Homemade Fritos

Comfort food goes a long way in a crisis.  Difficulties are just so much more manageable when you've got good food to sustain morale.  And for one of my daughters, QOTPE, that food is Fritos.

Being a good mom (at least, some days) and having been known to enjoy more than a few corn chips myself, I decided to see if there was a way to make them at home.  There are exactly three recipes online as of this writing (addresses below).  I tried two of the three.  The third one was so far off the Fritos ingredients (real Fritos do not have cayenne pepper or flax seed oil or safflower oil) that I didn't bother. 

No matter what I did--rolling thinner, salting more, sprinkling fairy dust, or just hoping really, really hard, they were nothing like real Fritos.  Now, I wouldn't call them an epic fail, because in this case, I believe an epic fail would call for barfing.  There was definitely no vomiting involved.  But there was nothing anyone would want to keep eating, either.  Sorry, QOTPE.

I have a couple of suspicions as to why DIY Fritos just don't work.

The first is that Frito-Lay company has industrial equipment for mechanically processing the grain and the chips.  We can't duplicate that at home.  Even with the edges of the chips that were rolled out so very thinly, the texture and taste just weren't there.

The second is that I also suspect that Frito-Lay has a certain variety of corn that they use for their chips.  The dent corn I have here, and which I suspect most people would be using, just doesn't have that true corn chip essence to it.  What I made here was far closer to regular tortilla chips, which would also be more easily made just by making corn tortillas and then frying those.

Just in case you want to confirm for yourself how right I am, here are the addresses for the recipes I tried, and the one I passed on:

https://www.justapinch.com/recipes/snack/chip-snack/homemade-fritos.html
https://eatup.kitchen/homemade-fritos/
https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/corn-chip-strips

Links to other recipes that just don't work:
Rice Krispiesd educat