Orchards Skittles - An Eclectic Gallery of Tastes

The Thrill of Beginning Again
For fans of bubble gum and fruit chews like Starburst and Skittles, few things are more exciting than the unveiling of new flavors.  We don't have this option with chocolate and caramel candies, generally speaking.  Nobody's releasing Tropical Punch Mr. Goodbars anytime soon and I doubt we'd want them to.  By contrast, the chewy-fruity candy category is an almost endless canvass upon which our leading industrial food chemists can apply their sorcerous palettes. So even though early spring is not the time I would expect to see orchard fruits emulated, I was excited to see Orchards Skittles in its pine-green bag, beckoning from its perch on the 7-11 shelf, promising tastes of the outdoors; grassy, pollen-tinged, kissed by powdery bloom.

How would orchard fruits be different? I was hoping for hints of apple skin and peach fuzz, a more organic and less processed flavor profile. I note with some irritation that, increasingly only the "Share Size" is available.

Flavor Shenanigans
After the post-purchase excitement wore off and I set to examining the package, there was one immediate disappointment: the dreaded flavor repeat.  One of the "new" flavors in Orchards Skittles is Orange, but that's also one of the flavors in the original Skittles assortment.  So is this really a new batch of flavors or just a recombination of old ones?  Red Apple does seem to be a new offering, but one has to ask whether it's identical to Green Apple from original Skittles but with a different coloring. For a moment, I even wondered whether Cherry wasn't also a repeat, but thankfully the red candy from original Skittles is Strawberry, so we only appear to have one truly recycled flavor.  And I still held out hope that "Orchard Orange" might somehow be subtly different from Original Orange.  But, of course, the inclusion of Orange in the Orchards assortment raised another question: don't oranges come from groves, not orchards?

Hey, wait just a second! The "new" Orchards Skittles (right) appear to be repeating the flavor Orange from Original Skittles (left).  Also, will Red Apple really taste any different from Green Apple?

The Difference Between Orchards and Groves
Another obvious objection to the inclusion of two citrus flavors, Orange and Lime, in this Orchards collection is that neither fruit really comes from an orchard (right?).  After all, we always speak of citrus groves, don't we?  Actually, while "citrus groves" is clearly more euphonious than "citrus orchards", oranges and limes can actually come from either one, for the difference between the two is rather subtle.  A grove is a cluster of fruit or nut trees that can occur naturally in the wild or as a result of human planting and they may or may not be surrounded with other kinds of vegetation.  An orchard exclusively refers to a purpose-planted collection of fruit or nut trees, created for the express purpose of harvesting.  So most of the citrus fruits we eat, romance aside, comes from orchards, not groves. With that out of the way, let's find out how these candies actually taste!

Serving Suggestion.  Pictured, left to right: Peach, Orange, Lime, Cherry, Red Apple

Reviewing the Individual Flavors

Peach - This was initially the most disappointing flavor because it almost completely fails to deliver the juicy burst of flavor that you get from a fresh peach, never mind any hint of the taste from the skins.   But once you accept the mildness, you start to notice creamy flavors.  If you were to rename this Peach Ice Cream or Peach Yogurt, it would be a perfect success.

Orange - Continuing the trend of the flavors being shockingly unrealistic given the current state of technology, this orange candy does little to remind you of a real orange.  Your mind won't wander back to halftimes of youth soccer games and those enormous clear garbage bags full of fresh orange wedges (did anybody else experience those?)  However, these do remind you of orange soda, or maybe even more than that, those orange lollipops they hand out to the kids in bank lobbies. By the way, if there's any difference between the original Orange Skittle and this one, it's too subtle for me to notice.

Lime - Once more, we get the classic artificial lime flavor, a remote cousin to the flavor of actual limes, though it does bear a striking resemblance to the flavor of Rose's Lime Juice.  Chew on one of these, then take a swig of vodka from your freezer, and you'll have a decent gimlet.

Cherry - This represents the most interesting "failure" of them all.  The dark color seems to promise a black cherry taste, and the very first bite seems to deliver that.  But after a few seconds the flavor begins to morph, first to that of a classic cherry Lifesaver and then, bizarrely, to the taste of a Maraschino Cherry, right down to the taste of the stem and the formaldehyde syrup. Fascinating.

Red Apple - Finally, the first flavor that seems to deliver on its promise.  This one has a classic Red Delicious apple flavor. You almost taste the last remnants of juice bleeding from the seed-revealing core.  Because it is, after all, a candy, it almost tastes as though you're eating a candy apple, but a real one all the same.

While the "Orchard Orange" (right) tastes exactly like the Original Orange Skittle, the Red Apple Skittle (right) with its ripe Red Delicious taste, is substantially different from the Original Green Apple, with its tarter, thick-skinned flavor.

Conclusions
Orchard Skittles raise a lot of questions and they're often perplexing and frustrating, but they're also always interesting.  If you're tired of the same old Skittles varieties, this will keep your taste buds entertained through several bags full of happy chewing.

Packed with Rice, Snickers Cruncher...Doesn't Really Satisfy

Candy Isn't Always a Bed of Nougat
You never really appreciate nougat until it isn't there anymore: that's the lesson of Snickers Cruncher, the unbalanced new addition to the Snickers family, an odd compromise of a candy bar.  There's nothing really wrong with the parts that are there, but omissions and odd combinations prevent it from really working.

Big, bold, and aggressive packaging promises a real earthquake of taste, making the candy's actual tameness a riddle to unpack.

