Wendy's Jalapeño Fresco Chicken Sandwich - Fast Food Champ of the Scoville Scale

It Had to Be Wendy's
Every fast-food joint has a personality that drives the content in their creations.  McDonald's test-markets endlessly, fearful of releasing something not approved by committee.  Burger King goes for the splashy, the gaudy, and almost relishes giving offense, which is why no one else could have thought up the Fully Loaded Croissanwich or the Angriest Whopper.  Taco Bell prides itself on generating a new menu item every other week, provided it's just some recombination of the twenty-something preexisting ingredients in their trough.  Wendy's has always been marked by a "why not?" restlessness with the status quo: why not chili, and why not put it on a baked potato?  Why not smoked gouda on a burger, why not a spicy chicken sandwich?  And centrally, why not try to make fast food just a bit fresher, with ingredients one notch better than the competition.  This nervy synthesis of the fast food spirit and "real food" ethic gave birth to 2016's best new sandwich thus far, the cheesy, juicy, and almost mouth-searing Jalapeño Fresco Chicken Sandwich.

It's for real. Despite another somewhat shoddy job of assembly, the underlying quality is evident in a thicker-than-usual chicken fillet and coarse chunks of fresh peppers.

Quality Components
In many ways, this sandwich reminds me of a custom-built mountain bike from a high-end retailer.  The ultimate quality is almost an inevitability because of the high grade of the constituent parts which, unless incompetently fastened together, virtually guarantee a top-flight experience.  Wendy's long ago mastered the art of cooking a chicken fillet until crisp but not too crunchy on the outside, and juicily plump inside.  This consistent feat was perfected at the same time that their original spicy chicken sandwich rose to be one of their top-sellers.  Starting from this rarified baseline of spiciness and succulence, creating a new sandwich was simply a matter of adding new tastes without detracting from the old.

"Five Layers of Spice": Deconstructing the Myth
While this sandwich is delicious, and complexly and eye-wateringly so, the promotional material that's advertising "five layers of spice" needs debunking.  Layering is all the rage these days, as celebrity chefs like to speak of "layering flavors" to create nuance, but heat isn't additive in the way that Wendy's is implying.  While adding more and more salt to something will indeed make it saltier, adding more and different ingredients, each of which contains some spice, doesn't have the additive effect of making the end product hotter. If you were to add more and more jalapeño peppers you would indeed have that effect, but any dish can only be as hot as its hottest ingredient, and in the case of the Jalapeño Fresco sandwich, Wendy's actually piles on certain less-hot items that serve to dilute the hot peppers.  Let's examine each individual layer in the 5-spice strata and understand the contribution it makes.

An angrily orange spiced fillet plus four additional sources of heat seem to threaten a sandwich that will pin you to the mat and make you beg for mercy.  But some of these scary additions are a little tame.

A Spicy Chicken Fillet - This is the aforementioned baseline that gets the sandwich off to a peppery start.  So far, so good.

Colby Pepper Jack - Take a look at the picture above and decide for yourself.  Do you see any prominent flecks of pepper? You don't particularly taste any either.

Red Jalapeño Infused Bun - As with the red bun of the Angriest Whopper, the bread here works more to absorb heat than contribute to it.  You can see a few red pepper bits, but they're sparsely scattered, and besides, there's a good reason why any bread has a hard time being hot.  Capsaicin, the volatile compound that attaches to the tongue's VR1 pain receptors and neurologically tricks the brain into perceiving heat-like pain, can only activate those receptors if they are free to attach, which is why raw peppers give you the hottest experience of all.  But capsaicin is soluble in both fat and starch, and any capsaicin that binds to the starch in the bun is tied up and unable to activate the tongue.

Ghost Pepper Sauce - This cheesy sauce truly is hot, but nothing like its name would suggest. Until 2011, the "ghost pepper" (the popular name for bhut jolokia) held the world record for the hottest pepper in the world on the Scoville Scale, the standard measure for expressing units of capsaicin heat.  At 350,000 Scoville units, it was 100 times hotter than a jalapeño and could literally induce a heart attack or other severe shock-induced event if eaten raw.  There's no way that there's any significant amount of ghost pepper in this fatty cheese emulsion; if there were, Wendy's would probably face lawsuits.  However, despite the capsaicin blocking properties of the Velveeta-like sauce, it manages to be about as spicy as movie-theater nacho cheese, which it pretty closely resembles.  Together with the spicy chicken fillet, we've got some pretty serious fire burning from the get-go.

Fresh Jalapeños - Again, as was the case with the Angriest Whopper, it's the plain old "boring" jalapeños that steal the show, and since these are fresh rather than the Whopper's pickled peppers, they help the sandwich live up to the "fresco" in its name.  Rough-cut, generously heaped, and as bursting with juice as if picked fresh from the field, these emerald stars light up the cheesy firmament in which they're embedded and vault the sandwich to brilliant life.

Shot through with heat-bursting green nuggets, the ghost pepper sauce oozes like lava from deep within the sandwich's molten core.

Red Onion Ties It All Together

Unmentioned until now, it is the hefty slice of red onion that makes the crucial difference in the sandwich, tilting the balance toward the natural and the fresh and cutting against the current of the manufactured and artificial (like the orange synthetic cheese) that could have easily overwhelmed it.  The essential oils and vegetal notes of the onion and the same elements in the peppers remind me somewhat of the Thai dish larb gai or perhaps a spicy ceviche. It's a far more homemade feeling than you usually get from fast food.

