Kotas Reviews Simple Truth Natural Turkey Burgers

We live in a modern age full of modern conveniences, especially when it comes to food. Electric powered ovens and stoves help us cook food we store in our refrigerators, or we can simply summon a car with a driver to deliver unto us whatever food we desire (at least so long as they have an UberEats arrangement). Truly, we live in a world where more good food is available than any one person could possibly eat. So let's look at some of that convenience food. Ladies and Gentlemen, we take a look at Simple Truth Natural Turkey Burgers.

It's the Simple Truth, this is a box from my freezer.

It's not exactly a secret that I am not the best at cooking preparation. How I long for the extravagance of having a prep chef available for when I decide I feel like cooking something that involves more than "open bag, add to boiling water, drain and serve". Still, I do enjoy grilling and I also enjoy burgers of many variations. My spouse and I have also had good success using chicken burgers from this same brand, so when we accidentally picked up these instead we figured we would be just fine. 

Simple Truth is the brand name for the Krogers in-house brand of organic grocery products. Yeah, yeah I know "organic" is just a marketing label, but many of their foods are actually fairly tasty, like the aforementioned chicken burgers so we keep some of them in the house. The packaging makes the patty look to be pretty good, though I have no idea what the hell it is supposed to be resting on. Is that pimento cheese? Bleah! Anyway, I cracked the box.

Yeah, those are frozen ground meat patties alright. Into the pan they go! They acted pretty much like any other pre-made frozen meat patty, so I'll skip the details, but they done cooked up right pretty. We also added some Worcestershire sauce for a bit of extra flavor. Let's put it on a bun!

Yeah, that's a burger. With ketchup and mustard no less.

 When I bit into my burger, something was off, but I couldn't quite place it. Was it the texture? No, the patty was nice and well done without being dry. The scent? Well, turkey isn't known for its heavy odor, so that wasn't it. It took me a few more bites, but I finally figured out what was wrong: the patty itself had exactly ZERO flavor. Literally all I could taste was the bun and the smear of condiments I had placed upon it. There was no turkey flavor at all. At first I thought it was me, so I asked my spouse what hers tasted like. She thought for a minute and said "Oh. Nothing. Weird." As a final, somewhat icky test, I found a bit of protein juice that leaked out of the patty and cooked up in the hot pan. On a chicken burger, this stuff has an incredibly strong chicken flavor if you eat it (or so I've heard *cough*). For this patty? It was like chewing paste. No flavor at all. What the ever-loving shit is this trash?

On the FACE Rating System, these get 3 Frowny Faces. How the hell do you fuck up a meat patty? Apparently by draining every iota of taste out of it. If there was a white can just labeled "FOOD", this is how I would expect it to taste. Hardtack has a more nuanced flavor profile than this garbage. Stay the hell away!

Kotas Reviews Orange Vanilla Coca Cola

There are a pile of flavored sodas on the market. From the ignoble beginnings of Fanta (seriously, go look this up) to the plain weirdness of Jones Soda, there are beau-coup varieties of soda flavors available to the average consumer. Only rarely does the introduction of a flavor shake up the market, usually coming from one of the two 800 pound rhinos in the market: Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Cherry Coke ushered in the "cola with fruit flavor" soda as a type in the 80s and Pepsi Twist started the "cola flavored with citrus" craze of the mid-2000s, so they tend to have an out sized impact. Anyway, that's a lot of lead up for me to tell you that we're looking at Yet Another Cola With Additional Flavor product. Ladies and Gentlemen, let's take a look at Orange Vanilla Coca-Cola.

GLORY GREATEST SODA! Or not.

I'm not sure why Coca-Cola needed an Orange Vanilla flavored version, honestly. I have always enjoyed Coca-Cola, though these days it is more of a "once a week" thing than a "once a meal" thing as it was in my younger days. As a wee lad I enjoyed Cherry Coke more than perhaps was healthy, so I have experience with "cola + fruit" sodas. Orange Vanilla though, I'm not sure about. Vanilla and Cola is pretty tasty, but nothing I would go out of my way to get. Orange and cola is not a combo I would have ever thought might be good. Still, citrus flavors do compliment Coca-Cola pretty well so maybe it will be fine? Let's open it up!

I'm not sure what you were expecting.

Yep. It's a cola, which means it is a very dark liquid. Nothing too surprising here. The scent is a nice strong orange scent with hints of cola and a creaminess I assume is the vanilla peeking through. It's a pleasant scent that I wouldn't mind having as an air freshener in my car. Let's drink it up! The flavor is almost an inversion of the scent. The cola flavor is very strong, with a bit of orange flavor and a creaminess associated with vanilla that smooths out the whole thing, though definitely less vanilla-y than Coke with Vanilla. It's a nice little flavor, but it's not that much different from regular Coke. It's fine is what I'm saying.

On the FACE Rating System, this gets 0 Faces. It tastes fine, but it isn't a strong flavor nor particularly interesting. If someone hands me this, or I accidentally get one instead of a regular Coke I will happily drink it, but I ain't beating down a door to get this specific flavor. Try some at your local gas station today!