Snickers' Previous Undefeated Streak
Up until now, Snickers had steadily built up their brand franchise without dealing out a single dud.  Snicker's Almond swapped peanuts for the woodsy nut crunch of big roasted almonds, backlit by a milder white nougat that offset nuttiness with placid purity.  Peanut Butter Snickers kept the peanuty crunch but added a double dose of peanut with a Reeses-style filling.  Given that so many of our favorite sweets (100 Grand, Nestle Crunch, Whatchamacallit, Rice Krispies Treats) include crisped rice, it makes sense that Mars would want to integrate that light crispness into one of their products. After all, apart for Crisp Rice M&M's (which haven't really gained much traction) Mars has no other crisped-rice candies in its lineup.

An army of enrobed squares dares you bite down and explore their innards. What role does the crisped rice play and how much is there?

Crisped Rice Needs a Purpose
The critical mistake I believe Mars made was failing to ask just what purpose they wanted the crisped rice to play.  In every other successful crisped-rice product, this purpose is quite clearly defined.  In Rice Krispy Treats, the rice is a densely-packed but defiantly crisp counterpart to the chewy marshmallow with which it's interwoven.  Together they form a paradoxical crisp-chewy substance that has won over millions.  Nestle Crunch's genius lies in its simple contrast between creamy and crispy, featuring only two great tastes that "go great together".  Whatchamacallit assembles its rice into a brick-like wall of crunch that gives it a bold and clear identity.  And Topps' Crunchkins, reviewed yesterday, uses crisped rice as a means to the end of causing their coated casings of creamy candy to cave in on themselves when bitten.  In each of these successful candies, the rice has a role to play.  As the picture below shows, that role is awfully confused in Snickers Cruncher.

Snickers Cruncher packs the rice cheek-by-jowl alongside the peanuts, making it hard to tell where the nuts begin and the rice ends. Note also the absence of nougat, for which there was no longer any room.

Not Enough Room at the Inn
In order to make room for the rice, something had to go and Snickers logically enough concluded that it couldn't be peanuts, for a candy bar without any kind of nut couldn't be reasonably placed within the Snickers family. So they naturally nixed the nougat.  But biting into one of these squares immediately reveals the problem with that choice.  It would be a lie to say that Snickers Crunchers don't taste good at all; anything with chocolate, caramel, and peanuts is going to give us some pleasure.  What is immediately clear is that there's no real reason for the rice to be there.  They're not there for crunch because the peanuts are already crunchy, and the two items intermingle such a way that they constantly undercut one another.  As the peanuts break down in the mouth it becomes difficult to know whether you're tasting gritty, sandy peanuts or chunky, coarse crisped rice.  The magical contrast between chewy and crunchy is lost, especially because the only chew comes from the relatively sparse caramel.  Without the wide bed of nougat, the peanuts have nothing to roll around and play in, and we're left with a mealy-crunchy jumble made marginally more palatable by a chocolate and caramel cover.

Conclusions
Neither fish nor fowl, Snickers Crisper was an interesting attempt to add one more textural element to a revered classic.  But to make way for the rice, an underappreciated element of the classic Snickers
was tossed aside, throwing the equilibrium out of whack.  You'll never take nougat for granted again.

Incredible Crunchkins - Baked Goods in a Candy Shell

This Shouldn't Work
Crunchkins are the kind of candy you walk past in the supermarket aisle and roll your eyes at.  Its starburst-meteor packaging is kind of cheesy, the name is lame and non-specific, referring as it does to texture rather than flavor, and its operating premise is ridiculous: that you can somehow take the taste of birthday cake, fudge brownies, and glazed donuts, and cram it down into a little ball inside a thin candy shell.  But one careful taste of these things will make you a believer.

The faux space-age packaging evokes the losers of the candy world, like the Zero or SkyBar, but Crunchkins actually are a technological marvel.

From the Minds of Topps and Bazooka
The package reveals that Crunchkins are produced by the Bazooka Candy division of the Topps company, which is better known for mediocre bubble gum that nobody would ever buy were it not included with either comics on the wrapper (which nobody would ever read if they didn't come with bubble gum) or trading cards.  It's been years since I've tasted Topps bubble gum but one can never forget those powder-dusted planks that splinter under the teeth and only coalesce into a coherent mass of chewable sweetness after a good 25 seconds of diligent grinding and salivating. This does not inspire confidence.  But the company has an interesting design innovation up its sleeve.

What is the meaning of the porous and airy center?  Read on and find out.

An Ingenious Crisped-Rice Center
The central challenge for the Crunchkin concept is how to replicate the taste of a perishable baked good within a shelf-stable candy.  Borrowing a page from the dessert themed Oreos we've discussed previously, Topps has given these candies a core of airy, crisped brown rice that, when moistened in the mouth and combined with the creamy, white-chocolate-like candy that surrounds it, creates the impression of crumbs from the baked good that it's supposed to replicate. Another critical quality, which you can see in the above photo, is the extreme thinness of the candy shell.  Whereas M&M and Skittle candy shells are relatively thick and crunchy, returning fairly stiff resistance as you munch down on them, this candy shell is paper-thin and yields with almost sensual gentleness, almost folding in on itself and embracing your teeth as they press down.  Hence the line between candy and baked good if further blurred.

Suitable for serving to your most refined guests, these candies almost resemble a postmodern, evolved iteration of the famous board game Go.

