and then a surprisingly hot spiciness, which can get a bit painful after a dozen or two chips in a row.

Bite after bite, chile and lime are the only thing I can taste.  Spice and acid.  The balance is way off.  In the end, they taste more like an experiment in extremes, not a sophisticated and interesting product.


Doritos Jacked Test Flavor 855:- Passable

Doritos Locos Tacos (Tortilla Chips)

They say that sometimes reality imitates art, right?  Well, just a few months ago while trying to highlight the ridiculousness of Ice Cream Oreo Cookies N' Cream, I stated that the snack's self-referential aura makes similar to if Doritos went ahead and made a Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos chip variety.  In the end, that's exactly what they did.

Doritos has rolled out two limited time flavors to celebrate the cross-branded tacos that Taco Bell now sells that features Doritos seasonings.  Luckily for us, Doritos did not attempt to make a chip seasoning that attempts to capture the essence of the product that captured the essence of original Doritos(like Oreo did), but instead sought to create an artistic approach that captures of the spirit of the product.

The company has resorted to its old "two flavors, one bag" paradigm in creating these two products: each bag contains either the original Nacho Cheese chips or Cool Ranch chips, along with another flavor that Doritos is calling Crunchy Taco.

The aroma of the Crunchy Taco chips is somewhat spicy and indicative of a dry chile powder, which is like many other products from this brand.  The taste, however, is completely new.  After a while, I realized that these chips attempt directly to mimic the seasoning that Taco Bell puts on their ground beef, and the resemblance is quite accurate.  The two major flavors are chile and coriander, and there's a bit of cumin in the background.  These are delicious, and I wish Doritos would produce this chip on its own.

Simply put, it's my opinion that these new chips are much better when paired with Nacho Cheese than with Cool Ranch.  The above-mentioned cocktail of spices simply go better with cheese than the other cocktail of spices and herbs that is Cool Ranch.  I was never one to dip everything in ranch dressing anyway, but these days that seems to be a popular thing to do.

Doritos Tacos Locos Nacho Cheese Crunchy Taco:- Great
Doritos Tacos Locos Cool Ranch Crunchy Taco:- Good

Doritos Jumpin' Jack

Doritos rolled out another limited edition flavor along with their continually-iterated Sour Cream & Onion.  This newbie is called Jumpin' Jack, and it has its own branded emblem and everything!

Let's face it: pepper jack cheese is freaking delicious, so much so that it should be incorporated to all of our favorite foods; it was simply a matter of time until this product was created.  Granted, Doritos already has several examples of its attempts in combining cheese, chiles, and spices (as does Cheetos and Fritos, for that matter), so this really isn't a new idea.

Whatever they changed this time, they got it right.  The flavor powder dusting on the chips looks lite, but these pack as much flavor as any Doritos mainstay.  Put a bit too simply, these taste like a spicy combination of the brand's flagship flavors Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch.  I actually crushed a handful of both the former and the latter and ate it with a spoon out of a bowl to see how right I was, and I wasn't far off.

The lady of the house commented that the cheese in the mix tasted a bit like plastic cheese.  I think that's her way of articulating the difference between this snack's light, young, and overly-creamy cheese flavor, as opposed to the fairly aged flavor of Nacho Cheese's seasoning.  And this cheese character invokes Monterey Jack surprisingly well.

Said creaminess on the tongue is cut by "spices"-- like onion, garlic, cumin, maybe coriander-- and chile, most of which is clearly jalapeno.  It doesn't get more complicated than that and there's not much more to say, but the balance in the seasoning is immaculate.  You'll keep reaching for these until they're gone.

These are just a hair away from 4-NOMs.


Doritos Jumpin' Jack:- Great
Original Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison):-Great

Doritos Sour Cream & Onion

I saw these Doritos in a store a year or two ago and have regretted not picking them up ever since.  They've finally come back, and I nabbed them with an amount of greed that surprised even myself.

Unfortunately, the payoff wasn't huge.

These aren't a perfect translation of sour cream & onion potato chips because they can't be; the exact flavors used for potatoes don't exactly harmonize the same way with corn.  Unfortunately, I don't think Doritos' choice of flavors harmonize with corn either.

