The Haterade Test Kitchen Makes Depression Tots™

Combating nihilism with crispier crowns.

I was an adult before I learned to like Tater Tots.

For much of my life, I associated Tater Tots with sad school lunches and sodden Midwestern casseroles. Periodically, a friend would try to make tots for me at home, assuring me that they would be “crisp.” They never were. They tasted like freezer burn and had the texture of mashed potatoes that had tried (and failed) to reconstitute themselves.

Instead, I longed for another, far better frozen potato product: the “potato olés” from Taco John’s.

Potato olés are cute little tot discs roughly the size and shape of a Starlight mint. They’re fried and dusted in cayenne and smoked paprika and served, on occasion, with a cup of nacho cheez. In short, they are the crunchy, crispy potato product the Tater Tot aspires to be.

The trouble is, vast swaths of the country live outside of Taco John’s light. The restaurant has wide but shallow market penetration; it’s still mostly an upper-Midwest concern. Iowa has the most TJ’s locations of any state, which makes sense when you consider the complex set of cultural influences that would lead one to seek tacos from a man named John.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: the Crispy Crown.

In 1981—eight years before Taco John oiled his first olé—frozen food conglomerate Ore-Ida released an unseasoned but otherwise identical, disc-shaped potato product.¹ The Crispy Crown was coronated in a summer ad blitz that doubles as a threat:

“Move over, Mr. Green Beans!”

Let us set aside for now the unseemly implications of a Large Adult Drumstick grooming literal Tots for consumption.

I’ve been thinking about Tater Tots in general (and Crispy Crowns in particular) because I’ve spent the last couple of months dealing with the most boring kind of depression—the numbing, sociopathic kind that leaves you feeling like an éclair someone forgot to fill. (I’m fine, everything’s fine; this is not a Cry for Help except in the sense that all of my newsletters are.)²

It’s common, I understand, for people to lose their appetite when they’re depressed. I don’t know what that’s like. I am hungry as a rule. One of many tattoos I have contemplated is that most Midwestern answer to hunger’s yes-or-no question: “I could eat.” What I do lose to depression is the energy required to cook, to meal plan, to plan in general.

My solution was to eat roughly a pound of Crispy Crowns a week. They require minimal effort for maximum comfort. They do not require me to put on clean clothes and go to a drive-through. They merely require me to remove a bag from my freezer and go about my business for a while.

Crispy Crowns are, for my money, the ideal Depression Tot.™ Their flat surface adds potato-to-sheet-pan contact, yielding a crispier “skin" in a shorter cook time. (Consider the Tater Tot, barrel rolling around the oven, never stopping for long enough to brown its husk.) They’re lighter, crunchier, more compact.

But you should know by now that I am never going to simply ask you to take my word for it. TO THE MATHNASIUM!

Constructing the Crunch Index

Because I insist on having a scientific basis for my arrogance, I bought a couple bags of Crowns and Tots to run some tests and construct a Crunch Index.

As a first step, I compared the surface area of each potato product. More surface area = more browning = more crunch.

I am not a mathematician—I haven’t performed any Geometry since eighth grade—so I enlisted the help of my husband, Tom. Tom isn’t a mathematician, either, but he does play a lot of Kerbal Space Program, which I have been led to believe is basically the same thing.

Both the Tot and the Crown are the same basic geometric shape—the Crown is just flatter with a larger radius. So Tom suggested measuring the total surface area using the below formula for calculating the area of a cylinder:

A = 2πrh + 2πr² ,

where r represents the radius of Tot or Crown, and h represents the height.

Plugging in the respective measurements yielded the results below:

• Tot surface area = 30.93 cm²

• Crown surface area= 23.56 cm²

One might reasonably look at that and conclude that the Tater Tot is crispier by virtue of its greater total surface area.

BUT WAIT!