Conclusions

With its splendid multitude of tastes, the meaty and cheesy, the soft and the starchy, the juicy and the spicy, the sprightly and the unctuous, this power-packed delicacy raises the bar for your drive-thru forays.  It's hot enough to threaten some, but isn't more than most people can manage.  If you can handle those Thai dishes with two peppers next to them on the menu, you should love this.  Congratulations to Wendy's on pushing the envelope.

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Oreo Update: Strawberry Shortcake Oreos (and S'More!)

Are They Still Even Oreos?
The proliferation of new flavors under the Oreo banner has created a sense of mission drift in the brand, and new Strawberry Shortcake Oreos reinforce the point. When the dense, blandly sweet Crisco-creme in the middle becomes a whipped and fruity filling, and when the dense cocoa discs of the original become a sweet graham cookie, one has to ask whether the Oreo name is overleveraged.  If a strawberry shortcake cookie is desirable, is the Oreo format that best way to bring it to fruition? Or have we reverse-engineered a cookie using Oreo assumptions when a better tasting treat might have better been achieved starting with a clean slate?  We'll address all of this in our review.

Another day, another limited edition. The picture of tender cakes, juicy berries, and creamy whipped topping makes many promises. Are they ones that a crumbly cookie filled with flavored fat can keep?

A Faux-Fruit Blast

The unveiling of a new Oreo flavor is always an event at Food Kingdom offices, so this was a group tasting, with James N., Brian S., and other curious onlookers gathered round the package as we prepared to breach the cellophane.  One side note: as the photo above shows, this edition did not feature Nabisco's patented re-sealable container that allows you to peel back the top face of the package, remove a portion, and close it back up.  There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason behind when this super-convenient innovation is available.  In any case, as the breaking of the seal let the air escape from inside, the hopes of the crowd were similarly deflated, for the scent was of a strong synthetic strawberry, the kind you find in Hubba Bubba bubble gum or some similar juvenile frivolity. From that moment, none of the tasters really took this cookie seriously.  This shows the importance of image and market positioning, for we instinctively respond more positively to "Strawberry Shortcake Oreos" than we would to "Jolly Rancher Strawberry Oreos" which these could be just as plausibly named.

The venerable "Red 40 Lake" gives the strawberry filling its pink blush.  Note the light, whipped texture, intended to suggest whipped cream tinged with strawberry juice.

Craftsmanship Carries the Day

The above criticisms notwithstanding, there are enough thoughtful design touches to persuade me that these are not just the brainchild of a bored factory manager tweaking the standard Oreo recipe with a different artificial color and chemical flavor in search of an innovation bonus.  For instance, using graham flour in the wafers creates a more tender and crumbly texture due to a lower gluten content.  This, along with what tastes to me like some extra shortening in the dough, produces a more cake-like texture, reminiscent of the buttery crumbs at the bottom of a golden cake pan.  The creme filling is also whipped to a fluffy consistency that allows it to spread and mingle with the cookie crumbs as you munch.  When this cookie is halfway chewed, you do get the distinct impression of real strawberry shortcake, albeit one with a sprinkling of Kool-Aid powder on top.

A Chain Reaction, with Marshmallows

Apart from the modest enjoyments afforded by tasting these techno-berry delights, the ingredient list inspired us to conduct some experiments of our own.  We were all struck by the choice of graham flour in the wafers, since neither biscuits nor sponge cake traditionally use it, and it got us thinking: could strawberries and graham crackers prove a fresh and winning combination?  Might strawberry s'mores be an inspiring variation on the original?

Among the myriad combinations attempted, the strawberry banana s'more was the clear winner.

Pure strawberry s'mores actually proved not to work very well for the simple reason that you can only fit two strawberry slices inside a graham cracker sandwich before the assemblage completely falls apart.  Strawberries can only be placed on top of the marshmallow, not underneath because the strawberries give off so much juice when warmed that the bottom graham cracker gets soggy if in direct contact with the berries.  Bananas, on the other hand, give off very little liquid when heated, so the best combination of all was two slices of banana beneath the marshmallow and one strawberry slice on top.  The preferred heating method is a toaster oven or broiler because the radiant heat of both work from the outside-in, tenderizing and browning the exterior of the marshmallow while keeping the interior reasonably solid, maintaining the structural integrity of the serving.   Microwaving is certainly faster, but the microwaves immediately penetrate into the core of the marshmallow, rendering it soupy, goopy, and unstable.

Choco-banana s'mores were also tasty, but lacked the fresh sweet and sour punch of the strawberry-banana combination.

Conclusions

Strawberry Shortcake Oreos are interesting enough to be worth the $2.99 to throw them in your shopping cart.  But they also serve as an object lesson that reflecting on your food, and following those thoughts wherever they lead, is the most satisfying choice of all.

Wendy's Jalapeno Fresco Chicken Sandwich - An Inauspicious Start

We'll be posting a full review of Wendy's Jalapeno Fresco Chicken Sandwich early next week, but our first trial tasting was marred by an interesting mix-up back in the kitchen.  You're not looking below at an upside-down sandwich, or perhaps you are, but the distinction is meaningless since this sandwich was served with two bottom buns.  It looked nearly the same either way you turned it.  There will be many more good and not-so-good thing to say in the full review, but in this instance someone wasn't paying much attention.

Note the deep thumb indentation in the top (bottom?) bun, in line with Wendy's recent strategy of crafting buns that look substantial but behave tenderly, cratering at the slightest pressure.

Sending a Big Box of America

An Overseas Artist Friend
In my day job, I work in educational video and have often had the pleasure to feature the artwork of Dutch-English archaeological illustrator Kelvin Wilson.   Kelvin has the diligence and intellectual curiosity of an archaeologist, but the soul of a fine painter.  Sometimes when I look at his work, I think he must have picked up a few genes from Rembrandt.

