Burgers for Breakfast - The Diner Experience Recreated

Burger King Battles Back
As with many industries, success in fast-food depends on hype, momentum, seizing people's imagination, and of course giving the eating public what they want.  McDonald's proved this recently with all-day breakfast.  The novelty of noshing on pancakes or an Egg McMuffin at lunchtime, the lure of "getting away with something" by buying a cheaper breakfast item rather than a relatively pricey burger-based combo, the frisson of individuality that one experiences from eating one mass-produced item while everybody else consumes another; all these things have rallied the Golden Arches from the doldrums, and their revenues are surging based on first quarter earnings reports. Naturally, Burger King wants in on the action.

So why doesn't Burger King just copy McDonald's and offer all-day breakfast?  Well, breakfast at Burger King just isn't as popular as it is at McDonald's, where morning is the strongest part of the day, sales-wise.  People just don't have a jones for a Croissanwich in the noontime heat, never mind French Toast Sticks.  Managing the logistics of all-day breakfast would represent a sizeable investment in processes and equipment retooling that Burger King likely would never recoup.  So, how to steal a little bit of McDonald's thunder on the cheap, offering a popular item at an unexpected time of day?  The question practically answers itself: burgers for breakfast.

No cheerful backlit sign, no warmly glowing windows welcome the breakfast visitor to Burger King. The dominant mood is morose as our breakfast experiment begins.

The atmosphere is equally depressing once inside as the cranked-up flatscreen blares the morning news to no one.

My Own Private Idaho Potatoes
If you live near a Burger King that happens to run a busy breakfast business then your experience may vary, but my Burger King is situated in an open-air food court of sorts, a huge asphalt expanse off a highway exit ramp, that's home to about seven different fast-food chains that serve the commuter crowd that works at surrounding businesses.  Most workers don't arrive before 8AM, so both of the times I had burgers for breakfast, I was the only one in the restaurant.  The staff hasn't been exactly annoyed to see me, but they've certainly been surprised, even more so when I've ordered burgers.  The corporate office may be pushing this menu option, but employees seem to find it a bit eccentric.  Both times, they've politely warned me that there will be a wait since the burger would have to be made-to-order.  As you'll see, though, this is quite the blessing in disguise.  When you're the only one in the restaurant, the order takers and the cooks are fairly unstressed and are able to provide a welcome amount of individual attention.

Once you place your order and are informed of the delay, you're given your beverage, in my case black coffee, asked if you want hash browns or fries (I chose fries), and simply told to take a seat and wait.  As you can see in the pictures above, it can be a bit bleak, and if I were a more of an assertive and demanding personality, I might have asked that the television, set at full volume, I imagine, so that the staff can hear it in the back, be turned down.  Setting that aside though, the time passes fairly quickly as you read your morning paper or, in my case, a dystopian military techno-thriller.   When I sat down, the occupying forces of a Kazakh battalion in the American South was digging an all-terrain vehicle out of the mud.  By the time our heroes had begun their ambush of the Kazakhs, my freshly prepared Whopper and straight-from-the-fryer potatoes had arrived, delivered right to my table.  On the second visit, I was called to the counter to pick up the order, but in both cases the experience was more like being in a lonely diner off the interstate and less that of interfacing with the food-industrial complex.  The whole thing was poignantly civilized, a bit of culinary-philosophical meditation at the edge of the world.  Yea, ok, but how were the burger and fries?

In the slowly gathering morning light, black coffee and a Whopper with cheese (fries obscured by the thick and copious wrapping paper) await consumption.

The Early Bird Catches the Fresh Lettuce and Tomato
From the very first bite, the benefits of ordering a burger with lettuce and tomato early in the morning became clear.  Think about it: most restaurants do their prep work right when they open; at no time will the lettuce be crisper than when it has just been taken out of the walk-in refrigerator, its cells plumped with the water in which it's been rinsed, before the heat of the kitchen and the passage of time has even started to turn it limp.  At no point will the tomatoes taste fresher than right after they've been sliced, probably only an hour earlier.  Even the bun is at its freshest, for it only left the plastic storage bag minutes before when the cook opened it for the unexpected order.  You can even see this in the picture above, as the burger's posture is high and erect, steam having not caused any component to sag.  This is the Whopper as it was meant to be, with the hot stuff piping hot and the cool stuff cool and crisp.

