Trader Joe’s Hashbrowns Shredded Potatoes

When I was a kid, my family would sometimes go to McDonald’s for breakfast. While the Big Breakfast with pancakes and sausage was a favorite in the family, I was fond of a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. The meal was the best, as it came with a drink (usually orange juice) and a hash brown patty.

The hash brown — or hashbrown, if you prefer* — feels almost like an afterthought, but it’s one of the tastier parts of a breakfast combo meal. It adds a complementary flavor to the sandwich and drink, and McDonald’s hash browns are pretty good. Later on I worked a couple of summers at the fast-food chain, preparing many hash browns in the deep fryers the restaurant uses.

Different grocers sell hash brown patties, including Aldi. Aldi’s distant relative, Trader Joe’s, also has a hash brown patty option.

Trader Joe’s Hashbrowns Shredded Potatoes can be found in the store’s frozen section. They come in a package of 10, with a total of 22.5 ounces. The package costs $2.29, or about 10 cents an ounce or 22 cents a patty. They’re a little more expensive than their Aldi counterparts, which run about 8 cents an ounce or 17 cents a patty, but the TJ’s patties are still much less than what you’d pay at a fast-food restaurant.

The hashbrowns offer one method of cooking: the oven. To do so, you preheat the oven to 400, place the patties on an ungreased baking pan, and cook for 14 minutes, turning over halfway through. For our test, we went instead with an air fryer, cooking them around the same time and temperature. I did add a couple of extra minutes at the end to crisp them up a little bit more, but that’s personal preference.

The patties came out amazing. I’ve had plenty of McDonald’s hash browns in my time, and these are the closest store-bought hash browns I’ve ever had to those. There is a distinct light flakiness and crispiness to McD’s patties, and these TJ’s patties capture that pitch-perfect. Aldi hash browns, which are solid in their own right, are nevertheless not as close an imitation, being a little more dense and potato-y.

In my experience, Trader Joe’s food ingredients tend to be either absurdly complicated or refreshingly simple. These hash browns seem to fall closer to the simple, with only five ingredients. They have enough fat, carbs, and sodium as to not be something to eat all the time, but it’s nice to see something that isn’t full of processed mystery ingredients.

Note that the product does contain soy.

Nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

The Verdict:

Trader Joe’s Hashbrowns Shredded Potatoes are about as a good a McDonald’s imitation as you’ll get, even more than the good Aldi hash browns. They’re reasonably priced, too, especially compared to fast food. If you’re looking to duplicate the restaurant experience, you won’t do much better than these.

* There doesn’t seem to be any consistent approach with how to render this food. Some sites use “hash brown” while others use “hashbrowns.” “Hash brown” seems to be more common: Aldi calls them “shredded hash browns” or “hash brown patties,” and McDonald’s also calls them “hash browns.” Trader Joe’s, meanwhile, uses “hashbrowns,” We tend to follow Aldi’s lead in calling them “hash browns,” which we continue to do here, except when referring to the proper name of the Trader Joe’s product.