Hidden within this image is a motherlode of historical information: the herding of animals that formed the Amourites' livelihood, the city on the Euphrates in the distance encroaching on pastoralism, the dress of the herders.  But you could be indifferent to history and still feel your eyes moisten at the sweep of the wind, the glow of the fire, and the mournful, muted sunset.

When Kelvin and I aren't collaborating professionally, we're just friends.   We comment on world events, on art, on each other's respective Netherlandish and American lives, trying to be sanguine, solemn, and insouciant, as appropriate, about the parade passing before us in the 21st century.  Kelvin is kind enough to follow the Food Kingdom blog as well, and shared a thought about this via Facebook messaging:

Surely, dear reader, you can see where this is going....

And so our merry game of trading snacks was afoot and, faced with difficult choices on, as Bob Seger once sang, what to leave in and what to leave out, I had to answer the essential question.

What Does America Taste Like?

In today's globalized society, truly local tastes are getting hard to come by.  You can buy Green Tea KitKats from East Asia at your local international market, along with lychee gummi bears and 10 pound blocks of frozen anchovies.  Without prodding Kelvin with questions on what was and wasn't available in the Netherlands, I searched both my memory and intuition as to what snack foods were, in all probability, safely confined to this side of the pond and either difficult or impossible to get in Kelvin's town of Ridderkerk.  To see what was chosen, let's look inside our Big Box of America.

In all its stomach-churning, tooth-assaulting glory, starting at top left, we have. Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, Chocodile Twinkies, Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes, Slim Jims, Little Debbie Nutty Bars, Orchard Skittles, Birthday Cake Oreos, Cinnamon Roll Oreos, Razzles, Take 5, Junior Mints, Red Velvet Oreos, Cracker Jacks, Pizza Combos, Utz Crab Chips, Classic Skittles, Berry Skittles, Sweet and Sour Skittles, Payday

Introducing Little Debbie: Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies and Nutty Bars were included for the counterintuitive reason that they are not a prestige brand.  In fact, the Little Debbie phenomenon shines a light on the class issues that do exist in America, even if not so strongly as in the UK.  Growing up at school, the rich kids got Hostess Snack Cakes in their lunch, but the poorer kids had to settle for Little Debbie, a budget brand that, because it was dirt-cheap, I assumed to be of poor quality.  But a 16-year-old punk kid with 35 cents of spending money in his pocket at the convenience store can't afford to be picky when he wants a snack and I slowly experimented with trying out the entire Little Debbie catalog.  Shock and surprise, they're delicious and still the best bargain around.   Kelvin, when you bite into your first Nutty Bar, you'll be sharing in a rite of passage with millions of kids that want something sweet, even if they may not have a lot of change with which to buy it.

Slim Jim: With its associations with professional wrestling, hungry big rig truckers, and swaggering American carnivore culture, this spicy meat snack was a no-brainer to throw in our box.

Red Velvet, Birthday Cake, and Cinnamon Roll Oreos: The delicacies that started it all, these were included so that Kelvin and his kids could "taste along" with the blog.

Hostess Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes: As one of the favorites of the past month, and emblematic of a trend that's probably not so huge in Europe as in the States, these moist salty-sweet treats with the super-long shelf life had to go in.

Hostess Chocodiles: Everyone knows about the Twinkie.  That preservative-packed sugar and fat bomb is infamously synonymous with hideous visions of the artificial and the mass-produced, even as it's a beloved favorite of many American children.  Less well-known is the Twinkie's chocolate-coated cousin, the Chocodile.  The chocolate adds a whole new dimension and it ought to be better known here in America, never mind overseas.

Utz Crab Chips: Utz is a smallish regional company based in Pennsylvania and they proudly claim that their potato chips are not even available nationwide, the better to emphasize that freshness demands a small delivery radius.  Their slogan is "You've got UTZ, too bad for the rest of the world", so these are definitely not to be found in Europe.  Further, the chips are "Crab Flavor" which means they're seasoned with Old Bay-style spice, the default spice blend that Maryland residents will often sprinkle on their steamed crabs and include in other crab dishes.

Four Flavors of Skittles: Kelvin's son Lucas is a big Skittles fan, so in go all four currently extant flavors, ready for combining in novel blends.  With their day-glo colors and sunshiny flavors, I like to believe that Skittles reflect what's left of American optimism.

A peanut-based bounty, the weird candy-gum Razzles, and Combos, the pretzel nuggets packed with spreadable cheese.  Orange not included, that's for my lunch.

Five Peanut-Based Snacks

America is the country of the peanut in many ways.  Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, George Washington Carver was an agronomist of diverse talents, but has become known for the ways he used this legume in an ingenious myriad of applications.  It's no surprise, therefore, that so many classic American snacks include the peanut.

1. Cracker Jacks: A combination of salted peanuts and popcorn coated in toffee, this snack has been immortalized in the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".  The peanuts are a little harder to access these days since they changed the packaging from a box (still available in a very few places) to a large bag.  The contents are packed so loosely, with so many voids between popped popcorn kernels that the peanuts all fall to the bottom.  Shaking it up helps a little.

2. Baby Ruth: This snack is widely assumed to be named after the great baseball slugger Babe Ruth and some claim that indeed it is while others say it was named after "baby" Ruth Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland.  Either way, it's a unique taste, blending the peanut with mild chocolate and a mouth-filling, mild, intriguingly flavored nougat.  The parts are roughly the same as the parts of a Snickers bar, and yet the experience of eating it is totally different.

