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.
A periodic blog on new developments in the mass-produced food industry. This includes, but is not limited to the realm of fast food restaurants, snack foods, frozen products and, to a far lesser degree, casual dining establishments. The focus and fascination of this blog is the quest to produce palatable food in a context of automation and standardization. How good can something be when the factor of independent human creative agency is removed at the actual point of physical creation?
Monday, January 19, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
McDouble's Consequences for the Double Cheeseburger: through the prism of a made-to-order system
When McDonald's removed its venerable Double Cheeseburger from its Dollar Menu last month, replacing it with the near-equivalent McDouble, shudders surely ran through the souls of value-loving fast food consumers everywhere. This, it was thought, was the end of an era we would all fondly remember but which we knew was too good to last. After all, McD had been selling the Double Cheeseburger at a loss for some time. Just think about it: a regular size bun, two beef patties, two slices of cheese, pickles, onions, ketchup and mustard, plus labor and overhead, all for 99 cents? No wonder franchisees had been chafing at this arrangement, finding it difficult to profit at that price point, even given the fact that customers would often add high-margin items like sodas to their orders.
So the McDouble was always inevitable, and the remarkable thing really is that so little has been compromised in its construction. Essentially, the McDouble is identical to the beloved Double Cheeseburger. The only thing that has been removed is the extra slice of cheese. I'd never have guessed that this would be the thing to reduce costs. I always figured cheese kind of grew on trees, brought up as I was by stories of surplus government cheese. So the McDouble is a fine compromise, an honorable substitute, especially considering that the Double Cheeseburger is still available for the slightly higher price of $1.19...ah, but there's the rub. This little adjustment in price has had perhaps unintentional ripple effects in the quality control chain at McDonald's, serving as a fine object lesson in how even the most quality and detail-oriented chains can fail to forsee all the downstream effects of any given business decision. And it all goes back to a major quality improvement initiative from the late 90s or early years of this milennium:
wait for it....
THE MADE-TO-ORDER SYSTEM
As the name implies, the made-to-order system is a system in which no menu-item is assembled by the kitchen staff until the moment that the customer orders it, ensuring as fresh-as-possible product is presented to the customer. No more dessicated chicken fillet sandwiches, their chicken patties dry as leather and having lost 20% of their weight through moisture loss. No more cheeseburgers featuring American cheese slices with orange curled-up corners. All menu item elements would be held at optimal humidity and temperature conditions until ready for assembly. Now, for most menu items, this is the ideal approach, particularly for chicken items whose popularity has surged in recent years, if their ubiquity on menus is any indication. The same would hold (no pun intended) for salads, where warm elements like chicken come into contact with ingredients like salad greens best presented chilled. If you're trying to exert control over each individual component of a dish, it must be assembled right before serving. This, after all, is how it's done at high-end dining establishments. But could there be instances where fresher is NOT always better?
ENTER THE DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER - an item which benefits from holding.
American cheese is a funny thing, at least in my opinion. You couldn't pay me to eat a slice of processed American cheese when chilled. At that temperature, it's artificial, chemical notes come to the fore, its stabilizers and gums, all of the things that normal cheese does not require, and would not benefit from, are all more noticable. But when you heat it, when that slice of cheese begins to wilt and become, if you will ,"melty" (expect a whole other post on that loaded term in the future) and a pleasant alchemy occurs. Suddenty the fats precipitate out and blend with whatever else is present in the dish, creating a richer gestalt than one ever would have imagined. This occurs in the best possible way with a nice hot Double Cheeseburger with nicely melted cheese slices: the liquid beef fats merge with the semi-liquid cheese oils which in turn meld with the onion and pickle juices and the ketchup and the mustard. It's a divine experience at either 99 cents or $1.19 (the new price). The problem is that the made-to-order system prevents this from happening at the higher price point.
Why? Well, when the Double Cheeseburger was priced at 99 cents it was quite popular and even though each individual cheeseburger was made-to-order, if multiple orders, let's say 5, were placed at once, a queue would inevitably form in the heated holding area where the sandwiches were placed after assembly and as each cheeseburger waited there in the heated area for a staffer to pick it up, the cheese slices would continue to melt past the point they had melted at the moment of assembly. So while the item was fresh, the delays in picking up the sandwich from its holding area, given the overall business and volume of orders, was sufficient to let this melting take place. There was never any telling whose McDouble you were getting as they all got mixed up in the queue. You might be getting the McDouble created in response to your order, but you might have gotten one that had been sitting there for a good five minutes, melting while more recently created sandwiches were picked up. When there are multiple versions of any given item, they all get mixed up and there's no guarantee that the one that gets picked is the most recently made. Chances are better that the sandwich you got had been sitting for a while, improving as the cheese melted.