The interior of the bun is fluffy, the June tomatoes are thick and ripe, the crisp lettuce is piled high, and the beef is flame broiled.  What would you rather munch on between sips of black coffee, this or a limp and stodgy Croissanwich?

The fries too could not have been better, for they were fried to order, slid into their holster the moment the doneness indicator on the fryer chirped.  It's worth noting that these are the recently redesigned fries, thicker cut and without much, if any, coating so that they boast a delicate crispness on the outside and fluffy moist starchiness within.  On both visits I also noticed that they were minimally salted, allowing me to season them to my preference with salt and a sprinkle of black pepper, just as I used to do at the Tastee 29 Diner on Route 29 in Fairfax, VA.  Completing the diner experience was the black coffee, which interacts with the brown caramel notes of broiled meat and golden fried potatoes in a different way than soft drinks.  As I alternated, in pensive solitude, between bites of fresh custom-seasoned fries, strong coffee, and a hearty but garden-fresh burger, it occurred to me how rare this private, intimate experience was.  It was a feeling entirely new in a fast-food restaurant and one that could become addictive for as long as BK decides to keep this experiment going.

Because the fries are thick-cut, you get more real potato taste than usual, and they stay hot longer because of the lower ratio of surface area to interior space.  Finally, because they are very modestly salted, it's possible to season them to taste with just the right amount of salt and pepper.

Conclusions
Burgers for breakfast are the best-kept secret going in fast food right now, and I encourage anyone with memories of eating burgers at Denny's or a diner at 3AM to activate nostalgia before what I predict will be low profitability prompts BK to pull the plug on this venture.  Don't doubt it til you've tried it.

Hostess Milky Way and M&M's Brownies: Can the Brownian Knot Be Cut?

The Hostess Hitting Streak Grinds to a Halt
Hostess had been on a tear since their miraculous resurrection by Greek-American billionaire turnaround artist C. Dean Metropoulos, using their newly-modernized manufacturing processes to crank out novel new items like the delish Caramel Sea Salt Cupcakes.  But their two new themed brownies, coated with M&M's or with caramel frosting and Milky Way pieces, fall flat.   Or perhaps it's better to say they simply fall prey to the seeming impossibility of creating a truly great brownie in a factory setting.  We'll have more on that later, but first let's talk about the factors that were at least under Hostess's control.

Untruth in Packaging
As a general principle, anyone who complains that a food product doesn't look like the picture on the package just needs to grow up.  Companies have a right to photograph their products in the best light possible and the package depictions will always be somewhat idealized; you mustn't mistake the cardboard carton housing your microwaved pasta dinner for a representation of reality.  The perfect chunks of chicken in the picture will always be a little plumper than what comes out of your oven, the gloss of the sauce a little smoother, the colors in the vegetables a little brighter.  But with these two brownies, Hostess crosses the line into deception, promising a totally different kind of brownie from what they deliver.  Let's first look at the Milky Way brownie.

The picture on the box promises that the base brownie will be smothered in chewy, gooey caramel, with hefty chunks of Milky Way candy thrown on top for good measure, adding textural diversity and an added boost of milk chocolate taste.  What you get instead isn't even caramel, but a gritty, sandy icing.  It might be the same icing that Hostess puts on their Sea Salt Caramel cupcakes, but while that icing works in the context of a thick cupcake, it's a real letdown when the consumer was expecting a rich caramel-turtle-like taste experience.  As for the Milky Way pieces, they're not the chunks that you see in the picture, but cast-off fragments, shards and particles of Milky Way dust.

Hostess promises chewy, stretchy caramel atop its brownies, but actually delivers a crumbly caramel-flavored icing sans sumptuousness, stretch, or even richness.