3. Peanut Chews: Kelvin has told me that many American candies are a bit sweet for his European palate, which is why I'll be interested to see what he thinks of these.  With their dark, thin, and not-a-bit-creamy chocolate coating and their almost bittersweet molasses chew surrounding the plentiful peanuts, this is a candy with an adult flavor profile.  They've been around for nearly 100 years too, and so a great exemplar of continuity and tradition.

4. Take 5: Reviewed recently for its updated packaging, this is the one example in the package of a peanut-butter based candy.  There are no special cultural traits to take note of here, it's just a delicious treat.

5. Payday: With its decidedly blue-collar "take this job and shove it" name, what you expect is rugged value, strong texture, and unapologetically assertive taste, and that's what Payday delivers.  Coated with a strong armor of super-salty peanuts that surrounds a caramel and nougat center, this accomplishes what Snickers constantly advertises: hunger satisfaction.  Underrated and under-publicized, I wanted Kelvin to be aware of this one.

Combos: Let's file this under the category of "rather gross to contemplate and even to eat until you kind of get used to it."  To enjoy Combos you have to reconcile yourself to the idea of room-temperature spreadable "cheese" and you have to be able to tolerate what to some is an almost ungodly saltiness. But oh, are these things addictive.  I wouldn't be surprised if Kelvin asked for another package of only Combos.  Pizza flavor is probably the most popular flavor, so in that goes.

At the Post Office, ready to tape up the box!

Razzles: This is a candy (or is it a gum?) that speaks to the kid in all of us.  The concept seems so miraculous to the naive mind; fruity candies that break apart in tiny fragments when you chew them, seemingly ready to dissolve and disappear down the throat when, suddenly they coalesce into a piece of gum, extending their life in the mouth.

Junior Mints: You rarely see people buying these in the drug store, and it's 1950s-style packaging hasn't changed since...well, the 1950s.  But for whatever reason, these slippery, shiny, wax-coated soft mints dominate the candy counter at the movie theaters.  Maybe it's because they so easily slide out of the box, their waxy sheen preventing them from ever melting in your hand, even as they melt so elegantly in your mouth.  Or maybe moviegoers have wanted to have fresh breath for extra-cinematic activities in the balcony.

It Was So Hard to Stop!

Though the logistics and expense of packaging were always theoretically a limiting factor, I confess I got so swept away in the fun of sharing the tastes of a nation that I had a great deal of trouble knowing when to call it quits.  There was always some other unique treat on the next shelf over.  But there's always next year, and so we close the lid on this big box with three final selections that aren't necessarily all that wonderful but are steeped in history and memory.

Those Weird Brown and White Caramels: Do they even have a brand name?  I mean, of course they do, but nobody really knows what it is.  They're just those caramels with the white cream filling (we Americans love our white cream filling, go write a thesis paper about that) that have the unusual texture that results from cutting the caramel with wheat flour.  Yes, really, wheat flour, go read the ingredient list.   The result is something chewy, but not stretchy, a hybrid of caramel and...something else.  Not an item for the export market but something to be experienced.

Smarties: Every Halloween trick-or-treater remembers getting these sweet-tart candies from those cheap houses that were too stingy to hand out the premium brands.  And yet who hasn't cherished lingering over these rolls of chalky sweetness, usually the last candies left after the chocolates and peanut-butter cups have been consumed.  Nostalgia and value guarantee that Smarties will never die.

Necco Wafers: The persistence of these hard, crumbly, bland discs is a little harder for me to understand, but as one of America's oldest candies (or at least they sure taste like it) they had to be included, a present-day time capsule tying together the past and the present and catapulting the package across the Atlantic where a curious and friendly soul awaits, anticipating surprises and delights.  Enjoy, my friend!

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Short Orders for Friday - Weird Sno-Cones, White Chocolate Pringles, and More!

Introducing Short Orders
Not every specimen collected in the fields of the Food Kingdom is going to be worthy of a full and lengthy review, yet these odds and ends still merit a mention.  Occasionally then we will compile these bite-sized commentaries for your perusal.

Coming to a Clearance Shelf Near You: White Chocolate Pringles
The prominent and extremely prescient "Limited Time Only" message on the label tells you they knew they were making a mistake and just couldn't help themselves.  It's not as though chocolate and potatoes are two great tastes that are known to go together and there is the additional question of whether white chocolate even has an identifiable taste.  White chocolate in its premium form is a combination of cocoa butter, milk solids, and usually some kind of vanilla extract, barring the introduction of some custom ingredient, as in peppermint bark.  All of these things do have flavors, it's just that they're subtle and mild, not bold and assertive. So can they do anything to enhance a potato chip?  Well, actually they can.  The secret is to place the curved surface of the chip directly on your tongue before biting down so that the confectioners' sugar and "sweet cream powder" can make a salty-sweet dairy impression before dissolving away and leaving you faced with the reality of the remaining crisp: dried, pressed, formed and fried potato flakes.  These are actually a fairly pleasant snack, but doomed to fail; nobody clamors for the fairly pleasant.

The pleasingly bland taste of whiteness in a can.

A Retreat to the Home Kitchen: Spiced Mediterranean Burgers

A passion for fast food in no way entails a distaste for good home-cooked meals.  Moderation and balance is the key to the good life, and a meal cooked from scratch always delivers to the soul that je ne sais quoi that puts one's mental and physical health back in balance.  The act of chopping, forming, smelling, tasting, and sensually encountering the ingredients is some combination of meditation and thoughtful foreplay prior to the consummation devoutly to be wished.

