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.
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.
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.
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.
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| 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. |
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. |
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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