Season’s Choice Twice Baked Potatoes

Holiday dinners among my immediate family often consist of certain familiar favorites. Shrimp with cocktail sauce, Rich & Charlie’s Salad, spiral ham, and deviled eggs frequently make it onto the menu. So does cheesecake or ice cream of some sort.

One side dish my family may ask for is twice baked potatoes. I usually make these from scratch using a recipe from The Pioneer Woman. The recipe calls for baking some potatoes, slicing them in half lengthwise, and scooping out the insides. Then, you mix the potato insides with generous amounts of butter, bacon, sour cream, cheese, milk, salt, pepper, and green onions. You stuff it all back inside the potato skins and bake until it’s all warm and melty. They taste heavenly and are the perfect accompaniment to a holiday meal.

Sometimes, Aldi sells ready-made twice baked potatoes. These feature “cheddar cheese and Monterey jack cheese blended with cream cheese & butter in a baked potato.” They’re a product of the U.S.

Season’s Choice Twice Baked Potatoes are an Aldi Find, so they’re only in stores for a short time. Each store gets one shipment, and after that sells out, they’re gone until whenever Aldi might decide to bring them back. Aldi does not offer online ordering for these if they’re sold out at your local store. When these are in stock, you’ll find them in the Aldi Find freezer case.

Season’s Choice is an Aldi house brand that encompasses various frozen vegetables. It’s not a company, just a name to give Aldi products a uniform look.

I bought these potatoes for review, and I paid $4.19 for a 10-ounce package at my local Aldi at the time of writing. Each box contains two potato halves, or two servings. That comes out to about $2.10 per serving or about 42 cents per ounce.

You could certainly make twice baked potatoes from scratch for less per serving, but they do require labor that you’re cutting out when you buy them ready-made like this. These aren’t quite as fully loaded as my homemade version, since they don’t have bacon or green onions.

If you’re looking out for allergens, these contain milk.

One serving has 220 calories, 11 grams of total fat (14% DV), 6 grams of saturated fat (30% DV), 310 mg of sodium (13% DV), 26 grams of total carbohydrates (9% DV), 3 grams of dietary fiber (11% DV), 2 grams of total sugars, no added sugars, and 6 grams of protein.

The box has directions for cooking these from frozen in a conventional oven or in a microwave.

To bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place unwrapped frozen potatoes on a baking sheet. Bake for 50 minutes or to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. The ridges will be browned and the potatoes should be heated throughout.

To microwave, remove the plastic wrap from a frozen potato and heat the potato on a microwave-safe plate for 3 1/2 to 4 minutes, or to an internal temperature of 165 degrees.

I opted to heat one of these in the microwave for a quick lunch alongside an Aldi Caesar salad kit.

I later baked the other potato in the oven to compare.

The potatoes turned out fine either way. The topping started to slide off the potato when it was heating in the microwave, but I gently scooped it back on and it didn’t look much worse for wear. Meanwhile, the oven-baked potato held together fine and got nicely browned and slightly crispy on top. If you have the time, I recommend the oven baking method.

While there are no instructions on the box for air frying these, I think you could probably heat them that way, too. You might have to experiment some with time and temperature.

Something I noticed with both potatoes is that the manufacturer didn’t scoop all of the regular potato out of the skin to mix with cheese and spoon back in. So, some parts of these twice baked potatoes taste more like a regular baked potato. One family member said these are more like “twice baked potato-topped baked potatoes.” They’re not bad, but if I were making these homemade, they wouldn’t have such large chunks of regular potato.

With that said, the cheesy parts are good, and these are decent if you want fancy potatoes without all the work.

The Verdict:

Season’s Choice Twice Baked Potatoes feature cheddar cheese, Monterey jack cheese, and cream cheese blended with baked potato insides and all spooned back inside potato skins. The plain baked potato isn’t fully scooped out of the potato skins, so these have a fair amount of regular potato on the bottom, with the cheesy potato mixture on top. That’s a bit disappointing, but otherwise these taste fine.