Flavors Both Natural and Artificial
Crunchkins amply demonstrate the virtue of the deft deployment of artificial flavors.  I don't believe for a second, for instance, that the glazed donut (that's the tan one) candy could succeed without it.  This brazen ball of rice and sugar not only calls forth the flavors of fat-fried dough (which you could never put into a candy naturally) but even the flavor of icing.  We don't even think of icing, which is essentially just water and confectioners sugar, of having a flavor, but it's plainly recognizable.  The birthday cake ball pulls of a similar trick, giving you the taste of white icing in a manner that makes you hyper-aware of its components as though the whole had been exploded into a three dimensional 360 view of each puzzle piece; you taste icing yes, but you taste shortening, you taste food coloring and artificial vanilla and, yes, you taste the lemon-yellow crumb beneath it all.  As for the brown ball, if you can call up in your mind the taste of chocolate bubble gum or a tootsie roll, you can roughly imagine the fudge brownie candy as well.  It doesn't taste completely artificial because it does contain some real cocoa powder, but artificial flavorings elevate the bare cocoa base by lending notes of fudge icing and raw batter. If you close your eyes, you might think you're licking the bowl.

Can this industrial confection transport you to the bake sale table at your neighborhood swimming pool back when you were ten years old?  Yes. Yes it can.

Conclusions
Candy consumption can be many things: a consolation on a bad day, an indulgent reward, a retreat to innocence, or a mindless mid-day chomp.  Crunchkins makes it an adventure and an experience that provokes reflection and wonder.  Not a bad deal for $1.19 at the Wal-Mart.  Well played, Topps, well played.

Hostess Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes: The Secret Ingredient is Beef Fat

Riding the Sea-Salt Bubble
Sea salt seems to be everywhere these days: on potato chips, on chocolate-covered caramels, in bagged popcorn; in fact, it's listed prominently on the package of any food item that contains salt and needs a little extra cache. And you know that the bubble is nowhere near popped when it even finds itself sprinkled on top of Hostess cupcakes.  Fans of salty-sweet sensations everywhere will be glad to know that those salt crystals do great work here in perhaps the best new item that Hostess has ever introduced.

Things You Never Thought You'd See: Hostess Cupcakes with Boutique Gourmet Pretensions

All Salt is Sea Salt
Before we talk about these cupcakes' scrumptious taste, and about some real concerns for committed vegetarians, let's dispense with a little nonsense surrounding sea salt.  Salt is manufactured through one of two methods: either we pool sea water in shallow beds until the water evaporates and leaves the salt behind (and this we know as sea salt) or we mine it from underground deposits.  But those underground deposits are themselves just the remnants of massive evaporated pools of sea water, which is why mined salt deposits tend to ring dried-out lake beds, inland seas, and bays in drier parts of the world.  There's a reason, after all, that there is a great salt trade along the Sahara.  But the activation of our romantic imagination is a very real component of how we enjoy foods, which perhaps explains the enduring appeal of salt water taffy.  And if you want to close your eyes while eating these and imagine the circling gulls, the rush of the surf, and the salty spray in the breeze coming off the water, I'm not about to stop you.

I Defy You to Distinguish These Salt Crystals from Morton's Kosher in a Blind Taste Test, but the Heart Wants What the Heart Wants

Reality is Logistics and Beef Fat
These cupcakes are actually amazingly good.  On the first bite, you notice deep butter and burnt sugar notes, a burnished and mature butterscotch flavor that carries throughout the cake, thanks to a caramel creme filling and a rich salty-sweet-fatty current that permeates the cake itself.  The chewy fondant icing, which can seem a little strange on a yellow or chocolate cupcake where we're used to creamy icing, is perfectly appropriate in a caramel cupcake where we can easily imagine that what tops the cake is actually a thin sheet of caramel.  And yes, those salt crystals are always waking up the taste, pinging brightly on the tongue at regular intervals.

A Chewy Caramel Covering Studded with Bursts of Salt, a Caramel-Flavored Filling, and a Moist Crumb Makes for Industrial Cupcake Perfection.  But Vegetarians Beware, the Moisture Comes from Beef Fat

What's a little more shocking is that all this great taste is in some ways a side effect of more efficient business practices.  Before entering bankruptcy, Hostess was burdened by contractual obligations that forced all product to be delivered direct from the factory to retail stores.  The post-bankruptcy Hostess sends the product in bulk to warehouses where retailers actually pick it up as needed.  This makes it easier for Hostess to introduce special temporary items because a retailer doesn't have to arrange for special delivery of the item in advance, but rather can decide to take them on an impromptu basis without having to constantly change delivery arrangements.  But this warehousing approach required that the product have a longer shelf life, and I think this is the reason that these cupcakes (VEGETARIAN ALERT!) are made with beef fat.  I don't know for a fact that Hostess didn't use beef fat (aka beef tallow) prior to this, but the earliest mention of it I can find dates to 2014, one year after the company's re-emergence.

Beef fat makes sense as a shortening because it's one of the most shelf-stable shortenings there is and it has a neutral flavor.  If you wanted to extend the shelf life of your product, this would be an excellent choice.  Remember that the whole purpose of shortening is to add a source of moisture that, unlike water, doesn't evaporate.  This is probably the reason why these cakes are extremely moist, more so than I can ever recall a Hostess cupcake being.  And because the retailer-to-warehouse model has been operating more efficiently than expected, you're probably not getting an older product than you did before, merely a product that's engineered for more moisture in the first place.

Conclusions
In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt asserted that the country needed "bold, persistent, experimentation" to lift it out of the doldrums.  If we may appropriate his concept and cause the slight rotation of his remains, we can say that Hostess has done the same, reorganizing and improving their business practices and trying risky and interesting new products.  Apparently Ghostbusters Green Slime Twinkies are on the horizon.  Their excellent Sea Salt Caramel Cupcake is a natural outgrowth of this new approach.  However, they probably should make more of an effort to educate the public as to the hidden animal products in their recipe.  Perhaps a discreet "contains animal products" or "not a vegetarian food" message would be appropriate.

