Cracker Barrel Redux

Remember how GrubHub forgot the hashbrown casserole from our order and I ended up getting an insane amount of food for free?

Since then all we want to eat is Cracker Barrel hashbrown casserole. Perhaps that is the business model: leave something out, play hard-to-get. Our desire overrode our liberal hatred of Cracker Barrel. It even overrode Gary’s past Cracker Barrel experience. “At least they aren’t sex traffickers,” we rationalized. So we submitted a very hashbrown-centric order, and they did not forget the hashbrowns, therefore I give you:

Hashbrown* Throwdown!

*First, the term ‘hashbrown’ here means shredded hashbrowns, not some ersatz fried potato cubes.

Second, evidently this restaurant chain did not use the Typepad editor to make their menu. Typepad’s spell-check keeps insisting Hashbrown is two words. I know, you are amused I pretend to care about spell-checks or proofreading. I will balance the scales by calling this restaurant “Crackerbarrel.”

Clockwise from top right:

• Regular Hashbrown Casserole
• Loaded Hashbrown Casserole Tots
• Loaded Regular Hashbrown Casserole

Regular Hashbrown Casserole – Hashbrowns in which Crackerbarrel trades the crispy potato bits for some extra creamy white sauce. This is a devil’s bargain. More on this later.

Loaded Hashbrown Casserole Tots – Crackerbarrel describes this as “Our Hashbrown Casserole fried into crispy bite-sized tater tots” and I call bullshit. You can see for yourself, they began life as tater tots, they taste nothing like the hashbrown casserole: the potato taste is entirely different.

Loaded Regular Hashbrown Casserole – Here they take the creamy casserole and add the crispy bits back in the form of deep-fried shoestring onions, the only possible upgrade from the crispy edges of hashbrowns. They also added cheese and bacon, and while green onions were also promised I could not see them. (I did not ask for a refund.)

Clearly, the final incarnation, the Loaded Regular Hashbrown casserole, won the throwdown hands down.