The next stop on our 2018 culinary journey brings us on a quick trip to Dunkin’ Donuts. Dunkin’ has stepped up its innovation over the last few years: every season brings new donut flavors and they seem to introduce a new sandwich variant on a similar schedule. However, the food preparation station at Dunkin’ Donuts limits their ability to get truly wild. The pastry is held on a display case and trucked in from a central kitchen, and they only seem to have toasters and microwaves to heat up their food on site. That doesn’t mean all the food is bad, it just restricts their options and probably lowers the ceiling on how good their food can be.

With that said, Dunkin’ Donuts’ Donut Fries are “individual pieces of delicious, buttery croissant style donut dough that are tossed in cinnamon sugar and served warm.” They were introduced as a $2 special for a pack of five. Obviously whenever the word ‘fry’ is brought up, I’m immediately interested. Based on the limitations of Dunkin’ kitchens, I wanted to know how well they could pull off something which should be fried, without a fryer. Then again, maybe it would be to their benefit. Would people really want actual, likely greasy, fried dough in the morning?

As the ad copy mentioned, these are served warm, but I had a fifteen-minute walk between receiving my Donut Fries and sitting down to eat them. While they weren’t cold, I was testing the limits of the word ‘warm’. Anyway, I pulled them out of the bad and was immediately excited. These looked like mini churros and who wouldn’t love a pack of mini churros for breakfast?

Picking up the fries, they weren’t greasy at all, so score one for not frying these. They also had a generous dusting of cinnamon sugar. If you aren’t getting your daily dose of grease, you did receive a healthy serving of sugar with an order of Donut Fries. The exterior was nice and crispy, but I couldn’t detect any grease. There was no exterior batter either, it was just sugar on dough.

The Donut Fries interior was nice and fluffy, which was a surprise for a product which I assumed was frozen when it arrived at the store location. The taste is pretty much what you would expect: mini churros. As I was eating them, five was a lot for an individual portion. Not in the sense that it was too much food, but just that it was boring after the initial novelty wore off. Not to make breakfast even unhealthier, but serving these with a nice cup of icing would have been great. Diabetes inducing, but great.

Was the great Dunkin’ Donuts Donut Fries experiment a success? I’d give it a qualified yes. The product is good and I would definitely snack on a few if they were in front of me. However, there’s a reason why these likely didn’t stay on the menu: who is really ordering these in the morning? At the time when I got these, I was going to Dunkin’ every morning, and never ordered them again. I could see splitting an order with someone, but I never had the desire to eat five of these on my own. With an icing add-on, maybe it becomes a dessert or afternoon snack if you’re stopping in for some PM caffeine. However, I just don’t know when I would want to order this from a predominantly breakfast establishment.