Dunkin' Days, Part 3 - Oreo and Raspberry Cheesecake Squares

Who Wants Cheesecake Pudding?
Your opinion on Dunkin's two new square donuts, the Raspberry Cheesecake Square and the Oreo Cheesecake Square, will flow from your feelings about cheesecake pudding because that's what they're filled with.  As covered in an earlier episode, donut makers don't lovingly slice open the raw dough, spoon in a filling and then reclose the pocket through careful folding and crimping.  Instead the filling is injected into the fully baked donut with a pastry bag, and so any filling has to be thin and loose enough to be handled this way.  So you don't get cookie dough, you get cookie dough ooze, and you don't get firm, grainy-smooth cheesecake inside your donut, but instead a semi-fluffy, semi gelatinous goop that carries the slightly sweet and slightly sour tang of cream cheese. The cheesecakey dough squares are then customized with the toppings that bear their names.

Beneath the Oreo Crumble, a Hearty Dollup of Cheesecakey Glop

Oreos, Oreos, But Not Everywhere
The main criticism of the Oreo donut is an insufficiency of strong, bold, and dark Oreo flavor.  If the Oreo crumble topping had been paired with a chocolate cake donut and the same smooth, rich filling, Dunkin might have really been onto something, but the Oreo element here is sparsely tame, more like an accent to the bready square.  In the donut I purchased (and we know that quantities vary from batch to batch) there was so much of the cheesecake pudding localized in some regions, that the taste varied from dry and bland in some parts to gag-inducingly gloppy in others.  This weak pastiche of disparate elements hasn't a strong enough identity to really please anyone.

Note the Ratio of Oreo Dust to Hamburger-Bun-Like Dough Pocket: A Recipe for Blandness

Raspberry Candy to the Rescue
The Raspberry Cheesecake Square gets its raspberry flavor from an extremely creative source: not jam, not some flavored creme, in fact not from anything within the actual donut.  This is actually a plain, iced, cheesecake-plumped dough square that gets transformed into a raspberry donut by little raspberry candies on top.  Containing milk, palm oil, and real raspberries, they're essentially molded crowns of raspberry-infused synthetic (in that they don't contain cocoa butter) white chocolate.  Their cute shape charms the eye, as the white plain of snowy frosting is punctuated by an array of what look like My Little Pony Peanut Butter Cups strewn across the confectionary landscape.

Aren't they Adorable? All the Raspberry Flavor Comes from these Tiny Berry Candies.
It Doesn't Look Like Enough, But it Is.

These smooth and tangy candies don't look like enough to power an entire donut with raspberry flavor, but they actually pack a real punch. Unable to resist, I tried one all by itself and they really are addictive.  If Dunkin wants to make some extra dough (ouch!) they should package these and sell them separately.  Though they look utterly artificial, the real raspberries lend a smooth, not-too-harsh fruit tang that balances out the sweetness of the icing and the cheesecake filling, which was judiciously portioned in this example.

It's Probably Too Much to Ask that Dunkin Distribute the Filling Evenly, but at Least in this Case, there was Just the Right Amount.

Conclusions
Skip the unimaginative Oreo spin-off product.  When your sweet tooth needs feeding, strongly consider the surprisingly light, supple, and subtly, creatively sophisticated Raspberry Cheesecake Square

At the Other End of the Spectrum

While the rest of the world presses ahead with the kind of agricultural methods that you would presumably need to feed people cheaply and to, well, produce a $1.29 McDouble, some people have a different vision and you can see it in this beautifully-shot film Good Things Await.  Danish farmer Niels Stokholm runs his farm on "biodynamic principles" which is to say that his farm produces its output with no outside inputs.  All the fodder consists of hay produced on the premises.  The cheese comes from the milk of the resident Danish Red Cattle, an endangered heirloom species.  He makes extensive use of composts and even stranger practices, such as packing cow horns with manure, burying the horns to undergo a fermentation process and, at the process's conclusion, digging out the transformed manure and stirring it into hot water to create some sort of super-fertilizing soup.  

There's a metaphysical aspect to is as well, as there was in biodynamics at its founding.  He speaks of sun and star energy transmogrifying into the reds and greens of the various plants on the farm.  He muses on the mystical properties of yarrow root and dandelions.  He slaughters his cattle on site, believing the hot blood that seeps into the soil after slaughter preserves the integrity of the herd's  collective spirit.  You don't have to be sold on his claim that these methods are just as productive as modern methods to appreciate his approach; certainly I'm not and the film makes it pretty clear that the farm is non self-sustaining from the sale of meat and produce but rather subsists pretty heavily on donations to a foundation around which the farm is economically organized.  But this is a man living out his dream, pointing out alternative approaches to agriculture that he is trying to demonstrate by living them out.

Ironically, his nemesis throughout the film is not Monsanto or any other predatory corporation, but rather the Danish authorities that instill a fairly rigid view of what organic farming practices need to be.  Stokholm, for instance, believes that dehorning cattle is cruel and makes for less healthy cattle.  He points to how air circulates through the horn and into the bloodstream, carrying clues from the fine particulate matter in the inhaled air as to the contents of the food that the cow's stomach needs to digest.  If the cow doesn't have this early-warning system, the digestive process will be less efficient.  But leaving horns on the cattle requires occasional use of tie stalls for when they need to be fed in doors and would otherwise use their horns to fight over feed.  And so this farmer, who is providing the most idyllic life you could ever imagine for his cattle (based on what we see onscreen anyhow) is cited for animal cruelty by the by-the-book bureaucratic regulators on alarmingly frequent "random inspections".  And so it goes.  This is almost a documentary analogue to the recent film Still Mine where James Cromwell's character fights for the right to use time-honored building methods in the construction of a cottage for his dementia-stricken wife, but almost loses everything for not strictly observing somewhat arbitrary and inflexible building codes.