Now, however, if you order the Double Cheeseburger, you're in the minority and your order sticks out like a sore thumb. It's unlikely that your cheeseburger will get neglected, benefiting, however inadvertently from the salutary additional melting that makes the sandwich taste best. Rather, it will be spotted by an employee the moment it comes down the chute, and rescued from its holding pen at the soonest opportunity, presented to you before the cheese has a chance to reach its ideal temperature and melting point. In other words, you're more likely to get it fresh, which in the case of the Double Cheeseburger, is worse.
This is not empty theorizing, by the way. This post is a reaction to the experiences I've had with the Double Cheeseburger ever since it came off the value menu. It's still a fine sandwich, and occasionally, it's still served with its two slices of cheese fully melted. But this happens much less frequently, and this has been my attempt to explain why. The made-to-order system. A brilliant innovation but one that perhaps needs further refinement.
One final note: I have not forgotten my pledge to review the Cheesy Bacon Wrap from BK. But willing one's self to suffer is not as easy as it seems when one first makes the pledge to do so.
So the McDouble was always inevitable, and the remarkable thing really is that so little has been compromised in its construction. Essentially, the McDouble is identical to the beloved Double Cheeseburger. The only thing that has been removed is the extra slice of cheese. I'd never have guessed that this would be the thing to reduce costs. I always figured cheese kind of grew on trees, brought up as I was by stories of surplus government cheese. So the McDouble is a fine compromise, an honorable substitute, especially considering that the Double Cheeseburger is still available for the slightly higher price of $1.19...ah, but there's the rub. This little adjustment in price has had perhaps unintentional ripple effects in the quality control chain at McDonald's, serving as a fine object lesson in how even the most quality and detail-oriented chains can fail to forsee all the downstream effects of any given business decision. And it all goes back to a major quality improvement initiative from the late 90s or early years of this milennium:
wait for it....
THE MADE-TO-ORDER SYSTEM
As the name implies, the made-to-order system is a system in which no menu-item is assembled by the kitchen staff until the moment that the customer orders it, ensuring as fresh-as-possible product is presented to the customer. No more dessicated chicken fillet sandwiches, their chicken patties dry as leather and having lost 20% of their weight through moisture loss. No more cheeseburgers featuring American cheese slices with orange curled-up corners. All menu item elements would be held at optimal humidity and temperature conditions until ready for assembly. Now, for most menu items, this is the ideal approach, particularly for chicken items whose popularity has surged in recent years, if their ubiquity on menus is any indication. The same would hold (no pun intended) for salads, where warm elements like chicken come into contact with ingredients like salad greens best presented chilled. If you're trying to exert control over each individual component of a dish, it must be assembled right before serving. This, after all, is how it's done at high-end dining establishments. But could there be instances where fresher is NOT always better?
ENTER THE DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER - an item which benefits from holding.
American cheese is a funny thing, at least in my opinion. You couldn't pay me to eat a slice of processed American cheese when chilled. At that temperature, it's artificial, chemical notes come to the fore, its stabilizers and gums, all of the things that normal cheese does not require, and would not benefit from, are all more noticable. But when you heat it, when that slice of cheese begins to wilt and become, if you will ,"melty" (expect a whole other post on that loaded term in the future) and a pleasant alchemy occurs. Suddenty the fats precipitate out and blend with whatever else is present in the dish, creating a richer gestalt than one ever would have imagined. This occurs in the best possible way with a nice hot Double Cheeseburger with nicely melted cheese slices: the liquid beef fats merge with the semi-liquid cheese oils which in turn meld with the onion and pickle juices and the ketchup and the mustard. It's a divine experience at either 99 cents or $1.19 (the new price). The problem is that the made-to-order system prevents this from happening at the higher price point.
