Basket Review No. 80: Tyson honey battered

The world kinda sucks right now. I won’t get into it, because everyone knows what’s been happening. But you know what doesn’t suck? Chicken tenders. Chicken tenders are a universal language.

For this basket review, I again stuck to the frozen aisle and crossed off a requested strip — Tyson’s honey-battered chicken tenders. Shoutout to my guy Cody for the request, I hope the review will be worth the wait.

Before we get into it, look, I’ve had some beef with Tyson in the past. If you recall, they tarnished chicken strips’ good name by letting METAL get into their product and onto grocery store shelves. That’s insane. So I reviewed them and aired my grievances. But I’m willing to look past that and give a fair, honest review of these strips, same as I did with their standard tenders.

Frankly, the honey-battered tenders are a completely different product. They’re smaller, have a batter coating instead of the standard breading, and an entirely different flavor.

The honey-battered tenders are far superior.

The meat was fair, no metal to be found, but that slightly sweet breading is what really shines here. It’s got that hint of honey and gets a beautiful crisp coming out of the air fryer. The meat-to-batter ratio was where it needs to be. With portions of meat this small, it would be easy to overpower it with too much batter, but that wasn’t the case here. It had been years since I had these and I gotta say, I missed them.

For my fries, I selected a bag of Essential Everyday seasoned fries. I would rank these second thus far on my list of frozen fries I’ve tried, right behind the Ore-Ida extra crispy fast food fries. Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, good seasoning — what more can I ask for?

You may have noticed that neither condiment on my plate looks like ranch — my go-to, my rock. Well, that’s because neither of them are ranch. Very observant of you.

What seems like ages ago (it was probably a year or so), Heinz rolled out a line of hybrid condiments, including “Kranch” (ketchup and ranch) and “Mayochup” (ketchup and mayo). I know ketchup and mayo is fry sauce, which has been around, but I’ve never seen it mass produced for grocery shelves. Well, after months of looking for those two every single time I went to the grocery store, they were finally restocked at the Fargo Target.

It’s good stuff. They’re each more versatile than any of the base condiments on their own. Like, I wouldn’t put mayo or ketchup on a breakfast taco, but I tried putting Mayochup on and it actually worked. I prefer the standard hot sauce, but the Mayochup wasn’t bad. Anywho, I’m rambling now about mass-produced condiments. I’ll go on for 1,500 words if I don’t stop myself.

Refocusing: I needed to stray away from my beloved ranch to see if Mayochup and Kranch were good with a chicken strap basket. They are, amongst many other dishes.

Overall, I’ll give these frozen morsels — modest morsels, if you will, a 6.7. I enjoyed the meal. I think those were my highest-rated frozen tenders up to this point. Hit me with more recommendations if ya got ’em.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe. Stay informed. Recognize the difference between a peaceful protest raising awareness about a horrible, tragic event and history of horrible, tragic events, and groups of outsiders coming in to insinuate chaos and make the peaceful groups look bad.

ALSO, I almost forgot, you may recognize a new look to the site. Thrills With JMills is now a premium site and is just “thrillswithjmills.com.” With a monetized site, I will try and bring more and better content your way to keep returning guests and try to grow my audience. Thank you for reading and for those who, for some reason, have read from the very beginning and are still here, thank you. Much love.

Bye. 6.7.