If you love David and Goliath tales, are fascinated by farming, or like drooling over artisanal foods, check this out.  I don't have Netflix so I can't say with certainty that it's on there, but it appears to be.

Dunkin' Day Two: Vegetables Victorious Over Sausage in the New Grande Burritos

The Veggies Are Out There
We tell ourselves a lot of innocent and not-so-innocent lies in the course of justifying our less-than-healthy food choices when eating out and when eating at home.  Perhaps the most frequent is that we would choose fresh fruits and vegetables more often if they weren't so expensive.  One problem with this statement is the wildly variable cost of fresh produce, depending on where you buy it.  I've bought scallions for $1 a bunch at Whole Foods and for 20 cents at the local international supermarket.  Another hole in our exculpatory web of self-deception is the faulty claim that fruits and vegetables need to be fresh to be palatable.  Frozen corn is delicious, as can be frozen spinach and broccoli; red peppers are great out of a jar and black beans are terrific from a can.  Perhaps most damning of all, every single one of these things is far cheaper, ounce for ounce, than ground beef or cheese.

Capitalizing and perhaps even trumpeting the truth of this statement, Dunkin has introduced two new breakfast burritos into its all-day menu, the veggie burrito and the sausage burrito, and they are equally priced, weighing in at $3.99 a piece, an excellent value considering that these hefty tubes of Tex-Mex are easily a meal all by themselves.  We'll begin with the veggie burrito.

Get a Load of the Size of This Thing: You're Looking at Half of a Dunkin Veggie Burrito

They Come From the Factory
Because most Dunkin locations have nothing like the dedicated kitchen staff of a normal fast-food restaurant, their food items have to require minimal assembly and little preparation of perishable ingredients, and for that reason these burritos are entirely pre-made.  I found this out on my first day of sampling these burritos, during which I intended to purchase one of each kind.  This intent was frustrated when the cashier rather awkwardly told me "we don't have any more sausage burritos", clearly referring to them as discrete units of inventory rather than something that could be assembled from components in a kitchen.  This is the kind of problem Dunkin really has to correct if it wants to compete seriously in the breakfast space; you don't run out of your signature new breakfast item at 7AM on a Sunday morning.

One Side Benefit of Factory Assembly (Pardon the Fuzzy Photo) is That They are Efficiently Packed, End to End with Cheese and Egg.  No Folded Ends of Empty Tortilla, the Fillings Reach All the Way to the Edge.

But They Bring the Fresh and they Bring the Heat!
Yea, I just verbed an adjective, you wanna fight about it?  Maybe I'm feeling feisty from all the spicy in these burritos.  I think Dunkin cannily reasoned that if you're going to strip the meat out of a breakfast item, you need to punch up the flavor and one way they've done that is to up the capsaicin quotient.  The official ingredient list mentions three kinds of peppers plugged into various places in the mix: chipotles are in the sauce that coats the rice and veggies as well as infused, along with bits of Jalapeno, into the egg patty, Chipotles and Habaneros are both blended into the cheese.  Since Chipotles are the only pepper of the three that's smoked, the primary sensation you get is just plain heat, heat that's potent enough that your hot coffee has an extra burn as it slides down your throat.  The creaminess of the cheese and the unctuousness of the egg cut the fire a little bit, adding smooth and warming notes that keep things from getting too harsh.

Moist, Vegetal, Beany, and Spicy.  Note the Big Hunk of Jalapeno at the Bottom Left Corner

Amidst this firefight between richness and piquancy rests a grain and vegetable feast in regal and splendid repose.  A mix of brown and white rice adds volume and chew, black beans studding the mixture are surprisingly firm and fresh-tasting, corn kernels pop with juice and smooth-skinned fibrousness.  A touch of cilantro brings an awake sense of the garden to keep things from getting excessively swaggery.  But the biggest revelation of all is the fire-roasted peppers which really and truly taste of fire-roasting.  Usually the effect of alleged roasting is merely cosmetic, with little black bits of skin meant to convince you that these bland, red, limp bits of vegetable matter have been kissed by flame.  But with these peppers, both red and green, you really taste the essene of the curled, blackened skins.  You would be proud to have roasted these peppers on your own stovetop.  So while vegans will have to sigh and await more options, those who can eat cheese and egg have a really exciting new convenience option for breakfast.

What About The Sausage Version?
The sausage version is just fine, but I honestly didn't like it quite as much as the veggie burrito for a pretty simple reason.  All the rice and veggies and spice that are in the veggie burrito are included here in the sausage burrito, but in smaller quantities in order to make room for the fairly thick chopped-up sausage patty, and the sausage is fairly bland.   If you're anything like me and you have fond memories of sausage, then you remember slices of Jimmy Dean HOT sausage sizzling in a cast-iron pan until they were firmly cooked through on the inside and dark brown and crusty on the outside.  The red pepper flakes would give that Jimmy Dean sausage enough heat that you'd take an extra gulp of orange juice to calm matters down.  No such luck here.  The sausage is just fatty, flabby, salted pork, taking up space and preventing you from getting all of the veggie goodness you'd otherwise enjoy.  Plus, unlike the McDonalds breakfast burrito, the sausage isn't mixed throughout the egg mixture.  Rather the veggies are on one side and the sausage is on the other.  It's like a duplex burrito housing two rather incompatible neighbors.

The Sausage Version has the Same Veggie Filling, but Less of it. Note the Segregation of the Sausage, Packed in at One End, Sequestered from its Vegetarian Companions.