These spiced Mediterranean lamb burgers were an especially satisfying success.  Adapted from a recipe in Fine Cooking, the one magazine to which I subscribe, I substituted beef for lamb (because I had another half pound from a big bonus buy to use up) and hamburger buns instead of pitas for the same reason.  The sour dollop of Greek yogurt and the garlicky Mediterranean herb paste were the perfect foil for the sweet tomato and the sear-crusted spicy beef patty. Also, you can use the leftover herb paste as a nice mix-in for all sorts of things.  Vegetarians could easily substitute a veggie patty and get excellent results.

Please don't call it food porn.  This is food you have a relationship with, and the ingredients are treated with respect.

Flavor Weirdness on the Washington Mall
Spotted on one of the food trucks that now line the streets surrounding the National Mall in Washington D.C. was this list of Snow Ball flavors, fairly pedestrian with two big exceptions.  One of these flavors is modeled after a disfavored architectural element of passive solar design, and the other would seem to have no natural constituency outside of the lactose intolerant.

The cool taste of glass, steel, and sunlight!  Plus, all the creaminess of frozen custard captured with ice crystals and syrup.

Wendy's New Burger Bun: The Point Is Invisibility

Buns are in flux in fast food today.  McDonald's premium Clubhouse sandwiches feature a so-called "artisan" roll and Wendy's started experimenting with a "brioche" bun a little over a year ago.  Now their new "bakery style" bun is the default bread for all of their burgers and chicken sandwiches.  It's certainly a cosmetic improvement: with its egg-wash shine and random cracks and fissures, it has a non-standardized, uneven look that belies its factory origins.

The new Wendy's bun looks substantial and delicate at the same time, suggesting a toothsome crackle and yeasty, chewy resistance.  Appearances are deceiving.

There are, however, two contradictions at the heart of all this revamping and facelifting of fast-food burger buns.  The first is that it's simply impossible to create shelf-stable bread with the traits of freshly baked bread.  The same thing that gives crusty bread its chewy substantiality also condemns it to go stale in less than a day.  Just as there's no such thing as a good two-day old baguette, there's no way (yet) to create a bun that lasts as long as cottony dinner rolls but tastes like a rustic loaf. The related contradiction is that until this conundrum is solved and we come up with a roll that's delicious on its own, nobody really wants to taste the bun at all.  It's merely a way to get the meat and toppings into your mouth without getting grease on your hands, and a vessel for catching all those juices and drippings.  Wendy's has correctly surmised, then, that we want a bun that looks appealing, but nearly disappears into the background once bitten, and that is what they've achieved.  This bun never gets soggy, and holds its shape with vigor, yet beyond that it barely registers.  With Wendy's fresh, high quality beef and crisp, fresh toppings, that's actually what you want.  This "artisanal" roll is a bait-and-switch, but it's a shrewd one.

In cross-section, the truth of this bun is exposed.  It's merely a vessel for the ample lettuce, red onion, tomato, condiments, and of course the beef. Note how the cottony interior is still remarkably resilient, never collapsing into a sodden mess.

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Reinventing the Wheel - Roadtesting the AM California Crunchwrap

NOTE TO VEGETARIAN READERS: The original post failed to mention that the AM California Crunchwrap, like most Taco Bell items, can be made vegetarian by just asking them to hold the bacon.  Making this one vegan would be considerably more challenging as omitting both the egg and the cheese would disrupt the flavor harmonies.

A Blast of Morning Freshness

The very first bite of Taco Bell's AM California Crunchwrap was actually unnerving.  The grillmarks on its sealed and folded bottom face provoke an instinctive expectation for a warm, rich, and unctuous interior; the usual combination of melted cheese, meat and egg.  The first sensation the teeth encounter under the chewy-tender wrapper, however, is...crunch? Leafy herbaceousness? Moist bits of tomato dripping with lime juice?  Is this really coming out of a drive-thru at 6 AM in the middle of suburbia?  

Dawn falls on the AM California Crunchwrap. Can it withstand the rigors of the morning commute?

Counterpoised Umami

In the AM California Crunchwrap, Taco Bell has found the perfect counterpart to its Breakfast Quesalupa, for each is everything that other isn't, and ought to serve very different market segments.  The Quesalupa, with its warm, fried shell filled with heaps of egg curds, sausage or bacon, shredded cheddar and fried potatoes, nods in the direction of the Southwest, especially with taco sauce added, but fundamentally it's still serving up a traditional American breakfast.  It's delicious, but also dangerously out of balance, the kind of breakfast that fuels burgeoning adolescence, but can hinder one's wellness in middle age.  It's great going down, but unless you've had a vigorous morning workout, it sits somewhat leadenly in the belly.

This Crunchwrap won't let you have your meat without your vegetables.  If you look carefully, you'll see the bacon bits and patches of scrambled eggs.  But look at the chunks of tomato! And all that cilantro!

In contrast, the AM California Crunchwrap, as its state affiliation implies, is a progressive creation, if not entirely subversive.  For every push it makes in the direction of tradition, there is an opposing pull towards a lighter vision of breakfast.  Yes, there's egg and bacon, but for every bite of those, there's the tangy crunch of lime-dressed oniony Pico de Gallo.  Sure, they throw in some shredded cheese to entice the cautious, but the real creaminess comes from a huge dollop of citrusy guacamole. And while there's a big hash brown patty inserted into the tortilla disc, it's primarily there to perform a structural and textural function.  Structurally, it provides a rigid bottom frame for the tortilla to wrap around, and texturally it's the element that provides the crunch advertised in the title, something that the PM Crunchwrap accomplishes with a crisp tortilla.  With every taste supplied in moderation, every possible taste excess tamed and balanced by its opposite, this is a mature and sensitive dish.