Why? Well, when the Double Cheeseburger was priced at 99 cents it was quite popular and even though each individual cheeseburger was made-to-order, if multiple orders, let's say 5, were placed at once, a queue would inevitably form in the heated holding area where the sandwiches were placed after assembly and as each cheeseburger waited there in the heated area for a staffer to pick it up, the cheese slices would continue to melt past the point they had melted at the moment of assembly. So while the item was fresh, the delays in picking up the sandwich from its holding area, given the overall business and volume of orders, was sufficient to let this melting take place. There was never any telling whose McDouble you were getting as they all got mixed up in the queue. You might be getting the McDouble created in response to your order, but you might have gotten one that had been sitting there for a good five minutes, melting while more recently created sandwiches were picked up. When there are multiple versions of any given item, they all get mixed up and there's no guarantee that the one that gets picked is the most recently made. Chances are better that the sandwich you got had been sitting for a while, improving as the cheese melted.
Now, however, if you order the Double Cheeseburger, you're in the minority and your order sticks out like a sore thumb. It's unlikely that your cheeseburger will get neglected, benefiting, however inadvertently from the salutary additional melting that makes the sandwich taste best. Rather, it will be spotted by an employee the moment it comes down the chute, and rescued from its holding pen at the soonest opportunity, presented to you before the cheese has a chance to reach its ideal temperature and melting point. In other words, you're more likely to get it fresh, which in the case of the Double Cheeseburger, is worse.
This is not empty theorizing, by the way. This post is a reaction to the experiences I've had with the Double Cheeseburger ever since it came off the value menu. It's still a fine sandwich, and occasionally, it's still served with its two slices of cheese fully melted. But this happens much less frequently, and this has been my attempt to explain why. The made-to-order system. A brilliant innovation but one that perhaps needs further refinement.
One final note: I have not forgotten my pledge to review the Cheesy Bacon Wrap from BK. But willing one's self to suffer is not as easy as it seems when one first makes the pledge to do so.
Monday, January 5, 2009
A Tale of Three Biscuits: Chic Fil-A and it's challengers
I've always been a fan of McDonald's, especially in recent times as it's outshone its competitors in setting trends and staying ahead of the curves. Its Dollar Menu has brought in consistent business from scores of customers who would never otherwise come through the door. Its 99 cent Double Cheeseburger (now the single slice McDouble) and its McChicken have spawned imitations from the other major chains, but no one has quite been able to offer the same value at it's price point. It's been the most successful in the area of entree salads, with a wide variety of offerings from the safe (Bacon Ranch, Caesar) to the eclectic (Southwest and Asian Salads). The attempts of its competitors lack the same energy and don't seem to have gained the same traction, though I'd have to do some research to substantiate it. But bottom line, McDonald's has thrived in a difficult environment through excellent quality control and creative thinking and I've been privately one of its biggest boosters. That's why it saddened me a bit when they introduced their two Southern-style chicken items because they are, to be frank, transparent ripoffs of the Chic Fil-A chicken sandwich and chicken biscuit.
To be sure, the move was savvy: Chic Fil-A had a unique product by which they've prospered for many years, and while McDonalds has a whole raft of chicken sandwiches, they're too burdened by the competing tastes of their various toppings and by their over-thick "hearty" buns to allow the chicken taste to shine through. Personally I have long wished for them to have a chicken sandwich that focused on the chicken, letting it speak for itself. I only wish that they had done it in their own way rather than blatantly copying another chains signature bread-and butter item. But be that as it may, it's worth investigating how well they pull it off.
This time out, I'm actually going to set aside the evaluation of the chicken sandwich for another day, and consider the chicken biscuit in the context of two competitors: the original chicken biscuit from Chic Fil-A and the recently introduced Burger King chicken biscuit. So let's consider each one individually. Before beginning the reviews, I want to introduce some qualifications. I've only tasted the McDonald's Chicken Biscuit twice, less frequently than I'd like before posting a review. It goes without saying that even at a tight operation like McDonald's, menu item quality can vary significantly from location to location and also with the time of day and other contingent circumstances. That said, I believe I've identified enough salient characteristics of each chicken biscuit to be able to write with some authority. I've retasted the Chic Fil-A biscuit recently, indeed side by side with the McDonald's biscuit, and there was a time many years ago when I consumed the Chic Fil-A biscuit just about every day. But enough beating around the bush, let's compare.