Conclusions
Right now, if you want a great comfort food burrito with sausage in it, your best bet is still the excellent value over at MickeyDs.  But if you want a veggie burrito with authentic Tex-Mex flavor and a nutrient profile markedly superior to, say, the Fully Loaded Croissanwich, get to your local Dunkin and hope they have it in stock!

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Dunkin Day 1: Strawberry Shortcake Croissant Donut – The Perils of Adaptation

Battling Back Our Fondest Memories

The short review of Dunkin’s new Strawberry Shortcake Croissant Donut would be to say that it’s light and tasty and leave it there.   But we can't settle on that simple truth without first batting away our neuroses, not about what this donut is, but what we may think it should be, and what it can’t ever be.

Can This Off-the-Shelf Item Somehow Deliver the Taste of Real Strawberry Shortcake

This all goes back our own memories of the original dessert.  If we’ve ever had true Strawberry Shortcake, then we remember the ripe strawberries, their juices brought glistening to their surface by a sprinkling of sugar, the same way salt draws life-juice out of a slug (the same slugs that victimized and made hopeless a strawberry patch adjacent the house in which I grew up).  We remember freshly-whipped real cream, sweetened with cane sugar and maybe flavored with just a touch of Grand Marnier or Cointreau.  And we know the velvety things, and the toothsomely juicy things, were folded together and sandwiched between buttery biscuits made sweet by two tablespoons of sugar in the dough rather than two teaspoons, and made light by pea-sized bits of butter pressed into flat proto-flakes by the intrepid fingers that worked the dough.  And even if we did none of this and used Cool Whip and spongecake dessert shells in place of whipped cream and biscuits, we remember when and where we ate them; probably outside on a summer evening when honeysuckles added via their scent an extra flavor note that resided outside the dish itself.

Ambition, the Mother of Invention

Throw all this gross sentimentality out the window, for we’re talking about what can be accomplished when you have to make the donuts at 4AM to last through the mid-day rush, whether you’re in Sonoma, CA or Dover, Delaware.   You can’t put real whipped cream in a donut that you’re holding at room temperature, for if it doesn’t spoil, it will certainly collapse and separate.  There’s no reliable supply of fresh strawberries from coast to coast that can be sourced at a consistently low day-to-day cost.  Modern food operations are modular, with all items consisting of interchangeable parts so if Dunkin doesn’t already make biscuits, and it doesn’t, it’s not going to change that to somehow magically transform  strawberry shortcake into a cheap convenience item.  Compromises will have to be made along the way, and innovations devised.

At it's Best, Dunkin's Croissant Donut Combines the Adult Taste of a Flaky Croissant with the Sweet, Childish Fun of a Glazed Donut.  But Will the Pink Creme Spoil the Party?

That said, there are some interesting choices that Dunkin perhaps could have attempted in translating the dessert to the donut.  They might have taken freeze-dried strawberries, the kind you see a lot in breakfast cereals these days, and tried to combine them with some whipped filling until dried berries plumped by mingling with the moist filling.  Or they might have gotten real strawberry taste into the mix by creating a layer of strawberry preserves and then adding some sort of “crème” to that.  After all, there’s nothing nicer than a good croissant with strawberry jam.  But nobody’s calling me to give them ideas, so let’s see what approach they actually took.

When the Real Seems Unreal

In reality, Dunkin took the unusual step of converting the whipped cream and strawberries into one integrated creamy filling to create the primary strawberry flavoring element, then enhanced the effect with a strawberry-icing drizzle laid over a thin neutral glaze.  These additions were applied to their standard croissant donut modeled after, though not truly replicating, the original New York Cronut ® 

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Does it work?  That depends, as we’ll see, but the strawberry flavor is pretty convincing, probably because, shockingly enough (as a visit to the Dunkin Website reveals) the filling actually contains real strawberry puree mixed into a buttercream base.  If you look closely as the filling stuffed inside, you can actually see specks of real strawberry.  That doesn’t necessarily translate into a fresh and fruity taste – the intense sweetness reminded me more of strawberry bubble gum, but it’s still a bright, pleasant, distinct berry flavor.

Among the Other 100+ Ingredients...Real Strawberry Puree!

Inconstancy

This surprisingly authentic strawberry filling, combined with Dunkin’s light, airy, yet rich and buttery croissant donut can indeed have delightful results.  In fact, after trying this for the first time, I was prepared to write a glowing review that would emphasize how harmoniously the light glaze, the understed filling, and the fluffy donut base combined for a surprisingly sophisticated treat.  But, unsatisfied with some of the original product photos, I bought another donut this morning, and found just how variable the results can be.

 

When the Croissant to Strawberry Creme Ratios are Right, Like in this Section, this Donut Works.  And Note the Specks of Real Strawberry! But Beware a Version with Excess Pink Goop.

In the mass-produced food world, consistency is extremely important, particularly in terms of the ratio of one ingredient to another, and we see why here.  Whereas the first donut, purchased last Sunday, had just enough strawberry crème to add flavor and a bit of moisture, the version purchased this Thursday morning had enough to make clear just how goopy it really is.  Nobody likes a mouthful of buttercream, and this version in some places had buttercream oozing into every crevice, completely overwhelming the airiness that a croissant is supposed to bring.  Similarly, the first version had just the right amount of glaze, like (to quote the great M.F.K. fisher) a single layer of porcelain that cracks so tinily, so ultimately at the first bite.  But today’s version was a sticky crust reminiscent of the ice shell we hack off of our windshields on January mornings.  These little variances spell the difference between a mature confection you would serve with, say, English Breakfast tea and a sodden lump of glazed starch that you keep needing to wash down with office coffee.

