French Fry Diary 638: Kettle Brand Oven Fries

Kettle Brand makes some incredible potato chips. Among my favorites are the Sweet & Salty, the Maple Bacon, and especially their wonderful baked Real Sliced Potatoes variety. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found out they were going into the French fries business.

Kettle Brand has entered the market, just the Whole Foods Market, in my area at least, with frozen potato wedges called oven fries. What's curious is I can't seem to find any info on them on their website. I know they are also available in Roasted Garlic, Salt + Fresh Ground Pepper, Sea Salt, and Rosemary + Garlic, but I couldn't find them any trace of them online. I even asked their usually very helpful Twitter account to no avail.

I tried the Sea Salt variety. As with most Kettle Brand products, these frozen natural cut potato wedges are gluten free, all natural, no preservatives, no transfats, no GMO, no nothing but potatoes, and some other stuff, but nothing that sounds harmful. Unlike most potato wedges however, they seem to be unbattered, we'll see how that works out.

Out of the oven they were not quite what I expected. Soft and hot, but only but a little bit crispy. I guess I could have cooked them a bit longer but that wasn't the real problem. These wedges were pretty much flavorless and needed seasoning bad. Once I gave them a bit of a kick with some Mrs. Dash, and dipped them in barbeque sauce they were much better.

French Fry Diary 552: Dunkin' Donuts Hash Browns 2014

On a recent episode of The GAR! Podcast, my partner Ray Cornwall espoused the virtues of Dunkin' Donuts Hash Browns. You can hear that episode here. I knew I had reviewed them once, and talked about them again a year later, and was more than unimpressed. Ray raved about them, so I felt it might be time to try them again.

Despite Ray's description of them as UFOs and flat pancakes (not necessarily incorrect or accurate either), I knew as soon as I saw them, these were the same hash brown discs I had tried years ago. These hash browns are inch wide, quarter inch high discs of shaped potato bits, similar to the offerings at, as I've said before, Burger King and Chick-fil-A.

When I saw them pulled from a drawer where they had been kept since a first deep fry, then put into a quick bake oven, I shuddered. This was not going to be pretty. They put them in a bag this time rather than a cup, but they still stuck together in a nasty greasy way.

These hash brown-ettes do have an herbal spicy kick (I'm still betting on Mrs. Dash), but that's not enough to recommend them. I imagine they might be good if they were hot and not so greasy, but I get the feeling they cannot be found thus. Sounds like Ray might have found that one percent occurrence.