After Three Swings, Mac n' Cheetos Strikes Out

Cheeto Pride Before the Fall
At least they won the first 24-hour news cycle.  When Burger King announced their new Mac n' Cheetos a few weeks back, the internet exploded with squeals of delight, and it's easy to see why.  BK was promising to marry two of America's guiltiest pleasures, creamy mac and cheese and intense, orange-dusted Cheetos into one portable snack, solving in one step a problem that we didn't know we had: the ability to take the melty rich taste of macaroni and cheese on the go.  One promotional product picture embodies this aspiration, showcasing  drippy cheese sauce running like a stream through a shapely cluster of macaroni, all safely encased in a radioactively orange fried shell, glistening with just the right amount of fryer oil.  Even if you would never dream of purchasing them, they were an understandable object of desire.  This is the kind of innovation of which a broad spectrum of Americans could feel justly proud; a bright orange object we could all agree on. It's interesting how the hype has died down, isn't it?  That's because the not-too-well-kept secret of Mac n' Cheetos is that they completely miss the mark, falling somewhere between a botched experiment and a con job.  I tried these woeful fried critters three times just to be absolutely sure they were as bad as they first seemed, before concluding they were inherently awful.  Let's dig in and dissect the anatomy of this failure.

Implausibly bulging at the seams with more pasta and sauce than they could reasonably hold, this promotional shot of shiny, crispy, creamy Mac n' Cheetos pieces shows us what we wanted to see.

Trial #1

The excitement showed no sign of abating when I called ahead to my local Burger King on the day of the product's debut to make sure they were available.  "Do you have the new Mac n' Cheetos?" I asked, and was answered with a breathless and beaming "We sure do!"  By this time it was 10:30 at night, so I was a little apprehensive that they might not be at their best, but like so many people I just couldn't wait to get my hands on munchable mac and cheese.  So off to BK I went.  The first warning sign came when I placed my order and the cashier remarked "Oh, yea, Mac n' Cheetos, they're good when they're fresh."  The response in kind would have been to turn tail in a huff and call out "I guess I'll come back when they're fresh", but who wants to be that person?  And besides, I was hungry.

Back at the Food Kingdom home base, the air is pulsing with excitement.  On their very first day of availability, the Mac n' Cheetos nuggets, "dangerously cheesy", are ready to burst onto the stage....

On biting into a Mac n' Cheetos piece for the first time, the first thing you wonder is where the sauce is.  The promotional photo shows a creamy, runny cheese sauce, and the package cries out that they are "dangerously cheesy" but reality is a depressing diptych of truths: they're both dry and strangely hollow.  As the photo below shows, there are no identifiable or distinct macaroni elbows but rather a mushy mass of anonymous, overcooked pasta.  The sauce has hardened and shriveled, and about 30% of the interior is empty space.  The taste is empty too; not repulsive or anything, just bland.  Ketchup can enhance lesser macaronis and cheese, and the same is true here, but this first foray leaves nothing to get excited about.

Behold the desiccated and paltry interior.  Note also how thick the fried coating is.  Far from a thin barrier that barely contains a bulging mass of pasta and sauce, it actually takes up as much space, and provides as much bulk, as the pasta itself, adding to the feeling of dryness, and making it hard to taste what cheese there is.

Trial #2

On the second time around, you could tell that Burger King's rank-and-file had stopped believing in this dish, and it felt as though they weren't even trying to prepare it well.  Though the product had only been on the market for a week, they seemed already to have run out of custom cardboard product holsters, or they didn't care to use them, and were instead throwing the breaded pasta mini-logs into the paper sleeves reserved for "chicken fries".  And although they were ordered at the height of the lunch rush, they didn't taste any fresher than they did the first time.  Again they were dry and again the interior seemed to be equal parts air and filling.

The thrill is gone: how sad does this look?  And what are those sickly black spots?  They appeared prominently the second and third time they were ordered and raise questions as to how Mac n' Cheetos are actually heated.  One would suspect they are thrown in the fryer, but these look like scorch marks.  Are we supposed to think of them as "flame grilled" in some weird way?