The M&M's brownie isn't quite so dishonestly presented, for at least it boasts a goodly amount of the candy-coated chocolate pieces, more in fact than are shown on the package.  Once again, however, Hostess gives us a substantially different icing than you get in the photo.  On the box we see a velvety sheet of glossy chocolate draped over the brownie, with a rainbow of chocolate pieces gently nestled into the soft, accommodating dimples of fudge that the icing affords.  The real icing, in contrast, is a dry and brittle crust of cocoa-stained confectioners icing.  Rather than draped, it looks laser-printed and bolted on, a rigid encasement more than an enticing adornment, and since the brownie underneath is a dry biscuit-like slab of cocoa bread, the whole act of eating it is a pleasureless affair.

Which icing would you rather eat?  And don't say it makes no difference.  Perhaps if Hostess hadn't done such a great job of meeting expectations in recent months, this bait-and-switch would feel like less of a betrayal.

Why Are Boxed Brownies So Difficult to Get Right?
All of the above complaints notwithstanding, Hostess's primary sin here may not be faulty execution so much as a lack of wisdom in once again trying to bring a shelf-stable packaged brownie to market. This is something that food companies have struggled to get right for decades and each time they fail. Intriguingly, these individually-wrapped brownies almost always fail in nearly identical ways.  Here's a list of the most common offputting traits.

The Scent of Dried Prunes - Next time you try an industrially baked brownie, hold it up to your nose and inhale deeply.  Usually a strong aroma conveys a mixture of wet coffee grounds mixed with dried fruit of the raisiny or prunish variety.  Though these brownies don't actually contain dried prunes, that was once a featured ingredient in a low-fat brownie from nearly two decades back which attempted to reduce the amount of fat by replacing shortening with prune puree.  Amazingly, that brownie didn't taste significantly worse than these.

A Uniformly Damp Texture - Why are brownies so popular in the first place?  Apart from intense chocolate taste, I'd argue that the other great attraction is their two simultaneous textures: crackly on top and around the edges, soft, dense and fudgy on the inside.  Packaged brownies never seem to be able to replicate this.  The medium-dense crumb on the inside is unchanged at the edges, and the cake square is limp and flabby throughout, robbing each bite of the excitement that comes with variability.

This picture gives a good view into the depressing sameness of texture that is common in packaged brownies.

I've often wondered why, with the arsenal of food technologies at our disposal, we should have such trouble creating a boxed brownie that's crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside.  One theory, though, is moisture migration.  When you wrap the brownie, you create a closed system where all the moisture inside the brownie simply has nowhere to go.  If it escapes into the air, it's still trapped inside the package and will get reabsorbed into the brownie's outside skin.  If the moisture is trapped in the center, it will eventually migrate through the cell structure of the brownie into the edges.  We forget that even the best homemade brownies only hold their double texture for a few hours uncovered and only a few days under plastic wrap.  After that, they dry out.  So if you're a manufacturer whose brownies will ship long distances and sit on shelves for long periods, you have two options: create a brownie that's uniformly dry or uniformly damp; that choice you have, but the uniformity is not optional.  It's a decent theory, but just as I was considering it, a co-worker brought a complication to this idea into the breakroom: brownie bites.

This supermarket brownie bite was everything that the Hostess brownies weren't.  Check out the crumbly, crusty, uneven skin and the dark tender interior.

Somehow brownie bites, those miniature cupcakes of baked brownie batter, manage to overcome all the aforementioned difficulties and taste just like a brownie should; fudgy and soft in the center, light and crackly at the edges.  Does this mean that the packaging theory is invalid?  I've actually written to an industrial food scientist to get a clear answer on this, and I'll update this post should I get an answer, but my instinct is to say no.  I think brownie bites succeed where industrial brownies fail because of a different delivery and consumption schedule.  Brownie bites are usually made by a local commercial bakery and shipped the same day to the retail outlets that sell them in under a week's time.  If they were to sit on a shelf for several weeks, they would probably dry out completely. Brownies such as Hostess sells have to sit for many weeks, if not months, and have to be formulated differently so that they stay reasonably fresh and moist for a much longer window of time.  Hostess has figured out a way to make this work for Twinkies and cupcakes, but brownies are still a struggle.   Still, there are tantalizing hints out there to a better way to make an industrial brownie.  Consider, for instance, Keebler Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies.  Those are crisp on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside.  What are they doing that industrial brownie bakers might duplicate?  The consumer desire is out there.  We'll see how the nation's food scientists respond.