In addition to being taller than the Crown, the Tot also has quite a bit more mass—so it shouldn’t be surprising that it has more surface area. To accurately estimate #crunchpotential, we need to account for the difference in mass. We can do that by calculating the surface area to mass ratio, represented as A:m. Colloquially, let’s consider this our Crunch Index.

Result: the Crown takes it.

• Tater tot A:m = 5.3 cm²/g

• Crown A:m = 6.5 cm²/g

As a Crunch Robustness Check, I weighed the Tots and Crowns before and after baking to see how much water weight evaporated in the cooking. To ensure a Representative Tot, I weighed five of each potato product and then calculated the average grams per Tot/Crown.

Values below are for a single Tot/Crown:

• Tater Tot: 9.2 grams frozen – 5.8 grams cooked = 3.4 gram moisture loss

• Crispy Crown: 7.4 grams frozen – 3.6 grams cooked = 3.8 gram moisture loss

Again, the Crispy Crown has a slight but noticeable edge when it comes to moisture loss (and therefore crunch).

Coupled with its greater surface-area-to-mass ratio and greater surface-to-sheet pan contact, the evidence is clear:

Crispy Crowns are the superior Depression Tot™

An important caveat for all frozen potato products: you’re going to need to bake them hotter and longer than any package is willing to suggest. The time and temperatures on the bag of Crowns are never sufficient. This makes little sense to me, so I can only conclude that Ore-Ida is in the pocket of Big Sog.

Every oven is different, and your mileage may vary. But for the truly crunchy tray of Crispy Crowns that you deserve, I suggest these adjustments as a starting point:

1. Preheat the oven 25 degrees (Fahrenheit) hotter than the package suggests. If your oven has a convection setting, use it.

2. Preheat the oven with the sheet pan inside to give the Tots or Crowns a little sizzle right out of the gate.

3. Mentally commit to a 30 minute cook time. The Crowns might not need all of that time, but in my oven, they usually do. And it helps, I think, to commit yourself to that time upfront rather than starting with the bag instructions and just adding five minutes at a time. That path is the path to “fuck-it” frustration, the kind that leads you to pull out the pan prematurely because you can’t believe it’s taking so long.

less potato olé than potato buffet

A truly perfect, crispy Tater Tot is an incredible thing—but it is not assured. You have to be patient. This is part of what makes them such a perfect Depression Meal. You don’t have to fuss with them, prep them, monitor them. All you have to do is wait.

And I’m so good at waiting! Lately, it feels like the only thing I can do—I can stare at a piece of copy paper tacked to the wall for 30 minutes, taking in nothing, benefitting no one.

How nice it is when that waiting has a purpose! How soothing it is to practice a small act of unfoolish hope—if I give it just a little more time, something better will emerge. True of so few things in life, but true of Tater Tots.

Like a lot of people in America right now, I’ve been grappling with how to avoid descending into nihilism when nihilism seems increasingly evidence-based. I don’t want to shrug my shoulders at mass death, but I also don’t want to melt into a neutron star of impotent rage. I would like to believe there are other options. It seems virtuous to believe there are other options.

Crispy Crowns have given me one way to practice hope, however feeble. There’s a tendency to think about “comfort food” as anesthetizing—as though comforting ourselves were an act of disengagement from the world and its problems. But to me, it has also been a path out of numbness and back to sensation. A path back to caring.

If you come over to my house and see me downing a plate of Crispy Crowns with a gin martini, you will know that I am unwell. But you will also know that I am trying.

Trying isn’t enough, of course. But it’s enough for now.

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1. H.J. Heinz (which owns Ore-Ida) has a trademark on the name “Crispy Crowns,” but that hasn’t stopped other potato manufacturers from entering the market. I actually prefer the off-label “Best Choice” Crispy Crowns: they’re less dense and less sog-prone than the Ore-Ida originals. Incidentally, “Best Choice” calls their Tater Tots “Potato Puffs,” reinforcing my suspicion that all frozen potato products must have alliterative names.

2. In the cosmic/spiritual sense, of course, nothing is fine, but this is always true and therefore not worth mentioning.