Conclusions:

It’s worth your while to try it, but at $2.49 (it’s one of their special “deluxe” donuts) there is some considerable risk involved.

Fully Loaded Crossainwich: Delivering the Smoky Goods

No Frills
In keeping with the Burger King ethos, their new Fully Loaded Crossainwich is elementally that which it is and nothing else:  filling the croissant roll is a nondescript egg patty, topped with ham, topped with a sausage patty, topped with cheese, topped with bacon.  There is no special sauce, no slice of tomato, no herb spread, just a stomach-filling workingman's delight, a sandwich to stave off the hunger of a growing teenage boy, or to deliver into indigestive stupor a foolish man of middle age who aspires to eat as he did when he was young and unstoppable.  M.F.K. Fisher warned us older men of this vaulting ambition, and to apparently little avail.

Protein Stacked on Protein Stacked on Protein Stacked on Protein

The Mysterious Smokestack
The greatest pleasure of the Fully Loaded Croissanwich is the sensation of one's teeth plunging through it's various layers, triumphantly, like a runaway piano crashing through multiple floors of an apartment building.  First they crack the patina of the surprisingly flaky croissant, which seems to have gotten a recent upgrade.  I can remember when the alleged croissant was more a hamburger bun that had been mechanically crimped into a clumsy crescent shape that routinely collapsed under the structural weakening of its own internally generated steam.  This time there's a real interior fluffiness and layering, so kudos for that.  Next we come to the carnal heart of the matter.  In this day and age there is a concern over excess meat consumption, especially red meat.  Burger King, as is its wont, takes these concerns, slashes them to pieces, heaves them into the trash bin and dances around the dumpster fire.  The showcase of the F.L.C. is not just a triple serving of pork but a triple serving of smoked pork.  The eater's teeth, once through the buttery flakiness, meets the firm, pleasingly leathery resistance of criss-crossed bacon slices, then encounters the stretchy net of American cheese that shields the hearty sausage patty with its knotty bits of gristle held in suspension by the oily tenderness of the finely ground pork.  No sooner is this barrier breached than we now encounter folded layers of tender ham, before finally hitting bottom: the compressed final layer of Croissant. And you'll notice I haven't even mentioned the egg patty, so generic that its purpose must merely be airy textural counterpoint.  So far, so triumphant, so we're now positioned to discuss the one truly strange and troubling aspect of the F.L.C., which is a counterintuitive excess of smokiness.

Note the Visible Puffed Flakiness of the Croissant, Adding Needed Volumetric Fluffiness to Counteract the  F.L.C.'s Thick, Weighty Meatiness

Too Much of a Good Thing?
It's indisputable that, without smoking, bacon would be barely a shell itself.  Indeed, unsmoked bacon in Italy goes by the name of pancetta and while that ingredient has its uses, it can seem tasteless to the uninitiated in comparison to classic American smoked bacon.  So we can hand out no demerits to B.K. for smokiness in the bacon.  But left unconsidered was the taste impression that smoked bacon might leave when combined with ham that had also been somewhat differently smoked in combination with a sausage patty that was also smoked.  Now, I regret to say that I didn't bother to taste the sausage patty all by itself, so I could be mistaken on this, but the taste impression I got was that BK had done to the sausage patty what they do to their hamburger patties, which is to say flame broil it.  And while everyone loves smoked taste, the net result of smoke on top of smoke on top of smoke was overwhelming as well as more than a little artificial-seeming.  If you've ever poured too much liquid smoke into your homemade barbecue sauce, you know what I mean.   There's a sickly, bottled, chemical aspect to the F.L.C.'s aggressive smokiness akin to a taste stain that won't wash away. In fact, tasting the F.L.C. brought back a memory from high school that I hadn't considered for a couple decades.  There was a fellow high-schooler that sat in front of me during early morning chemistry class, and he smelled immensely of garlic.  There was no other possible proximate cause for the odor he gave off, for he was always immaculately groomed; his shirts were always crisply starched and brilliant white.  His hair seemed to have been trimmed with razor precision almost daily.  But an acrid sulphuric smell seemed to waft directly from the nape of his neck directly into my nostrils and I have since come to understand this smell as the smell of garlic that, when consumed in excess, works its way into the bloodstream and oozes out through the pores.  If you eat garlic all the time, you'll never notice it.  But if you wander into this cloud of human garlic fumes unawares, you will never forget it.  This best describes the pervasiveness of the F.L.C.'s smoke cloud, which strikes you fairly strongly while you eat it, but even more so throughout the day as the smoke odor seems to linger in your mouth, in your nostrils, and on the fingers that have held the sandwich even after you've washed your hands.  The morning after my encounter with the F.L.C., I sniffed my fingertips and somehow the smoke smell was still there.  Perhaps it didn't really reside physically on my digits.  Maybe it was just indelibly etched in my memory.  Your individual results may vary, but I hope you're curious enough to find out and let me know.

Conclusions
The Fully Loaded Croissanwich has much to recommend it: its surprisingly flaky and rejuvenated croissant, its robust meatiness, its satisfying caloricity. But its industrial-strength smokiness is an experience that must be evaluated on an individual basis to see whether it's something your system wants to handle.  One thing certain is this creation could only have come from Burger King, the most bludgeoningly insouciant fast food joint on the planet.

