Henrietta Said – Nashville Hot Chicken Peanuts

Bitter: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Salty: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰

Sour: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Sweet: ⭐⭐✰✰✰

Umami: ⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Heat: ⭐✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰

Quick Flavor Notes: Savory, salty, smoky, sweet

Texture: Crunch peanuts with nice meaty texture

Recommended: Yes

Ingredients: Peanuts, Peanut Oil, Nashville Hot Seasoning Mix (to include celery seed), Paprika, Salt, Yeast Extract, Sugar, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Soybean Oil, Natural Flavor, Smoke Flavor, Spice Extractive, and Silicon Dioxide Added to Prevent Caking

I’ve previously tried the Henrietta Said Buffalo Wing Flavored Peanuts when Amazon decided to send me a five pack of those instead of the variety flavor pack I ordered. I enjoyed them enough to give Amazon another shot at the variety pack and this time it arrived as expected. Not sure where to start I decided to just go with the one on the top of the box which was the Nashville Hot Chicken flavor.

Nashville Hot Chicken is often served with pickles and according to the bad the peanuts have a blend of pickle and hot chicken seasoning to best recreate the flavors of the dish. I don’t see any ingredients in the list that strike me as definitively pickle-flavored, but many of them are obscured as just “spices” “spice extractives” and “natural flavors” so anything could be present here. The peanuts are thankfully very well covered in seasoning, there’s nothing more disappointing than opening up a bag of seasoned peanuts and seeing the people who made them skimped heavily on the seasoning mix.

While the label claims that these are “scandalously spicy” and shows a heat level of four (out of how many I’m not sure) chicken drumsticks, the actual heat level on these is very low. Nashville hot chicken is known to have a range of spice from just barely there to hot enough to make you beg for mercy and chug milk (or your beverage of choice) just to get through a piece. Henrietta Said obviously aimed for the extremely low end of that scale, though what these lack in heat they do make up for in a great savory slightly-smoky and slightly-sweet flavor profile. The celery seed is a great addition (and having grown up in the land of Old Bay I feel it’s an ingredient that should see more use) adding some grassy freshness to the earthier and darker other spices used. I don’t necessarily get Nashville chicken from the flavor of these however. If anything they remind me of a dry-spice version of the “everything” seafood boil spices used in the various Vietnamese-Cajun seafood places that have popped up all over the country.

I’ll also take issue with the front of the bag saying “no artificial ingredients” while the ingredients list shows “spice extractives”. Extracts are inherently unnatural in my opinion. If you want to use a spice, use the spice, not an extract of that spice. That being said these don’t have an artificial chemically taste, and the onion, garlic, paprika, and other spices used give them a great savory flavor plus a good bit of umami richness from the nutritional yeast. So these aren’t actually spicy and I’d say not all-natural, but they do taste quite good, and the quality of the peanuts used is high, nice and large with a meaty texture and good crunch.

I’ll go ahead and recommend Henrietta Said Nashville Hot Chicken Peanuts. My main issues are the branding and claims made on the packaging and not with the product itself which, while not spicy, is flavorful and delicious.