Trader Joe's Potato Cheese Sticks look like something you'd find at a county fair right next to the funnel cakes and deep-fried Oreos. They're big, breaded sticks on wooden skewers, packed with potato and cheese, and just begging to be dunked into some sort of sauce.
Surprisingly, though, these aren't some Midwestern carnival creation. They're imported all the way from South Korea, where potato-coated cheese dogs and similar fried potato snacks are popular fare in Seoul and other cities. Leave it to Trader Joe's to bring Korean street food to suburban America's freezer aisles.
We cooked ours in the air fryer, which seemed like the obvious move. The outside got beautifully crisp and golden while the cheese inside turned into that glorious stretchy, stringy goodness that food photographers dream about. Between the potato coating and the mozzarella center, there's also a layer of starchy batter that holds everything together on the stick.
Flavor-wise, these are exactly what they sound like: fried potato and melty cheese. That's not a bad thing at all. In fact, it's downright tasty. The problem is that they're a little plain. After the initial excitement of pulling apart those epic cheese strings, we found ourselves wishing for just a bit more seasoning and personality.
Trader Joe's suggests serving them with ketchup or honey mustard. Sonia and I looked at each other and immediately decided neither option sounded particularly appealing. Instead, we asked ChatGPT for a dipping sauce recipe involving gochujang. It had us mix mayo, rice vinegar, and honey with the spicy pepper paste. The result was creamy, tangy, sweet, and just spicy enough to wake these sticks up. It turned out to be an excellent pairing and added the extra flavor dimension we felt the product needed.
Would we buy them again? Absolutely. They're fun, they're different, and they're satisfyingly cheesy. Sonia was more enthusiastic than I was, though. The beautiful wifey throws out an ardent eight and a half stars. I'll go with a respectable seven and a half.
Trader Joe's Potato Cheese Sticks are crispy, cheesy, Korean-inspired comfort food on a stick. They'll run you $4.99 for four individually-wrapped servings, found in the frozen section. They're a little tame on their own, but with the right sauce and beverage pairings they're a snack worth revisiting.
We've already reviewed this product on video, so I guess it's time to get a written review up here on the blog. It's a whipped cream cheese with strawberry flavor, found in the refrigerated section of TJ's, and it'll run you $2.79. Most name brand cream cheese costs significantly more than that, so we're already looking at a pretty decent value.
The texture is fairly standard as far as whipped cream cheeses tend to go. Trader Joe's Whipped Strawberry Cream Cheese is light and fluffy and super easy to spread. We had ours with Trader Joe's Strawberry Brioche Style Liège Waffles. I kind of expected both products to be tasty but not necessarily bursting with strawberry flavor.
Lo and behold, I was right. That's really my only complaint about this product. It could be more strawberry-ish. If it's too difficult to load the product up with strawberry bits or strawberry puree, one would think freeze-dried strawberry would do the trick. Far from strawberry overload, the strawberry waffle/strawberry cream cheese combo yielded a perfectly adequate level of strawberry scrumptiousness.
Of course, we did try the cream cheese with plain sourdough toast. It's nice. It gets a thumbs up. But there's only a whisper of the fruit flavor.
The sweetness level is pleasant and restrained. Some fruit-flavored cream cheeses lean heavily into the dessert category, but this one manages to stay firmly in breakfast-spread territory. It's creamy, mildly tangy, and just sweet enough to keep things interesting without tasting artificial or candy-like. In that sense, Trader Joe's got the balance right. I just wish they'd turned the strawberry dial up a notch or two.
As it stands, the texture is on point and the flavor is there, but you'll probably find yourself searching for strawberry more than savoring it. Still, for less than three bucks, it's an easy way to add a little something extra to your morning toast, bagel, waffle, or whatever carb delivery system happens to be on the menu. Kosher. Found in the refrigerated section. Eight out of ten stars from Sonia on Trader Joe's Whipped Strawberry Cream Cheese Spread. I'll go with seven out of ten.