Road-Ready
The AM California Crunchwrap also stands apart from the Breakfast Quesalupa in its suitability for consumption during commuting.  Though the tortilla isn't that tautly wrapped, it maintains its hold on all the interior fillings, and not a crumb fell out during the test trip from the Chantilly Taco Bell to my office two miles away.  Even as each additional bite further eroded the integrity of the hexagonal whole, the overall firmness and shape was maintained.  Up the elevator the Crunchwrap went, and through the hallways, never spilling its contents, never ceasing to be a truly handheld breakfast.

How portable and ergonomic is the California Crunchwrap? You can eat it with one hand while operating a manual transmission.  And it also charges fully within 5 minutes. 

Conclusions
For many of us, hefty breakfast bagel sandwiches, breakfast burritos, and Croissanwich-style offerings just don't work anymore.  They're a little too greasy, too starchy, and frankly too stodgy, at least for everyday consumption.  The AM California Crunchwrap is a terrific alternative that gives us just enough of the familiar breakfast tastes we love, while leavening with garden-fresh additions.  The California name isn't mere vanity, but oddly appropriate.  In fact, in a lot of ways, this Crunchwrap reminds me of a Cobb Salad, minus the chicken and the bleu cheese.  After all, it's got tomatoes, bacon, and avocado, and while there isn't any lettuce, the crunchy pico does give off the impression of lettuce.  It's really like eating a salad and a breakfast sandwich at the same time.  If what you're after at breakfast is feeling satisfied, but not too full, you now have one more place to go.

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Breakfast Quesalupas - Taco Bell Gets Its Breakfast Act Together

Jumpstarting a Stalled Breakfast Engine
It's been over two years since Taco Bell debuted their breakfast menu with arrogant fanfare and the ambition to dethrone what was then a financially struggling McDonald's.  Fast forward to today and McDonald's is riding high on the strength of their all-day breakfast menu while the Bell is seemingly sputtering in neutral, never having gained traction with any truly exciting items.  That may finally change with the cheesy, eggy, meaty Breakfast Chalupas that, along with a few other new introductions, finally deliver what made so many of us excited about Taco Bell breakfast, conceptually, in the first place.  We'll unpack what makes the chalupas work towards the end.  For now, let's review some of the big mistakes that have held Bell back for so long.

The Chantilly Taco Bell at 7AM is not a bright, festive, or merry place. There were no retirees jovially discussing politics nor couples reading the morning paper.  U2's "Mysterious Ways" was jamming on the sound system, however.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I heard Taco Bell would be offering breakfast, I envisioned a menu with a real Tex-Mex flair: a take on Huevos Rancheros, Steak and Eggs with Tex-Mex seasonings, Breakfast Burritos loaded with bell peppers, onions, tomatoes or salsa.  In other words, I expected a real unique value proposition.  But the breakfast burritos and crunchwraps that were offered were plain-jane affairs filled only with cheese, eggs, and bacon with no Mexican flavorings at all.  And since these were sealed items, there was no way to even get taco sauce into them; you'd have to drizzle it over top, making eating in the car out of the question.  And does taco sauce really even fit with a burrito filled only with eggs, bacon, and cheese?  But an even bigger mistake was training the largest spotlight on the now deservedly-defunct waffle taco.

The Idiotic Waffle Taco
It must have seemed cutely brilliant to some Taco Bell executive to take the classic waffle and then taco-ize by bending it in the middle and filling it with eggs and breakfast meats, but this thoughtlessly thrown-together item failed in almost every way.  The waffle was so thick-walled that it left little interior space for fillings, and so rubbery that it required constant hand pressure to keep it from splaying open and spilling out its contents.  If you ever wanted to adjust the flavoring by, say, pouring on additional maple syrup, you had to carefully place it back in its holster to avoid a mess.

The idea of supplying syrup for the customer to pour over the taco was also unworkable.  McDonald's McGriddles wisely bake their syrup flavor right into the pancakes, which saves customer labor but is also simply more practical.  For if you tried to pour syrup onto the waffle taco, the syrup had nowhere to go, since the egg filling and especially the folded sausage that lined the bottom formed an impermeable barrier, causing the syrup to run off towards the ends and spill out onto the tray.  Even the waffle itself was less porous than you would think, only partially soaking up syrup and mainly directing it out like an irrigation conduit, making for a sticky and unsightly mess. All this trouble for a weird portmanteau of waffles, on the one hand, and eggs and bacon (or sausage) on the other.  Does anyone really want to eat this mashup drenched in pancake syrup anyway?

The hubristic ad for Taco Bell Breakfast in March 2014.  Note that the Waffle Taco, spotlit at left, requires the lateral support of the Breakfast Burrito and the Cinnamon Delights to keep from sprawling outward.

The Long Road Back Begins with the Breakfast Quesalupa
The new Breakfast Quesalupas are different; they just work.  Served fresh and consumed in the restaurant, its fried shell warms the hands, immediately creating a nourishing breakfast mood. As you can see in the picture below, the melted cheese within the shell stretches invitingly.  The plentiful scrambled eggs within are warm and custardy, the fried potatoes add substance and, in the sausage version, the juices from the patty mingle throughout to unify the flavors.  Because this is an open-faced item, it's easy to drizzle taco sauce over it, making the flavor more complex.  This is down-on-the-farm taste with a south of the border twist, just what we were expecting from Taco Bell breakfast in the first place.