McDonald's Southern Style Chicken Biscuit
For the most part, this is a pretty good imitation of the Chic Fil-A original and evaluated purely on it's own terms, it's a tasty item. Given the far great number of McDonald's locations nationwide, this could very well become my default go-to breakfast item when I'm eating there, displacing the excellent Bacon Egg and Cheese Bagel and the Steak McSkillet Burrito (though again, those are far more creative items.) There is a sort of primal simplicity to a chicken biscuit that gives it an appeal beyond what it ought to have. After all, taken on it's own, it's a rather dry thing. Even if the chicken is juicy, and it has been moderately so on both occassions, that said chicken is enveloped in a dry crunchy crust and then the moisture content is overwhelmed by the inherent relative dryness of the fairly thick biscuit. This, unlike an Egg McMuffin, is an item that must be consumed with a beverage, with a gulp of orange juice or a swig of coffee alternating with each bite. But the intoxicating aroma of fried chicken in the morning, subtly seasoned with just a hint of spice, the blending of browned fat, protein and starch aromas with the roasted goodness of black coffee is so fortifying that it's hard to resist. So, are there any weaknesses. Well, taken on it's own, not so much, but there are minor flaws that stand in high relief when set against the original. These are subtle, but they are still real. Let's proceed then to the Chic Fil-A chicken biscuit and try to make a meaningful comparison.
CHIC FIL-A CHICKEN BISCUIT
Ok, so the original is still the best, edging out McDonald's southern-style chicken biscuit, but why? Is this simply a case of nostalgic preference and loyalty warping objective evaluation? I'd say not, let me try to sort out why. I already mentioned that chicken biscuits are unavoidably dry, but the Chic Fil-A entry manages to be somewhat less so. I propose a few reasons for this.
1. The biscuit is just ever so slightly thinner. I might not have been able to make this claim had I not found a Chic Fil-A nearby to a McDonald's enabling me to eat the two simultaneiously comparing and contrasting the two visually and sensorially with each bite. For the record, the Chic Fil-A biscuit was purchased first, about ten minutes earlier and so was slightly less warm and less fresh. It therefore started from a disadvantage. Nonetheless the impression was of a juicier piece of chicken. This may have been a result of the thinner bicsuit, it may have been because of juicier chicken or some combination of both. To my embarrassment, I didn't remove and isolate the chicken fillet pieces themselves to taste them without the biscuit. If I repeat this test I'll be sure to do so.
2. Slightly superior seasoning and other crust attributes. One thing I noticed when I first taste the McDonald's item was that the crust was a bit lighter, tending towards golden whereas the Chic Fil-A crust tends toward something in between golden and outright brown. As a general matter, more browning reactions means more caramelized, brown bit type flavor. I don't want to overstate this, it's not like Chic Fil-A browns the things to a toasty crisp. There's just a bit more fried flavor and if you like that sort of thing, as I do, it gives Chic Fil-A another slight leg up. I suppose a firmer crunchier crust also allows for a bit less evaporation of moisture. I mention evaporation specifically because of course the idea of a crust "sealing in the juices" is a bit of a canard. If you overcook something it'll be tough and dry even if you seal it hermetically. If you were to seal a piece of chicken in plastic wrap in nuke it to death you'd get a dry leathery piece of chicken swimming in chicken juices. However, the reality being that these items to sit for a while after they've cooked, a piece of chicken with more air circulating around it will be drier so the Chick Fil-A steaming bag (my name for it not theirs) in which it's presented to the customer, plus the crunchier crust probably does prevent less moisture evaporation.
3. Possible x-factor -- Ok, for this one, I'm just wondering out loud because again to my shame I didn't investigate this directly and will have to do so later. Is it possible that there's a bit of buttering of the biscuit at Chic Fil-A and not at McDonald's? If so, it's very lightly done or I would have noticed it. But it's possible that they ever so slightly do.
So in sum, more browned flavor, slightly more distinctive seasoning, and a thinner biscuit make this the winner and still champion. Ok, what about the newcomer, the Burger King Chicken Biscuit? We'll quickly review it.