Though ordered at the height of the lunch rush, this piece seems almost petrified, as though it had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, its moisture evaporating away.  Neither macaroni nor cheese sauce is the least bit identifiable.

Trial #3

The third and final time they were slightly better.  This time there were at least some congealed remnants of what once may have been a mildly flavorful cheese sauce.  The weird black markings, resembling grill marks, were once again noticeable, but at least they weren't unsightly.  With enough ketchup they were palatable and reminded me of the cheese fritters that The Magic Pan used to serve. This was still nothing like what the eating public had been led to expect, but it wasn't offensive.  It is time to ask, though, why Mac n' Cheetos fell so far short of everyone's expectations

Where did all the moist cheesiness go?  Some of it probably got absorbed by the breading, and other moisture was probably driven inside the pasta itself as the product steamed within its dry shell.

Assessing What Went Wrong

The Mac n' Cheetos experiment failed in a number of ways, some of them predictable and all of them, I believe, explicable.  Let's take the two biggest failures in turn.

Overall dryness: To understand why the macaroni and cheese inside the shell was so dry, it's first helpful to understand that there are actually two varieties of mac and cheese: the type prepared on the stovetop and the kind that you bake.   Stovetop macaroni and cheese consists of freshly boiled macaroni, cooked al-dente firm, and still moist and slick from the pasta water, which is immediately blended with a bechamel cheese sauce and served immediately after the cheese and macaroni are blended.  For this reason, the dish is still moist and the macaroni is swimming in thick, cheesy sauce.  Baked pasta, on the other hand, is much drier because the pasta continues to cook as it bakes, drying from the circulating air and from the fact that, even if it's enrobed in sauce when shoved in the oven, that sauce will be absorbed by the pasta as it continues to cook.  That's why baked macaroni and cheese often features a layer of melted cheese on top -- both to trap moisture and to ensure that the product is still visibly cheesy even after the macaroni soaks up the cheese sauce.  Mac n' Cheetos are more like the baked mac and cheese.  The mac and cheese inside the breading may have been saucy prior to cooking, but as it steams, it dries out and also goes limp.  As the sauce is soaked up by the pasta, it leaves voids within the shell and the pasta goes formless and mushy.  Because the crisp outer coating was far thicker than it needed to be, it overwhelmed the shrunken pasta interior and exacerbated the dryness problem.  It's also an open question whether these things are even fried.  The outside never seemed to have the thin film of oil that things get when they come from the fryer.   Instead, it has that crusty dryness that usually comes from spending too much time exposed to hot circulating air.

The Lack of a Bold Cheetos-like Flavor: As far as appearances go, Mac n' Cheetos do seem to capture the spirit of Cheetos with their bright orange color.  But, leaving the dryness aside, that punchy, bright cheese flavor that make Cheetos so addictive was absent, and one wonders why.  I suspect that it's more difficult than people suspect to "bake flavor into" things and that, if BK really wanted to give these that bright orange Cheetos punch, the way to do it would have been to sprinkle them with that trademark Cheetos orange cheese powder.  But to do this would have required segregating them from other fried items like fries and onion rings, lest the powder spill uninvited onto them, and Burger King may not have wanted to add that step of labor to the process.  

Indeed, this whole project was not so much a failure in conception as a case of lazy execution.  Burger  King could have added more cheese taste with a sprinkling of cheese dust but they didn't want to take the time and effort.  They could have begun with a slightly undercooked macaroni filling and an excess of slightly thin sauce, and allowed the ratio of cheese to sauce to even out as the item cooked, the sauce thickening slightly as the pasta came to the proper degree of doneness.  Finally, they could have made more of an effort to serve them fresh out of the fryer, but I'm beginning to think that these were transferred from a bag to an oven and finally to a holding area, compromising any possibility of freshness or tenderness.

Conclusion

Burger King captured a nation's imagination with an exciting idea, and threw it all away.  Expect these to be gone within a month, never to return.