It's still a little messy, but it's also positively symphonic. Gently melted cheddar, spicy sausage, tender eggs, a crisp-chewy shell combine with the tangy counterpoint of taco sauce for a stomach-warming handful of satisfaction.

Challenges Remain
In future episodes we'll be discussing some other new on-target breakfast offerings like the California Breakfast Crunchwrap, as well as some additional failures like the biscuit taco, the problems of which ought to be evident just from the name.  But ultimately, Taco Bell breakfast faces challenges that go beyond the inherent properties of the menu items.  The first is a lack of momentum.  In other words, Taco Bell's current unpopularity at breakfast make it difficult for it to compete.  As the photo towards the top shows, Taco Bell is nearly empty at the peak breakfast hour of 7AM.  With so few customers, it can't justify keeping a large staff on hand, so service tends to be slow.  While my Breakfast Chalupa was piping hot from fresh preparation, it took four minutes to be ready from the time the order was placed.  Because service is slow, it can't attract many drive-thru customers, but because its lack of business can't justify a larger staff, it can't even open for sit-down customers until 7AM, offering only drive-thru service between 6 and 7.  And so it remains caught in a Catch-22 cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies.  It can't get customers because the service is slow but it can't improve service because there aren't enough customers to pay for it.  Meanwhile its best item, the Breakfast Quesalupa, is really at its best when fresh and isn't suitable for drive thru customers because it's extremely messy to eat.

Taco Bell likes to talk about thinking outside the bun, but they need to think outside the holster.  Items like the Quesalupa need their box to keep them closed.  If you're thinking that you couldn't possibly eat this in your car, you win a prize.

Conclusions
What Taco Bell breakfast really needs is something that is as convenient to eat with one hand as an Egg McMuffin but also every bit as delicious.  Could that elusive item be the truly outside-the-box California Breakfast Crunchwrap?  Find out when we discuss that next time.

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A Brand New Look: 5 Reasons Why Take 5 Changed Its Package

A Radical Reboot

Since Hershey introduced Take 5 in 2004, it has arguably been the perfect candy, and it's easy to forget how revolutionary it was at the time.  Before Take 5, chocolate-covered pretzels were expensive and hard to find, available mainly in specialty boutique chocolate shops.  Remember, this was before the Trader Joe's chocolate-covered pretzel era.  Hershey took this pretzel-chocolate foundation and enhanced it with three nearly bullet-proof additions: peanuts, peanut butter, and caramel, and the result was chewy, crunchy, salty-sweet heaven.  At the time, its original packaging made perfect sense, the red and yellow color scheme echoing other products in the Hershey product line like Kit-Kat, Krackel, and to a lesser extent the whole Reese's family of products.  Plus, its beautiful cutaway product shot proudly displayed the chewy nutty goodies underneath the chocolate robe.  But 11 years is a long time for any packaging design to go without a refresh, and so we now have a new Take 5 wrapper, and it is so drastically different from what came before it that we have to ask: what does it all mean?

Take 5, before (top) and after (bottom).  Gone is the classic, straightforward design, replaced by a jazzy, hip, helter-skelter approach.

Blame the Millennials
While precise sales figures are unavailable, Hershey has been struggling to market the brand to the younger generation, and the stodgy traditional wrapper was an easy target for blame.  So in 2016, Hershey partnered with what they're calling a panel of "diverse millennial-aged students" to come up with a new packaging design.  The result looks a little bit like an art-school collaborative project, doesn't it?  But instead of looking at the jaunty, turbocharged, black and neon-green collaged look superficially, let me propose five theories as to the concrete logical marketing purpose behind this new look.

Theory 1 - Creating a Healthful Image: Take 5 is, as I said, a delicious candy but it is candy.  Hershey does everything it can, though, to downplay this in the new design.  The pretzel, its waffle-cut shape revealed for the first time, is foregrounded, as is a large dollop of peanut butter and a peanut, while the chocolate is barely shown at the top right, alongside a meager strip of caramel that could easily be mistaken for additional peanut butter.  Note also how the package shows real creamy peanut butter, not the sweetened peanut butter fudge that you really find inside.  Together with the eco-green text and text backing, you get the impression more of trail mix in a bar, not a concoction featuring peanut butter fudge, caramel, and chocolate.

The reality of Take 5 is chewy, fudgy, crunchy, and chocolatey.  But their new packaging cries out light and healthy.

Theory 2 - Product Differentiation: What had earlier been an asset, signaling that Take 5 has a relationship with other Hershey's classics like Kit-Kat, Reese's, and Krackel, was now a liability.  Candy shelves are crowded today and red as a background color is so commonly used that Take 5 almost certainly didn't "pop" from the shelf like this new design does.

If you were to squint, could you differentiate this older packaging from the "Big Kat" Kit-Kat bar or a number of other well-known Hershey's items? Could you even distinguish it from a bag of Skittles at a distance?

Theory 3 - Explaining the Product: Whereas the original packaging showed a cutaway that revealed the innards of the candy, it didn't give a clear picture of exactly what was inside. The new packaging separates out all five tastes and clearly displays them so the consumers know what they're getting.  Pretzel fans lock in on the prominently displayed pretzel, chocolate and peanut butter fans do the same, and so on.

Theory 4 - Celebrating Racial Diversity: No, I'm not kidding.  Hershey proudly announced that the product design panel consisted of "diverse millennial-aged students" and the color palette on the new wrapper is black, grey, dark brown, tan/beige/yellow, white, and green.  If you've ever heard someone say "I don't care if you're black, white, brown, green, or whatever" then this color-continuum approach perfectly expresses that sentiment.

