The Perturbed Whopper (An Angry Whopper Review)

In recent years, Burger King has not made a name for itself through subtlety. More than any other chain, they've thumbed their noses at the scolding health nannys of our society, unveiling product after product the central attraction of which has been their caloric audacity. Steakhouse Burgers with fried onions, Triple Whoppers, Enormous Omelet Sandwiches, Cheesy Tots (cheese-filled tater tots!). On top of that, there was the triple-caffeinated coffee! These are the things we've remembered BK for over the years, not their half-hearted forays into reasonable eating like their Veggie Burger (still the only mass-market one available, btw, though they've switched from a proprietary patty to a third-party texturized vegetable protein product from Morningstar Farms) or their fire-grilled salads (a novel, if unwieldy approach to entree salads in which the hot protein, shrimp or chicken is kept fresh in a pouch).

And so it is, or was promised to be, with their latest item, the Angry Whopper.

Composed of the usual Whopper ground beef patty, spicy fried "angry" onions, jalapeno peppers, pepper jack cheese, bacon, and "angry sauce," this burger seemed poised to prove an exception to usual rule that fast food tends to be bland, conservative, inoffensive and risk-averse in its flavor profiles.

Before we evaluate T.A.W.'s success on this score, let's assess the risks it would run if it were to succeed in this in the first place. The first danger would be that a truly Angry Whopper would be no Whopper at all, which is to say that the entire Whopper line's enduring claim to fame still resides in the trademark flame-broiled taste of the beef, a taste no chain has successfully duplicated, or even tried to duplicate, so far as I know. As bold, up-front, and distinctive as the flavors of flame broiling are, they're also surprisingly delicate. So I feared that hot sauce, whole jalapenos, and unctuous fried onions would overwhelm the sandwich, obliterating the beef. We'll see in a moment if this came to pass. But first, a word about the taste-testing method.

THE WHOPPER AS CONTROL

For the test, I purchased one standard Whopper sandwich which I determined to consume first to gauge a baseline flavor level for flame-broiled taste against which the Angry Whopper would be compared and in general, to better understand what happens when you start tweaking a classic taste combination in the interest of improvement or novelty.

As someone who only consumes about 1.5 Whoppers per year, this was a pleasant reminder of what's kept this sandwich on the menu for so many years. The lettuce, tomato, onions, and pickles all shone with crisp freshness and the burger portion retained the uncannily outdoorsy flavor of a true backyard barbecue burger. My only complaint is one I've always had with the Whopper: they apply far too much mayonnaise for my taste, causing the bun to bend and collapse from an excess of moisture, both grease and water based. Why anyone can stand for this level of sogginess and limp-bunned messiness I'll never understand. But in a very real sense, this isn't a reasonable complaint, since Burger King has for years insisted that we can have our sandwiches modified any which way we like. So the ultimate moderate-mayonnaise Whopper is presumably out there for the asking. But it's worth lingering for moment on the mayonnaise issue. As I finished up the last bits of the Whopper, I wondered to myself how this new Whopper variant could possibly hold its shape with the usual glut of mayonnaise, augmented by a wet sauce, melted cheese, greasy onions and greasy bacon. Would Burger King strategically moderate the amount of mayonnaise to lower the overall wetness of the sandwich? It's time to find out the answer to this question and others.

TASTING THE ANGRINESS

Sadly, I have to report that there simply isn't much anger to taste here. The burger might be described as slightly miffed, a touch annoyed, grumpy and rough around the edges perhaps, but it can't be fairly described as angry. First off, the angry sauce, what promised to be the backbone of the sandwich's heat, is more sweet than fiery. It tastes like nothing so much as an off-the-shelf barbecue sauce with a few shakes of Tabasco. The jalapenos? I guess they were present and accounted for, but I really didn't take notice of them. Same goes for the pepper jack, the so-called angry onions, and so on down the line. The sandwich was mildly hot, but not as you'd expect from its having four distinct heating elements: spicy cheese, jalapenos, spicy sauce, and spicy onions. How can we make sense of this? Well, I do have a theory.

FAT IS THE ENEMY OF HEAT

Actually, at a certain point, fat is the enemy of all flavors. It's axiomatic that a little bit of fat, just like a little bit of salt, helps to boost flavors, to carry them, to extend them, to get them over the hump, so to speak. But just as with salt, where an excess leaves you tasting nothing but salt, so with fats, there is a point of diminishing marginal returns. When fat and spice have to compete for room, the fat starts crowding out the taste of the spice. To take the point further, the more ingredients and flavors one starts piling on, the more the competing flavors cancel each other out. This is why a tomato, basil and mozzarella salad has a more memorable taste than tomato, basil, and lemon-verbena truffle oil salad with minced ahi caviar andouille aioli brunoise topped with plum anise-pepper sorbet. At a certain point, to add is to subtract, and this sandwich quickly lost focus through too much fat and too many flavors. If I can single out the worst offender of all the extraneous flavors, I'd like to do so with the bacon. Yes, bacon...as hard as it is to believe, bacon does not always help the taste of a dish, and I say that as someone who loves bacon perhaps more than any other food on the planet. I say that as someone who can eat an entire pound of bacon at a sitting. But bacon has a potent, smoky, salty flavor. In the case of the Angry Whopper, the strong assertive bacon flavor immediately took the A.W.'s heat factor down one distinct notch. Next, the creamy pepper jack cheese. Surely, there was a note of jalapeno somewhere to be found in the oozy mess, but the creamy and pungent processed cheese flavor smothered the very pepper fragments it contained, and the extra jalapenos as well. Swimming in this sea of emulsified grease were the angry onions. Were the onions truly angry? It's hard to say, there were never really allowed to speak. The frying grease from the fried onions, merged with the cheese fat and the bacon fat and formed a viscous seal around the capsaicin (the substance responsible for the heat in hot peppers), rendering it harmless. What happened to the remaining burn that managed to escape from the bonds of surrounding fat? It got obfuscated by the sweetness of the foundational barbecue sauce. The moral of the story: you cannot simultaneously be bacony, sweet, cheesy, and still be angry. Nor, for that matter can you still be flame-broiled. As suspected, the flame-broiled taste also got lost in the shuffle.

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER

So did BK do anything right here? Well, sure, it could have been worse, and BK took some positive steps to keep the A.W. from being downright unpalatable. For one, they pre-emptively kept the amount of mayonnaise in check. When I picked up the burger I noticed that it was nicely compact and dense with no melted mayonnaise oozing out as is usually the case with a regular Whopper. Perhaps on some level BK did realize that if they were going to keep adding elements, they had to take some out. They may have realized at some level that adding fat does at some point interfere with the transmission of flavor. They may just not have set the balance at the correct point. But then again, the lesson may very well be that correctness is relative and subjective and that BK has done what they set out to do: create a moderately spicy sandwich with the swaggering image of a super-hot burger that flatters their customers' pretensions of toughness. Perhaps the rule for fast-food remains: though we decline to admit it, blandness and comfort is what we want most of all.