Popeyes beignets are soured by Hershey's
Posted on Jan 13, 2021
Is there anything more New Orleans than a beignet? Well, I mean, probably: etouffee, red beans and rice, gumbo, the Holy Trinity of onions, bell peppers, and celery… yeah, beignets aren’t the most Louisiana food out there, but they’re in the top 20 or so, right? Man, Louisiana has a lot of good food. And you know what my favorite Louisiana restaurant is? Popeyes!
So why hasn’t Popeyes done beignets as an LTO before? It seems so right, doesn’t it? Popeyes’s dessert LTOs tend to disappoint us because they’re not good values and we don’t like getting fast food dessert. I mean, they’re good for what they are, but who goes to Popeyes to order a lemon pie? You want fried chicken. You want shrimp. You want values. We are bargain-crazed in these desperate times. But beignets are another story.
They were cheap enough - 3 for $2, not bad - and they were thematic. Fried chicken and beignets? Well let me hop on this steamboat with my uh whatever period-appropriate clothing I’d be wearing for this! My only reference for this kind of thing is the music video for Karma Chameleon! Let’s just hit the jump and get into the review.
First off, these were really small. We didn’t expect them to be big or anything, but these are straight up bite-sized. What did we expect, really? Two dollars for three, did we think they’d be full-sized like apple pies from McDonalds? No, these were little bitty things, a little smaller than two quarters next to each other. Of course, we have no idea how big “a beignet” is supposed to be anyway. Well, the point is it’s still a pretty decent buy for the price. It’s only $2, after all. Ordering a meal at Popeyes can sometimes be over $50 if you’re trying to feed a family! What matters a few bucks in that scenario?
But are they worth the money beyond being “a good deal?” Well, the first issue is that this is made with Hershey’s chocolate. Bad news! It is well known that Hershey’s is the worst chocolate ever made. All of the other countries in the world laugh at us for having Hershey’s rotten milk-flavored chocolate-like product as our primary chocolate bar. But what else can you expect? They’re not going to team up with Ghirardelli, it’s Popeyes! So Hershey’s we get. But maybe it’s not THAT bad.
So, go through the drive-thru, get your sandwich and the beignets, and actually eat the damn things. Yes, they’re small, but we were lucky enough to get these things fresh - are other people not really ordering them? They really did smell good, and to our surprise, were actually really crispy when we bit into them. It kind of had the texture of a grocery store croissant, but a good grocery store croissant. Paula thought it was really good, but Will was less than impressed. But for Popeyes, you can’t argue!
But the point of a beignet is the filling, even if that isn’t the point of beignets in reality. Did you know “authentic” beignets don’t even have filling? I thought that was interesting. But yeah, these beignets taste like they were filled with Hershey’s chocolate syrup. It’s fine, I guess, but it’s not good. There also isn’t a lot of filling, which is a lot like complaining about how awful your free beer is, but it’s the principle of the thing. The star attraction here really is that crisp crust! It’s crunchy and flaky and good! Really good!
No, these aren’t really that good, but they’re cheap and interesting and fun to eat. When Popeyes does a dessert LTO, that’s about the range you can expect: mediocre, but acceptable. The only other time we tried a Popeyes dessert was their Lemonade Icebox Pie, and that was also okay. We wish Popeyes wouldn’t waste their time with desserts, but we know they have to have a little variety. Why not bring back fun things like the Spicebox Chicken? We liked that a lot.
Try these or don’t. We have little strong feelings about them. But we can tell you, if they had better chocolate, they would have been amazing. We hate you, Hershey’s, and your garbage vomit flavored chocolate. We wish we lived in a world where Cadbury’s was the dominant chocolate company in America, but those guys are just owned by Kraft so what does it even matter? We’ve been eating a lot of KFC recently anyway so I guess none of this amounts to anything. The point is, these are fine.
Categories: food