These amount to more like a Cool Ranch Lite than sour cream & onion.  There's plenty of onion in the seasoning, and also a good bit of supporting herbs and spices, many of which are found in the brand's Cool Ranch variety.  There's also the light cheese/sour milk powder on there to simulate the sour cream, but overall it tastes like something other than sour cream and onion.  While moderately tasty, A die hard SC&O fan would find these very disappointing.


Doritos Sour Cream & Onion:- Good
Original Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison):- Great

Doritos Jacked Smoky Chipotle BBQ

 Note: This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom.

This is the 2nd flavor that Doritos rolled out in their initial (and perhaps only) Jacked line.  I reviewed the first one here.

It's simultaneously bizarre and pleasant to experience a barbecue aroma and flavor on Doritos, simply because it's so seldom done.  (This reminds of when I recently saw Sour Cream and Onion Doritos but stupidly didn't pick them up.  It looks like I lost my one chance.)

The initial flavor hit is of a traditional barbecue seasoning like you'd find on any potato chip.  The ways in which this one is different is with increased amounts of tomato powder and sugar, which make this seasoning one of the sweetest I've ever had on such a chip.  The sweetness is there for a reason, because these chips are quite spicy.  You knew that sugar is really the only thing that counteracts capsaicin, right?

It was a friend who finally tipped me off to the fact that these taste almost exactly like the now-discontinued Kentucky Fried Chicken Honey BBQ wings.  It's uncanny.  I haven't had them in years, but these taste almost like an exact replica of that sticky wing sauce.

And that's a problem.  It's a problem because these are not honey bbq chips, they are smoky chipotle bbq chips.  As a side note, I enjoy cooking, and I do it often.  One of the ingredients I find excuses to use more of are chipotles, whether they be dried or, even better, canned with adobo sauce.  As someone very familiar with the flavor of chipotles, these taste nothing like them.

There's another problem that reared it's head with the last Jacked flavor: the chip itself.  This ultra-thick chip is severely crunchy, and I feel that Doritos may have made a misstep in trying to achieve this dubious characteristic.  These chips somehow achieve their amount of crunchiness by containing less-than-normal amounts of fat, which usually lend a tenderness to snacks like these.  This lack of fattiness, however, is to the detriment to the snack as a whole, and not just its structural nature.  The lack of fat prevents these chips from having an aftertaste; that is to say, after the swallow, except for spiciness, these chips leave very little flavor in your mouth.  It may sound pleasant, but it is instead very dissatisfying.  A bit of extra grease would carry the flavor a bit more, but as it stands now the flavor's a bit too ephemeral, dare I say.

If this snack used a normal Doritos chip type, it would have been Great, and if it had also been labeled as "Spicy Honey BBQ", it would have been Outstanding.  But as it sits, even though it's a fascinating snack, it won't get past the 2-NOM barrier.

Doritos Jacked Smoky Chipotle BBQ: - Good

Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison): - Great


acquired: supermarket

Doritos Jacked Enchilada Supreme

Note: This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom.

New Doritos flavors tend to be among the most exciting snacks, and so I nabbed this bag greedily when I saw it.

I was taken aback by their texture, and then I was informed by the back of the bag that this new line, Doritos Jacked, contains new extra thick chips to go along with the new flavors.  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  Back near the turn of the millennium Tostitos had their thicker Tostitos Gold variety, which I loved, but these Doritos Jacked are even thicker and crunchier.

The flavor of Enchilada Supreme Doritos seems like a redundant and half-hearted attempt.  The base of the seasoning feels like a duller version of the company's Nacho Cheese flavor.  On top of this base I can detect a few additions - chiles, bell pepper, a bit of cumin.  The flavor is overall enjoyable but not assertive enough, almost like the dull lovechild of Doritos Nacho Cheese and Doritos Taco.

As for the Jacked line's textural signature, I don't feel like it adds anything.  Then again, I always tend to enjoy more tender snacks like Tostitos Multigrain over normal tortilla chips and regular potato chips over their kettle-cooked counterparts.


Doritos Jacked Enchilada Supreme: (Good)

Doritos Nacho Cheese(for comparison): (Great)

Acquired: supermarket