When I was in high school, this is what I would eat for breakfast: four cevapi (small Balkan sausages), four eggs, and four hash browns. It was awesome. Twenty years later my consumption of breakfast fry-ups may have dipped but my love of hash browns has not. Before this taste test, I believed hash browns to be one of those rare foods that is never bad.
Boy was I wrong. Turns out hash browns are like Red Hot Chili Peppers songs – some are universally loved, but others I never again want to experience.
I invited some potato enthusiasts to my home for a taste test of supermarket hash browns and potato gems – eight products in total – and we rated them based on texture, flavour and appearance.
Potato gems were included as they are essentially small hash browns, unlike chips or potato scallops which lack the same shredded potato composition. All were cooked to the fan-forced oven instructions on the packet, in an oven I consider to be quite reliable.
Note: if you want a golden, crunchy result, the suggested oven times are almost never long enough. If you use an air fryer, you’ll likely also have to experiment with cook times.
Each taster ate the hash browns however they liked – with sauce, with salt, or unadulterated – and cleansed their palate with peach soda if desired. It was less like a blind taste and more like a potato festival. From a brand of potato gems that delivered maximum crunch to a “sad” sweet-potato rendition, here’s how the lineup performed.
The best overall
Birds Eye Golden Crunch Potato Gems, 900g, $6.50 from Coles and Woolworths, $7.22 a kilo
Score: 4.5/5
The clear winner, for every taste tester. They are everything you want from a shredded and baked potato product – crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, salty and extremely snackable. If I had a bucket of them in a movie, the bucket size wouldn’t matter – I would get to the end. They were so far ahead of their competitors I have now come to believe potato gems are simply a superior product to hash browns. They have more surface area in contact with oven air which makes for a much crispier result. It’s just science.
The best value for money
Birds Eye Golden Crunch Hash Browns 800g, $5.50 from Coles, IGA and Woolworths, $6.88 a kilo
Score: 3.5/5
Strangely this was the only readily available supermarket hash brown I found in the classic rectangle shape. They’re a little flatter than you’d expect but they have decent crispness and more chew to the interior potato “crystals” than their competitors. The flavour isn’t that far away from the McCain hash browns, though these are a little starchier. They also have an odd bacon smell.
And the rest
McCain Quick Cook Hash Browns 525g, $5.80 from Woolworths, $11.05 a kilo
Score: 3.5/5
The two claims on the packet, that they are “CRUNCHY” and cook in “HALF THE TIME”, are bang on. These hash browns are superior in every way to their long-cook McCain cousins – except in price (about $4 more expensive a kilo) and saltiness. Despite containing the highest amount of sodium, per 100g, of the all the taste-tested products, these, weirdly, did not taste salty enough. Life is never simple. All up, a classic hash brown experience, just in a triangle shape.
Seasons Pride Potato Jewels 1kg, $4.69 from Aldi, $4.69 per kilo
Score: 3.5/5
One of the great surprises of the taste test was the sheer variation in aroma. The tasters described the smell of these potato jewels as “strong”, “like a farm” and “it gives sausage roll”. I have no explanation for this strong-sausage-farm bouquet other than the fact Seasons Pride uses onion powder and white pepper. Add to this a slightly gloopy interior, and you might wonder why they were rated so high. Simply, they were crunchy when others were not – which goes to show how important crunch is in any baked potato product.
McCain Hash Browns 750g, $5.80 from Coles, IGA and Woolworths, $7.73 a kilo
Score: 2.5/5
Of all the hash browns we tasted, these are the most reminiscent of the salty, oily and potato-y McDonald’s hash brown. Not necessarily a bad thing, although these lacked the most important quality of McDonald’s and all great hash browns: crunch. Despite having one of the longest cooking times of any other brands, the hash brown I ate so lacked crispness it flopped in my hand. Criminal.
Potato Utopia Crispy Hash Browns 700g, $6.70 from Woolworths, $9.57 a kilo
Score: 2.5/5
With a black-and-pink packet graced with images of herbs, sea salt and onion rings, Potato Utopia looks to be the Connoisseur ice-cream of the hash brown world – a fairly basic product masquerading as luxury. Coming out of the oven, they look glorious, golden and dotted with bronze crunchy bits. And then the smell hits … onion? Like the Seasons Pride, these hash browns contain onion powder and white pepper, which makes them taste like packet soup mix. Despite the name, these are neither crispy nor my vision of utopia.
Woolworths Australian Potato Minis 1kg, $5.50 from Woolworths, $5.50 a kilo
Score: 2.5/5
While Birds Eye uses their potato gem packaging real estate to promise a “golden crunch” and “moreish mega-munch factor”, Woolworths uses theirs to talk about Australian farmers. Sadly, the potatoes from “Mark and Daniel from Victoria” produced zero crunch in my oven. I find this galling for two reasons: one, with one of the longest cooking times, these should be truly crackling, and two, there’s the fact Australian farmers have historically criticised the major supermarkets for underpaying producers.
Strong Roots Sweet Potato Hash Brown 350g, $7.50 from Woolworths, $21.43 a kilo
Score: 1.5/5
These were the last hash browns we ate. Earlier in the taste test, one reviewer described another product as the “worst yet but I’d still eat it – no such thing as an inedible hash brown”. After eating these sweet potato renditions, she changed her mind, writing a single word on her scorecard: “inedible”. Another reviewer described these as “sad vegetable glue”; another, in optimistic feedback about the flavour and texture, noted: “it has potential”. They do look like they’re going to taste good, at least. But at more than twice the price of their competitors, good looks just aren’t enough.