BURGER KING CHICKEN BISCUIT
Burger King has a rather diffuse and scattershot breakfast menu. Never having really competed for breakfast primacy it's perpetually throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. Witness their Enormous Omelet Sandwich, a revolting pile of meat egg and cheese on an incongruous sub roll. As so often with Burger King it hopes to win the quantity competition, creating the most filling item imaginable and leaving such niceties as taste aesthetic by the wayside. Watch this space later for a belated review of the Cheesy Bacon Wrapper where a similar theme will be explored. But back to the biscuit. Surprisingly BK doesn't disgrace itself here. The biscuit is competent, the chicken is decently thick, decently juicy. The problem is really one of a lack of personality and even more blatant me-tooism. Though if it emerges that the BK Chicken Biscuit actually preceded the McDonald's one I'll have to retract that. Until this blog becomes a full-time job (HA!) I'll be unable to really keep the kind of detailed tabs on the industry that I'd prefer to keep. But returning to the actual taste, there's one other disqualifying attribute that keeps this from approaching the winner's circle. A strange chemically and obtrusive seasoning note. I suspect it was added to make sure the item and a strong distinctive flavor. Well, that it does, and perhaps some people will like the flavor. You might wish to taste for yourself and see if it appeals to you. It's certainly strong enough and might make some people actually prefer it. But it was anything but natural and just too odd. But perhaps more re-tasting is in order. I need hardly say that my tasting companion and I (who also noticed the odd flavor) had to hop on the bike and pedal extra vigorously to work off this morning of chicken and biscuit indulgence. Well that's all. When next I return, it shall probably be to discuss the fascinating and repugnant BK Cheesy Bacon Wrap.
To be sure, the move was savvy: Chic Fil-A had a unique product by which they've prospered for many years, and while McDonalds has a whole raft of chicken sandwiches, they're too burdened by the competing tastes of their various toppings and by their over-thick "hearty" buns to allow the chicken taste to shine through. Personally I have long wished for them to have a chicken sandwich that focused on the chicken, letting it speak for itself. I only wish that they had done it in their own way rather than blatantly copying another chains signature bread-and butter item. But be that as it may, it's worth investigating how well they pull it off.
This time out, I'm actually going to set aside the evaluation of the chicken sandwich for another day, and consider the chicken biscuit in the context of two competitors: the original chicken biscuit from Chic Fil-A and the recently introduced Burger King chicken biscuit. So let's consider each one individually. Before beginning the reviews, I want to introduce some qualifications. I've only tasted the McDonald's Chicken Biscuit twice, less frequently than I'd like before posting a review. It goes without saying that even at a tight operation like McDonald's, menu item quality can vary significantly from location to location and also with the time of day and other contingent circumstances. That said, I believe I've identified enough salient characteristics of each chicken biscuit to be able to write with some authority. I've retasted the Chic Fil-A biscuit recently, indeed side by side with the McDonald's biscuit, and there was a time many years ago when I consumed the Chic Fil-A biscuit just about every day. But enough beating around the bush, let's compare.
McDonald's Southern Style Chicken Biscuit
For the most part, this is a pretty good imitation of the Chic Fil-A original and evaluated purely on it's own terms, it's a tasty item. Given the far great number of McDonald's locations nationwide, this could very well become my default go-to breakfast item when I'm eating there, displacing the excellent Bacon Egg and Cheese Bagel and the Steak McSkillet Burrito (though again, those are far more creative items.) There is a sort of primal simplicity to a chicken biscuit that gives it an appeal beyond what it ought to have. After all, taken on it's own, it's a rather dry thing. Even if the chicken is juicy, and it has been moderately so on both occassions, that said chicken is enveloped in a dry crunchy crust and then the moisture content is overwhelmed by the inherent relative dryness of the fairly thick biscuit. This, unlike an Egg McMuffin, is an item that must be consumed with a beverage, with a gulp of orange juice or a swig of coffee alternating with each bite. But the intoxicating aroma of fried chicken in the morning, subtly seasoned with just a hint of spice, the blending of browned fat, protein and starch aromas with the roasted goodness of black coffee is so fortifying that it's hard to resist. So, are there any weaknesses. Well, taken on it's own, not so much, but there are minor flaws that stand in high relief when set against the original. These are subtle, but they are still real. Let's proceed then to the Chic Fil-A chicken biscuit and try to make a meaningful comparison.
