17 April 2014

Bannisters' Farm Ready Baked Potatoes and Littl'uns [review by @NLi10]

Spuds. Most of them aren't very interesting (although some of them are Rockstars) and they are a staple of the British diet. Being somewhat of a contrarian I'm not a fan of potatoes, they take ages to cook and really only have the flavour of whatever you added to them.

This is why I turned the review of these frozen, ready baked potatoes down initially. I mean - it's a box of spuds, how exciting can that be!

When the invitation came a second time I had a closer look at the PR and figured that the worst that could happen is I'd get a free meal and a very short review that essentially said - it's spuds.


The main reason I decided to go for it was that the cooking times are short and comparable to pasta and noodles (which I live off unless someone intervenes and goes shopping with or for me). This means you have a reasonable window in which to craft something to go with your potatoes.


The frozen spuds are prebuttered and pre baked and even have a neat little cross on them to prevent exploding potato incidents.  We went for the large ones initially - one each.


While these were reheating I threw some left over veg and Thai curry paste at the wok pan and added a chopped up veggie sausage or three.  I figured this would be interesting enough to complement the spuds but not enough to overpower.


I added more butter to the potato because it was an automatic thing to do and we ate away. Firstly the potatoes smelt nicely roasted - for 8 or so mins in the microwave this was pretty good, and when I squeezed the cross they opened easily and were very soft.  Previous microwave potatoes have been pretty hard so they have this part sorted!

The flavour was similarly impressive with the roastness definitely shining through. I did wonder whether some of this was due to my generous helping of extra butter and the zingy curry that complemented it really well. 

When we made the smaller little uns potatoes the following week I had mine without extras (just a side of baked beans) and found them solid enough but I preferred them with the extras. Not quite the full richness of oven roast potatoes but definitely nice enough to stash away in the freezer for a quick and filling treat.

I'm sure the mini baked potatoes were supposed to be eaten one at a time but we had two which was a large portion.  With a more substantial side of veg or meat as part of a healthier meal though I think I'd have been happy with just the one.

Overall a surprising win for the box of frozen spuds. Not so much one for the fortnightly shop, but something to keep with the frozen pizza for a simple effective meal good enough for guests.

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