TGI Fridays Cheddar and Bacon Potato Skins

Thu, July 10 2008

I hadn’t really planned on reviewing any food items here but I was so disappointed in this product that I had to. Now, I love potato skins, even the worst tend to be pretty good. We all know they’re bad for us but, hey, I’m from Wisconsin and that’s how we like things. TGI Fridays Cheddar and Bacon Potatoes Skins are the really bad kind of worst.

So this frozen box clad in the traditional Fridays red and white stripes contains about 6 skins and seems to imply that you can have this delectable and sinful treat previously only available in their restaurants, right in your own home and for less time, too!

I quickly open the box to find the skins are laying looks in a bag inside all upside down and bacon bits have fallen off. Now, these skins are much smaller than, say, a pizza where you can toss any loose toppings back on and there was basically no saving anything that had fallen off.

Next I notice the “cheese.” As I mentioned, I’m from Wisconsin and I am damned picky about my dairy products. Happy cows do not come from California and California would not know real milk if it bit them on the nose but that is neither here nor there. What is here, or rather, was on my cooking sheet were frozen potato skins with a big dollop of what looked like frozen Cheez Wiz, something which quite definitely is not cheese but pretends to be, and a few speckles of bacon.

Whatever. I pop them in the oven, come back about 10 minutes later and see that the cheese is not doing what cheese should be doing and that is melting into a greasy, gooey, delicious mess. I give them some more time and this still has not happened.

I decided to give them a chomp anyway. I usually have my potato skins with sour cream or ranch so I opted for the former. Right away these potato skins were bland and lacking in any sort of taste. The sour cream wasn’t cutting it so I upped the ante, to ranch, just to make these things palatable.

I tried to pop some others in the microwave to see if it really was just that I wasn’t heating them enough but the cheese just did not do what cheese should do. This was nothing like the wonderful treat served in TGI Fridays and it paled even in comparison to the mediocre skins I usually must resort to.

The additional heating proved that this simply is not a product made with cheese but an imitation which may be yellow but retains none of the other cheesy characters we all love.

So what’s left? The bacon had no taste, what little was left on the skins. The potato itself was not horrible but there seems to be a lot of it considering as these are just the skins. Parts seemed a bit dry and the “cheese” wasn’t spread very evenly – if that would even have helped – so I drowned the last of these skins in ranch and down the hatch they went.

The ranch was very good.

My 2cents? Skip it. Enjoy it at the restaurant but this poor imitation is a disgrace to the name.

My name is Cole and I do not endorse this product!