THE OFFP Tests:
Astronaut French Fries
from the Smithsonian Institution's
National Air & Space Museum
The National Air & Space Museum has got to be our all-time, most favouritest museum in the entire world (and may even remain so after someone builds a French Fry Museum). Even if you go in when they first open the doors at 9:45 a.m., you will not have finished looking when they throw you out at 5:30 p.m. Not even if you do it two days in a row.
The Museum also has a shop that is famous for selling freeze-dried neopolitan "Astronaut Ice Cream". It was popular when they opened more than 20 years ago and remains a favourite.
So imagine our surprise when we walked in for the $3 slab of dried ice cream and noticed they'd added a few new items: strawberries, peaches, cheeze pizza. They also offered multi-packs.
We took a close look a the label and saw the magic words listed as one of the packs, but French Fries weren't available individually although everything else in the package was. So we bought the whole thing and spent $12 instead of $3. We're gonna need a lot of people clicking the banners (which people never seem to do, but the ads that come up on some pages are absolutely hysterical! Have you seen the eBay "Buy McDonald's French Fries on eBay" ad? But we digress...)
On the left is what we got for our twelve bucks.
On the right is what we were after.
Or so we thought.
While the Mission Pack label clearly said "French Fries", the package itself just said "Fries". This wasn't looking good. It looked like a hash brown. And things got worse.
The ingredients panel, which is written with teensy-tiny, itty-bitty, hard-to-read type, stated that it contained "animal and/or vegetable shortening". And/or??? They don't even know what's in the thing? And considering that they're charging about $2.50, couldn't they have spent the extra ¼¢ and used only vegetable oil?
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What we had here was... failure to communicate. This isn't French Fries; it's "Home Fries" or simply, a hash brown, similar to the kind served by fast food chains for breakfast. We broke the patty apart, just in case it really was French Fries that all stuck together. It wasn't.
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This review clearly wasn't going well, and unlike many of our other reviews, we weren't trying hard to find the bad things. We love the museum, but they can do wrong, and certainly have with this mislabeled item. Since we paid for the thing and since it was already opened and since one of the other judges was also in attendance for this review AND since the other judge didn't mind the potential tallow content, a taste test was performed. |
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Image removed. |
Our judge considered the first bite. Her initial comment was that it was a bit hard, very crispy, and tasted like cardboard. However, since it was completely dry, it took a few seconds for any taste to develop.
Our judge decided that maybe this stuff isn't so bad as a snack food. She agreed, however, that whatever this thing was, it was not French Fries. |
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Image removed. |
Since they didn't supply freeze-dried condiments for this, our judge also tried it with a bit of "Super Ketchup" but decided that didn't work so well.
Our judge then went on to steal most of the dried peaches and strawberries (two of the other packs), but was not a fan of the ice cream and loathed the pizza, which the primary judge devoured. The secondary judge is history; her pictures have been removed. |
| We are forced to disqualify "Astronaut French Fries" because the product is really a hash brown. The Museum, however, is fantastic. Go there; you won't be disappointed... unless you're hoping for Astronaut French Fries. |
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