Vegetarians (And Vegans) Rejoice!: The Best Quesalupa (or Chalupa) is Vegetarian (or Vegan)

Let Not Meat Be Your Mindless Protein
Longtime readers of The Food Kingdom will know that we don't abstain from eating meat and, indeed, we will be reviewing the Fully Loaded Croissanwich next week, once Sunday rolls around and I can avail myself of the Sunday exception to my Lenten season removal of pork products from my diet.  But meat should never be an automatic ingredient in a meal.  Reasons for this range from environmental concerns, health considerations, cost considerations (for meat can be and probably ought to be relatively pricey) as well as considerations of animal welfare.  Let me throw in yet another addition to the list here: meat doesn't always make a meal taste better.  As I discovered at a recent visit to Taco Bell to further explore the taste possibilities of their new Quesalupa, this cheesy treat (and its cheeselesss cousin the Chalupa) taste best when meat beats a hasty retreat.

Why Meat Doesn't Work in a Quesalupa
Though these comments apply equally to ground beef, shredded chicken, and chicken strips, let's use steak as our consistent example in the discussion.  Steak is at it's best in two distinct situations.  The first is where it commands center stage as the star of the show.  There's a reason so many steak dishes are relatively simple and unadorned: as delicious as it can be, it needs minimal interference for its many flavor notes to shine.  I commend to your attention a recent dinner we had at home of skirt steak pounded 1/4 inch thick, coated with chopped rosemary, kosher salt and coarse ground peppercorns, seared for 2-3 minutes on high on each side and set aside.  Then deglaze the pan with 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar, reduced to a syrup.  Add steak juices to the balsamic drizzle, then slice the medium rare steak, lay it over a bed of arugula, and drizzle with the balsamic-beef juice reduction.  Simple, bold, perfect with red wine - the tender beef, tangy sauce, and peppery arugula each make strong statements.  The other way to use meat is as a flavoring ingredient, as in a stir fry.  The meat adds one more flavor element to the mix and the diner gets an occasional bit of it, mixed with carrots, snow peas, mushrooms and the like.  But when you do taste the meat, it's only in combination with a few other things on the fork, so again the beef's taste is unobscured

Now consider how differently steak is situated in a quesalupa.  In our original quesalupa review, I compared the dish to a stuffed crust pizza.  As with a pizza, each bite consists of a substantial starchy shell, copious amounts of goopy cheese, more shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, creamy sauce, etc etc.  Now consider the texture of Taco Bell steak strips: they're a tender, chewy protein, tossed about with the chewy protein of the melted cheese, and the chewy protein of the stretchy chalupa shell.  Therefore you can hardly taste it.  What we want in our Quesalupa is contrasting flavors, not complementary ones.

Amidst all the Dough, Cheese, Tomatoes, Lettuce, and Creamy Sauce, the Steak Doesn't Stand a Chance

Enter the Customizable Vegetarian Fillings
Though they don't really advertise this, you can ask Taco Bell to hold the meat and substitute in a bunch of customized toppings.  And it doesn't necessarily cost extra.  For every ingredient you ask them to remove, you can add an additional one at no costs.  So if you ask them to hold the steak, shredded cheese and tomatoes, you can substitute in some other fillings.  I'm not exactly sure when they start charging for additional fillings, but you can see from the receipt that the extra charges take a while to kick in.  Ordering in this way isn't very much trouble if you're patient in explaining what you want and they aren't too too busy.

Here we see a Chalupa, Hold the Steak, with Black Beans, Pico de Gallo, Jalapenos, and Guacamole added at no extra charge.  Only the Latin Rice was .49 extra.

The Vegetarian (Not Vegan) Quesalupa
Because of the cheese inside the Quesalupa, we obviously can't include it as a vegan item, but all of the fillings listed here are vegan with the exception of the chipotle sauce and perhaps the potatoes.  The latest information I've received is that they are vegan but there was some buzz that for some reason they weren't so if you're very strict, you might forgo those.
Anyhow, we chose to fill our cheesy shell with a real cornucopia of flavors: roasted potatoes and black beans for an earthy note, jalapeno slices and chipotle cream sauce for a double dose of heat, pico de gallo for a juicy and citric tanginess, and guacamole for extra creaminess.  This dish absolutely explodes with flavor.  Instead of focusing on chewy bits of steak that contribute little of their own bold flavor to the dish, we instead allowed these assertive flavors and varied textures to battle it out.  The results were absolutely explosive, as juice from the salsa flowed over the brown meaty flavors of the potatoes and the smooth surface of the black beans intermingled with the luscious mouthfeel of the guacamole.  The hot taco sauce added yet another exciting note of spice to the double layer of heat from the chipotles and jalapenos.  I just couldn't believe how much flavor this thing had, and it will fill you up too.

Just Look at All that Good Stuff!  This thing Literally Overflows With Taste.

A Surprisingly Substantial Vegan Option
I wasn't sure if going even further down the ladder of dietary restriction would hurt, but since it's important to give vegan diners an option, I decided to give it a whirl.  A classic Chalupa is basically the same thing as a Quesalupa minus the cheese, and the fried dough shell is so rich that we're already starting with something rather decadent, vegan or not.  Playing it safe, we subbed spanish rice for potatoes to make sure we didn't violate any vegan rules.  Jalapenos and pico de gallo went in next, followed by black beans and that surprisingly good guacamole.  While it didn't burst at the seams with taste in quite the same way, the fundamentals were once again solid and the flavors all rang out clear and distinct.  The shell served up a toasty fried bass note, the guacamole added the creaminess and the tanginess, the pico de gallo gave us juicy herbaceousness with its onion and cilantro, and the black beans again lent an almost meaty earthiness.  We really didn't feel like we were sacrificing anything here.  It was simply delicious.

The Vegan Chalupa: That's a lot of Green for Not a Lot of Green

Conclusion:
The world of mass market fast food has got to be one of the most challenging environments for a committed vegetarian, especially a vegan, to navigate.  It's especially heartening to find that options for them at Taco Bell are not only available: they happen to be arguably the best thing on the menu.