Slightly off-center but lyrically connected, the look of the package and the name of the candy could very well allude to jazz in general, and specifically to the Dave Brubeck classic.

Theory 5 - Someone at Hershey's is a Dave Brubeck Fan: I don't know whether the name of this candy originally referenced Dave Brubeck's distinctive quintuple-time composition "Take Five" or not, but it's hard not to notice the visual allusions to jazz in the wrapper's visual composition. Elements are arranged in a seemingly disorganized yet coherent contrapuntal arrangement that is dissonant and harmonious at the same time.  Comparisons to the Harlem-cubism of a Norman Lewis, the rhythmic collages of Romare Bearden, or the layered, musically radiant forms of Aaron Douglas could easily be justified.  Dave Brubeck passed away a mere four months prior to the product redesign and his memory could easily have been fresh in the minds of some of Hershey's creative types.

Ever cautious, as businesses tend to be, Hershey let loyal fans know that the new look was on the horizon.

Conclusions
Change always takes some getting used to, but this new package is starting to grow on me.  And any way you slice it, Take 5 still belongs in the beloved pantheon of classic American candy.

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The Angriest Whopper - A Pussycat Pumped Up on Jalapenos

Burger King Gets Serious
As we revealed way back in 2009, the first Burger King Angry Whopper couldn't live up to its name.  Weighted down with excessive amounts of mayonnaise and other fried elements, there wasn't enough serious heat to cut through the fatty clutter.  If my two tastings since the sandwich debuted are any indication, BK has taken serious steps to engineer out the flaws of the original.  And to show they mean business, they have completely leap-frogged the never-iterated "Angrier Whopper" and christened this reboot the Angriest Whopper.  The sandwich actually has a pretty volatile personality, swerving from grumpy to irate as one proceeds bite by bite, depending on which fillings you happen to hit.  This excessive variability keeps the burger from being a total success, but the improvements are both many and intriguing.

 This burger indeed has attitude "You eat me? No way, man, I'm eating YOU!!!!

Interesting Changes
There's a definite strategy powering BK's attempt to create a flame-broiled beef creation with real fire, so let's look at the new features and understand the thinking behind them.

Hot Sauce Bun - Either electrically thrilling or appallingly gauche, depending on your point of view, the hot red color of the bun definitely gets your attention, and I believe aesthetics was the prime mover behind staining the bread.  But ostensibly, there is hot sauce baked in that you should be able to taste.  I took a goodly wedge and ate it straight, and it does provide a bedrock foundation of mild piquancy.  If you can stand the sight of it, it's a net plus.

Thick-Cut Bacon - You could hardly taste the bacon in the first Angry Whopper, but that doesn't happen this time.  The bacon has a manly leatheriness and an authentic smokiness that, together with the flame-broiled beef, establish smoke and spice as the two strong flavors the sandwich needs in order to have a personality.

American Swapped for Pepper-Jack: Superficially, this is a step backwards but it really isn't.  First, we all know that the Pepper-Jack in the original wasn't real Pepper-Jack; it never is.  And when sliced as thin as is common in the fast food world, it didn't add any real flavor.  American Cheese, love it or hate it, goes a long way even when sliced super-thin.  BK was decidedly going for flavor here, and this choice makes good sense.

Less Mayo: This was by far the most consequential decision.  All the other ingredients -- the japapenos, the "angry onion petals" which actually have almost no heat, the tangy "angry sauce", the lettuce and tomatoes -- are all unchanged from last time but they were all stifled by what felt like tablespoons worth of fatty gunk; white food-borne squid ink if you will.  This time there's just a touch of dressing and that makes all the difference.  Now the tangy (but not truly spicy) sauce sings, the jalapenos bite, the onions are at least detectable, and the tomato and onion lighten the load.  BK take note: less really IS more.

There's a lot here, but note what isn't there.  Yep, the mayo was applied with a very light touch, so you taste everything.  Incidentally, this very first Whopper we tried seemed to be pretty skimpy on the beef.  One expects these things to be standardized, but apparently not always.

Jalapeno Fury
Despite all the improvements, we still need to address head-on the extent of this Whopper's anger.  Both times we tried it, the very first bite was alive with fire.  Each component, the bun, the onions, the sauce, all supplied a modicum of heat, upping the overall level.  But as we progressed through the sandwich, what slowly became clear was that the burger was only truly furious when we happened upon a jalapeno.  For all the tricks that BK is employing here, it isn't the gimmicks that are igniting the tongue, it's those pickled hot peppers, sliced even thicker than last time if memory serves.  This is great news for people that believe in tried-and-true ingredients over high-tech fixes.  But the downside of all this is that, when you happen upon a bit with no peppers, the whole thing deflates down from the Hulk to Bruce Banner.  And something else is going on here that works against the Whopper.  After a while your mouth adjusts to the heat and seems to reach a new set point.  So while the Angriest Whopper is feisty for fast food, it's not like you're eating four-pepper Thai cuisine. Adjust expectations accordingly.

Imagine the top bun is a kind of toupee, that the bacon is a protruding nose, and the jalapenos are eyes. Once you do, the Whopper looks not angry, but dispirited and somewhat lonely.  Now you can't stop seeing it, can you?

Conclusions
As of this writing, the Angriest Whopper is the most peppery item on the fast-food block, a close second to Wendy's Spicy Chicken Sandwich.  Flaws aside, it deserves to graduate to the permanent menu. You won't need an extra large soda to cool yourself down, but this is a burger to raise eyebrows.

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