Season’s Choice Hash Brown Patties Shredded Potato Patties
When I was a kid, sporting events sometimes required that we travel to places overnight. Not every hotel we stayed at offered a free continental breakfast, which meant we needed to get something to eat in the mornings. McDonald’s somehow ended up being the default option, which is probably funny in hindsight when you consider how McD’s isn’t exactly synonymous with a prime athlete’s meal. Still, the kids loved it, and the adults probably did, too.
The hash brown was the cornerstone of any McDonald’s breakfast, and while it wasn’t healthy or even all that natural looking, we still liked the taste of that rounded rectangle of deep fried starch. It was salty and hot, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. Whether in a Big Breakfast or next to a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit sandwich, the little golden potato product was a seemingly indispensable part of the meal.
Grocers, I’ve since learned, sell hash browns much like those. Trader Joe’s sells one that is, we think, the best out there. You can also find them at most large grocers, Walmart included.
Aldi also has sold one, although there are some twists in that story. For many years, the supermarket sold a frozen pack in a paper carton under its Season’s Choice private label, with a few small tweaks to the formula along the way. Then, in 2023, and for reasons unknown, Season’s Choice Hash Browns disappeared from Aldi shelves. They were replaced by Mydibel Hash Brown Patties, a product that is not an Aldi house brand but instead a Belgian-based outfit. We weren’t the biggest fans of the Mydibel patties, but that’s what Aldi had. (We tended to get TJ’s hash browns instead when we could.)
And then, in 2024, a Season’s Choice version reappeared on Aldi shelves, this time in a plastic bag.
We picked them up.
Season’s Choice Hash Brown Patties Shredded Potato Patties — yes, that’s the full name — are an Aldi Regular Buy. You can find them in stores all the time, notwithstanding the fact that they were out of stores entirely for a while. They come in a 43.33-ounce plastic bag in the store’s frozen section and currently cost $5.49. That comes out to 12.6 cents an ounce. That’s a hair more than the 12.4 cents an ounce Trader Joe’s Hashbrowns currently cost.
One of the first things I noticed about the Aldi hash browns was that the bag declared they were a product of Belgium … the same home country as Mydibel. Does that mean Aldi patties are rebranded Mydibel patties or patties manufactured by Mydibel? It’s possible. Although there are some differences between the two nutrition labels, it would make sense that Aldi would contract out with a known company, and the common country of origin suggests something.
Regardless, let’s talk about the Season’s Choice label. Each patty has 110 calories, 5 grams of fat, 0.5 grams of saturated fat, and 220 milligrams of sodium. The ingredients are potatoes, sunflower oil, salt, dextrose, white pepper, and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, a food emulsifier that helps everything to combine together. No allergens are listed.
The package lists two methods for cooking, oven and air fryer. The patties should be kept frozen until it’s time to prepare them.
To bake, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spread the frozen patties in a single layer on a baking sheet. Heat 15-18 minutes until crispy, flipping halfway through the cooking time.
To heat in the air fryer, preheat the fryer to 350 degrees. Place a single layer of hash browns in the basket. Heat in the air fryer for 10-12 minutes or until desired color and crispiness is achieved.
I used the air fryer for the listed time.
I thought the hash browns were a little soft after 12 minutes, so I heated them for about 5 more minutes at 400 degrees, which crisped them up a little.
They’re okay. The exterior had an adequate crisp, if not as crispy as the old Season’s Choice version or the current Trader Joe’s one. The interior was a little on the mushy side, which is unusual for hash browns I’ve had from stores. The taste, likewise, was adequate, if a little on the bland side.
The Verdict:
I was curious to see how the relaunched Season’s Choice Hash Browns would hold up to both the stellar Trader Joe’s Hashbrowns and the passable Mydibel ones. As it turns out, we think these are closer to Mydibel than TJ’s. They’re not terrible, but they’re not great. The texture is not as crisp as we’d like — the interior is on the mushy side — and the taste isn’t as flavorful as we’d prefer.
For our money, we’d rather get the Trader Joe’s patties, which cost about the same and are superior in taste and texture. If you don’t have ready access to Trader Joe’s in your area, these are okay. In our view, they’re not as good as what Aldi sold years ago, though. It’s rare to see Aldi take a step back on food quality, but this might be an example.
We recently purchased Mini Hash Brown Patties from our local Aldi store. I had never seen them before, nor have we seen any hash brown patties previously. We tried the mini’s and like them. They are small so we each eat two with breakfast. I would purchase again. I agree to bake them a little longer for crispiness.
I think the mini ones may be a limited-time Aldi Find, so if you like them, I’d recommend stocking up if they’re still in your local store the next time you go shopping.
So sad to know these don’t meet the standard of the original paper packaging hash browns, they were so good. We were disappointed in the replacement and doubt I’ll buy these to try. We also get the Trader Joe’s hash browns which are quite good, but our closest TJ location is planned outing, so it’s more of a “special buy” than a “regular buy” for us.