CHIC FIL-A CHICKEN BISCUIT
Ok, so the original is still the best, edging out McDonald's southern-style chicken biscuit, but why? Is this simply a case of nostalgic preference and loyalty warping objective evaluation? I'd say not, let me try to sort out why. I already mentioned that chicken biscuits are unavoidably dry, but the Chic Fil-A entry manages to be somewhat less so. I propose a few reasons for this.
1. The biscuit is just ever so slightly thinner. I might not have been able to make this claim had I not found a Chic Fil-A nearby to a McDonald's enabling me to eat the two simultaneiously comparing and contrasting the two visually and sensorially with each bite. For the record, the Chic Fil-A biscuit was purchased first, about ten minutes earlier and so was slightly less warm and less fresh. It therefore started from a disadvantage. Nonetheless the impression was of a juicier piece of chicken. This may have been a result of the thinner bicsuit, it may have been because of juicier chicken or some combination of both. To my embarrassment, I didn't remove and isolate the chicken fillet pieces themselves to taste them without the biscuit. If I repeat this test I'll be sure to do so.
2. Slightly superior seasoning and other crust attributes. One thing I noticed when I first taste the McDonald's item was that the crust was a bit lighter, tending towards golden whereas the Chic Fil-A crust tends toward something in between golden and outright brown. As a general matter, more browning reactions means more caramelized, brown bit type flavor. I don't want to overstate this, it's not like Chic Fil-A browns the things to a toasty crisp. There's just a bit more fried flavor and if you like that sort of thing, as I do, it gives Chic Fil-A another slight leg up. I suppose a firmer crunchier crust also allows for a bit less evaporation of moisture. I mention evaporation specifically because of course the idea of a crust "sealing in the juices" is a bit of a canard. If you overcook something it'll be tough and dry even if you seal it hermetically. If you were to seal a piece of chicken in plastic wrap in nuke it to death you'd get a dry leathery piece of chicken swimming in chicken juices. However, the reality being that these items to sit for a while after they've cooked, a piece of chicken with more air circulating around it will be drier so the Chick Fil-A steaming bag (my name for it not theirs) in which it's presented to the customer, plus the crunchier crust probably does prevent less moisture evaporation.
3. Possible x-factor -- Ok, for this one, I'm just wondering out loud because again to my shame I didn't investigate this directly and will have to do so later. Is it possible that there's a bit of buttering of the biscuit at Chic Fil-A and not at McDonald's? If so, it's very lightly done or I would have noticed it. But it's possible that they ever so slightly do.
So in sum, more browned flavor, slightly more distinctive seasoning, and a thinner biscuit make this the winner and still champion. Ok, what about the newcomer, the Burger King Chicken Biscuit? We'll quickly review it.
BURGER KING CHICKEN BISCUIT
Burger King has a rather diffuse and scattershot breakfast menu. Never having really competed for breakfast primacy it's perpetually throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. Witness their Enormous Omelet Sandwich, a revolting pile of meat egg and cheese on an incongruous sub roll. As so often with Burger King it hopes to win the quantity competition, creating the most filling item imaginable and leaving such niceties as taste aesthetic by the wayside. Watch this space later for a belated review of the Cheesy Bacon Wrapper where a similar theme will be explored. But back to the biscuit. Surprisingly BK doesn't disgrace itself here. The biscuit is competent, the chicken is decently thick, decently juicy. The problem is really one of a lack of personality and even more blatant me-tooism. Though if it emerges that the BK Chicken Biscuit actually preceded the McDonald's one I'll have to retract that. Until this blog becomes a full-time job (HA!) I'll be unable to really keep the kind of detailed tabs on the industry that I'd prefer to keep. But returning to the actual taste, there's one other disqualifying attribute that keeps this from approaching the winner's circle. A strange chemically and obtrusive seasoning note. I suspect it was added to make sure the item and a strong distinctive flavor. Well, that it does, and perhaps some people will like the flavor. You might wish to taste for yourself and see if it appeals to you. It's certainly strong enough and might make some people actually prefer it. But it was anything but natural and just too odd. But perhaps more re-tasting is in order. I need hardly say that my tasting companion and I (who also noticed the odd flavor) had to hop on the bike and pedal extra vigorously to work off this morning of chicken and biscuit indulgence. Well that's all. When next I return, it shall probably be to discuss the fascinating and repugnant BK Cheesy Bacon Wrap.
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